2008/1/30, Deirdre mcNamara <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Dear Sun Micro, > > I switched to Mac OSX from Windows Office 2003 Teacher > version. I was about to download iWork when I read > user blogs. > Can I open my Windows 2003 files with open office? > Can I work o Mac with Open Office and how does OO > compare with iOffice? Would I need Final Draft as > well? > > Most of your users seem to be highly computer savvy. > I'm a Writer/Dramatist who has to work new tech out on > my own. Thank you, reply soon. I've great scripts in > Macs "restricted" files that need immediate attention. > Thank you, DM >
Hello Deirdre, iWork is a bit of a one-way street. You can save only in a few formats that live outside the Mac world (MS Word doc, rtf, txt). I find the possibilities offered by Pages rather limited, although sufficient for most users. Final Draft is probably very useful if you have to write screenplays, in particular if you have to hand them in in a standardised format. The big advantages of OpenOffice.org are that it is free, that it reads and saves in many different formats, and that it is malleable: you can use templates and styles that make your work easier and that can correspond to the requirements of screenplay formats demanded by studios, theatres or television. You have a big community of OOo users that works along the same lines and that helps you out when you get stuck somewhere. OOo is in full development and you can contribute and ask for enhancements that would suit your work. OOo will open MS Office formats doc, pps, xls (but for the moment not the new docx, xlsx, ppsx formats, conversion of these is planned for later this year). I doubt that OOo will read your Mac-only formats (iWork/Pages, Appleworks), so you have to save these first in doc, rtf or txt before you can import them in OOo. I read somewhere that recent Pages saves in an xml-like format, but I'm not sure OOo will read it. For more info about OOo on Mac, I refer to the OpenOffice.org Mac porting pages, where you can find FAQ's, How-To's and also the downloads (different versions for Mac OS X Panther-10.3.x and for Tiger & Leopard-10.4.x & 10.5.x/ also different versions for PowerPC (G4 and G5, older iMacs...) and the newer Intel Macs). You also have to choose between the stable version that works with the X11 windowing program, or the native Aqua version that is still in its experimental stages, but can be used for not too vital activities. read info here: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ download from here: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/index.html If all this seems complicated... it may be or it may just work fine. Many people now are switching to OOo on Mac because the suite is improving rapidly from version to version. Feel free to pose more precise questions on this list. HTH -- Guy using dutch OOo 2.3 m221 on a iMac Intel DualCore Tiger and brazilian OOo SRC 680 m241 on an Intel MacBook Pro Leopard -- please reply only to [email protected] -- Dodoes can't afford to have headaches
