[wellylug] Open Office 1.1.3 Released

[jumbophut]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 15:23:21 +1300, Nick Jensen wrote:
> > > I've never used Open Office - how does it compare to Microsoft Office?
> > > Price aside of course.
[snip]
> 
> So it's very similar in style to MS Office? My mother wants to be able
> to take home documents from work where she uses MS Office 2003, and
> she doesn't want to pay $500 or whatever it costs these days for 2003
> - do you know if Open Office will be similar enough for her to use it
> effectively, and if documents created in Office 2003 and modified in
> Open Office will still be readable by Office 2003?
> 

I have found the Word compatibility good.  It can futz a bit with your
styles sometimes (e.g. text I highlighted in Word ends up being on a
yellow background, not removable using the highlighting tool, once I
round-trip.).  Sometimes layout of complex graphics (e.g. as on an
application/order form) changes slightly.

The Excel compatibility is significantly less polished.  Charts will
break if you use complex features, links to other spreadsheets will
corrupt if moving between Windows and Linux (this is probably not
surprising given the different file-naming conventions).  I've also
seen straight numerical bugs, which is a little concerning.

But for anything straight-foward in Word, I've been quite impressed.

-- 
Tony (echo 'spend!,pocket awide' | sed 'y/acdeikospntw!, /l at omcgtjuba.phi/')