Open Office compatability with MS Office

[alan-d]

Currently we use MS Office throughout the school and I am thinking of giving all our users the option of using Open Office too, in the hope that I can get all out students using it in the future. (Purely a cost saving measure).

 

What compatability issues have you found when alternating documents from one to the other?

 

I know for example that PowerPoint animations either don't play or play incorrectly in OO impress and movie files don't show at all.

 

What about things like MS Word or Excel documents ie Tables, Formuli etc. any real problems? Would the users have to rewrite a lot of documents to keep the functionallity they had in the MS Office version?

 

 

 

 

(Please keep this on topic - I'm not interested in the pros and cons of industry standards - there are other threads already for that )

[beeswax]

well I've just run a power point presentation thru OO without any problems. had the head of ict look through the excel equivalent, and she reckoned it had all the features needed to do the coursework required. I've used it myself for word docs without any probs, keeps formatting etc. of course you can save it as a word doc from OO and open it in word, same with all the others. can't help with movie files tho.

[CyberNerd]

A MSOffice ODF plugin is in the pipeline:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060504015438308

 

I find compatibility is not as good as OOo say - clearly they compete on an uneven playing field as MS can dodge and change their standards at will.

 

In general compatibility is good for office97, pretty good for office2000, but worse for 2003.

I find compatibility is better if the document is written in OOo then exported to MS - importing can be more messy - depending upon the document smaller, less complicated documents are better. Usually the errors are minor formatting errors anyway, but sometimes importing a large MS document can crash OOo. The easy solution is 'upgrade' MS office to openoffice.

OOo also exports to pdf and swf (impress), so that can help with compatibility.

 

A link here on easing compatibility issues: http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid39_gci1186330,00.html

[CyberNerd]

oh - theres a slashdot artice on tfa:

http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot?m=5249

[Geoff]

Oo.org compatability is ok apart from in two situations:

 

1) Macros.

2) Badly formatted documents. Ones formatted entirely using the spacebar for example.

[Pear]

Yeah, I had a maths teacher upset because a 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' powerpoint wouldn't work properly in Impress because either hyperlinks or Macro's weren't working on the slideshow.

[alan-d]

In general compatibility is good for office97, pretty good for office2000, but worse for 2003.

Oohhhh bugger!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! we have 2003

 

Thanks for the info so far - checking all the links now

[Geoff]

Ironically Oo.org does a better job of importing Office97 documents than Office 2k3 does.

[_Bob_]

You can use GPOs to limit users to saving files in older Office formats. This is somthing we had to do as we have a mixture of versions of office between machines.

[CyberNerd]

You can use GPOs to limit users to saving files in older Office formats. This is somthing we had to do as we have a mixture of versions of office between machines

 

interesting, can you give more detail on this.. Will it default to say office97

[_Bob_]

I think you can set it to any of the previous versions. You can get the .adm files from the office resource kit, import them and set it up from there.