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OpenOffice and MS Office Docs
Hello,
I know that OpenOffice and open MS Office documents (more-or-less, the formatting sometimes is off) - but, can it reliably save documents as MS Office? I know that it can, but my question is how well? Would someone know that the file (Word & Excel mainly) wasn't done in MS Office because the formatting has been all messed up?
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And the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14) |
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I don't know but, as a side note, the author of "High Performance mySQL" has written several books and says that Office is far buggier than OpenOffice and is a pain to work with for writing books. He very much prefers working with OO than Office.
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Hello,
Quote:
Unfortunately, I don't have MS Office on my home computer to do comparisons on. So, I can't tell myself how well the conversion is - though I do know that converting from MS format isn't always 100% effective (i.e., formatting).
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And the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14) |
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I've had mixed luck going in either direction. It depends a lot on the document complexity, as is well known. I deal mainly with NIH forms, and OO.o does OK, but not well enough.
You really just have to try it and compare. |
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Personally, the only thing I have recognized is a problem with graphics. When you embed graphics in a OO writer document, save it as DOC and afterwards open it with M$Word, those images are either not existent or they are not interpreted as objects in their own frame, so you don't have a chance of modifying any of their options (including positioning/size).
Another thing is the conversion of tables between OOimpress and M$Powerpoint - I don't remember in which direction, but if you're going to have a table of size 2x2 on one side, you'll end up with 4 text-frames on the other side Of course, not to speak about fonts and animations A few years ago the german - well, let's call it - "federation" started on migration guides. Version 2.0 is available in English and explains migration problems between M$2003 and OOo (page 273 et seqq.). This document is quite old (2005) and does not deal with all problems and migration in both directions. The new version 3.0 (dated Apr 2008) unfortunately is only available in German right now, but it is a really good comparison as far as I can see. |
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Hello,
Not all of my files are going to be .doc - many (and the most important so far) are Excel (spreadsheet) documents. And I don't have any experience with converting Excel files in OpenOffice - either in or out.
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And the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14) |
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Well, Excel, ... Gnumeric is said to be more compatible to Excel than Excel itself.
But, not all macros pass, not all graphs pass, ... I personally find Gnumeric a better spreadsheet than OOcalc. Same non-compatibility btw. There is an Open Document Architecture, the FLOSS version is comprehensive in OO, unfortunately Redmond designed an Open Document Architecture which is said better ('course you pay a license fee!) hence no full compatibility. Now, as these are compressed XML files, you can always decompress them and mull them through sed.
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da more I know I know I know nuttin' |
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Quote:
FWIW, I think graphics from all spreadsheets are useful only for crude data exploring. For anything more complicated you need a plotting package. I like Grace on Unix; there is a clone on Windows (I can look up the name if you care, but this is getting OT). |
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Hello,
Thanks - Gnumeric looks interesting (aside from forcing Gnome to be installed). I haven't had to do any graphs yet. I'm going to give OpenOffice a shot and see how it does (and I'm planning on having WinXP available via virtualization). What I'm using Excel for instance - my boss wrote a perl script that takes an Excel generated CSV file and converts it to a DHCP entry(ies), so all you have to do is cut and paste into dhcpd.conf. This is nice for when you have to add 70 new hosts and someone emails you an Excel spreadsheet with their information in it. This method takes less than five minutes compared to how long to type in all that information manually (though, I still see room for improved automation). I use Word to write up reports on, say, usage of a certain program. I could easily, probably much more so, write it up in OO and save it as an .odt or .rtf file, but my bosses would probably flip their lids if I did (not good for me). Where I work is slooowly coming around to alternatives, but they are still very hand-in-hand with Microsoft.
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And the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14) |
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If you do simple text with paragraphs, some mixed fonts and little else, then OO.o is fine. It gets hairy when you have complex tables, fill-in forms, images and stuff like that. For straight text there are no problems.
For the simple spreadsheet application you describe, most anything will work. csv is a standard format, and simple tables with strings they all do. I'd personally do the Perl script in awk, but I'm old school. |
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That sounds like a strange use for a spreadsheet.
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On the contrary, managers, administrative assistants, & Human Relations personnel tend to live in Microsoft Office (and/or Microsoft Project...). Creating a list of new employees for the coming week is frequently in the purview of HR-types & distributed to managers who either have new charges coming into their departments or passed on to IT personnel & payroll to ensure that all bureaucratic paperwork is completed by the time these new people start.
Converting back-&-forth between CSV & Excel's native format has been a product feature since day one, & of course, manipulating comma separated value records is exceptionally easy in Perl or any other language which supports regular expressions. Collaterally, I have seen technical writers keep track of API calls they have to include in printed documentation in either Excel spreadsheets or Access databases -- both of which I have written Perl scripts to manipulate. Microsoft Office has been a huge money maker for a reason. Much of business lives in the various applications. |
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