Open Office and Office XP .doc files

[netdragon]

I've found that Open Office sucks at saving Word documents, but is pretty good at opening them. Would you all agree?

In that case, I don't want that POS M$ Office on my computer, yet all the students I'd be doing projects with use M$ Office. I could either make them install Open Office and use .sxw format, or I need some way to boycott Microsoft yet be able to interact files with them.

Does anyone know any plugins for M$ Office to allow it to load .sxw files or any other way to have the files save all formatting and be usable on both programs?

I'd like something for powerpoint and excel too.

[MoNkaholic]

My vote would be to force everyone to use a plain text editor, you know... vi, notepad, BBEdit etc...

[nilson]

RTF seems to be the most platfom-independant option.

[daihard]

RTF seems to be the most platfom-independant option.

Or XML... but I hear that the XML format used by Office 2003 is still Microsoft-proprietary. So much for platform independence.

[netdragon]

Its not in Microsoft's interest to foster platform independence. In that case everyone would just go to Mac (if their technical skills were lacking but their socks matched) or Linux (if they were computer-savvy).

[old Harry Waldron]

Hi ND -- I've found this same issue in my own testing with Red Hat and Open Office at work.

BTW - I liked Open Office and the Addabus RDBMS environment which has some good capabilities.

Not only are there interfacing and interoperability issues between MS Office & Open Office, but even between older versions in the MS Office family.

If you're required to use Office formats, you may need a 3rd party tool if one is available (and there may be. Maybe, in a worse case scenario, consider it like IE where if you have to use, you have to use it, but you can still use Open Office for your other needs.

Good luck on this issue.

[MagicT]

I know that Abiword's word export is actually in .rtf-format where they only change the extension to .doc. Word accepts this without trouble, so why do a dedicated .doc export function? You could try the same: export to rtf and then change the extension to .doc.

Then again you could just export to rtf and NOT go to the extra lengths of doing a nonessential change of extension;)

[bthater]

Does anyone know any plugins for M$ Office to allow it to load .sxw files or any other way to have the files save all formatting and be usable on both programs?

I'd like something for powerpoint and excel too.

ummmm... isn't that what Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML for?;-) at least that's what he told us at the time.

after all it IS HyperTEXT MARKUP language.

[daihard]

As netdragon put it nicely, Microsoft has no intension of cooperating with other software vendors (and volunteers) to make their Office suite more compatible with other packages such as OpenOffice.

http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5069246.html?tag=fd_ots

It really sends shivers down my spine... does Microsoft want EVERYTHING? Even Hitler wasn't that relentless.

Now I know... there's absolutely no way that Office 2003 will be anywhere near me.

[johann_p]

It really sends shivers down my spine... does Microsoft want EVERYTHING?

Yes they do.

I wonder if there ever was a company in history that had that much control and impact on so many aspects of life in so many areas of the world. I think it is amazing that this is not the topic of much more discussion and controversy, most people just seem to find this ok or do not care.

[Allenz]

I wonder if there ever was a company in history that had that much control and impact on so many aspects of life in so many areas of the world.

Having that much control and influence means they must have done something right some time Everyone likes to complain, but I don't see any of my clients rushing to anything else. MS is still the standard they use for office documents.

And, I must agree with the sentiment that MS has no motivation to open up its formats. If you ran the company, would you? Or better yet, if you did how long do you think your stockholders would let you stay in charge?

[johann_p]

I wonder if there ever was a company in history that had that much control and impact on so many aspects of life in so many areas of the world.

Having that much control and influence means they must have done something right some time Everyone likes to complain, but I don't see any of my clients rushing to anything else. MS is still the standard they use for office documents.

And, I must agree with the sentiment that MS has no motivation to open up its formats. If you ran the company, would you? Or better yet, if you did how long do you think your stockholders would let you stay in charge?

Firstoff, whatever they "did right" was not necessarily a good product - often, with the right environment - it is enough to have the right partner, the right contracts etc. Rarely it happens that the best product or even the one with best price/quality ration has the biggest market share. But once there is enough control, "doing it right" just means fighting the competition. The main reason people are not "rushing to anything else" is that "everybody else" uses something they migt not be compatible with then.

But this is not the issue - even if we assume that Mother MS where the most wonderful company on earth using all the earnings to do good thing etc. - would we really want to have all the computers and hence everything on earth controlled by computers (and that is a lot in the meantime) under the control of just their and only their products?

[Ashitaka]

As netdragon put it nicely, Microsoft has no intension of cooperating with other software vendors (and volunteers) to make their Office suite more compatible with other packages such as OpenOffice.

http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5069246.html?tag=fd_ots

Which gives a bit of weight to my statement offline:

"The worst thing you can do in terms of compatibility is to write your document with Microsoft Word."