Office 2003 Compability with Open Office Help!!! 1

[ihilton]

I am the IT Analyst (learning as I go). for a new School that started this year. I jumped into a big mess...I need help cleaning this place up. They originally had Open Office installed on all the PC's. They have just ordered the Office Pro 2003 and now I installed it on my PC to test it out and the Open Office files won't open. I tried to re-save them but no luck what do I do? This needs to happen for next year. The teachers would be in an up-roar if they don't have access to their files.

Waiting desperatly...

 

[KenWright]

Are you saying that OpenOffice files won't open in 'OpenOffice' anymore, or they just won't open in Microsoft Office.

What files are we talking about, ie what is the extension on them.

Regards
Ken.........

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[ihilton]

The OpenOffice files extentions are... are .odt, .sxw, .stw, .ott,

What I was saying is that I had OpenOffice on my PC first, then I Un-installed it and Installed Microsoft Office 2003. Word won't open any document that was Openoffice ext. Does that make sence?

 

[KenWright]

Yes. I would guess that you need to use OpenOffice to save it down as a Word file. OpenOffice will open all MS Office filetypes, but the reverse is not true.

As an example, you need to open any .ods files in openOffice and then use the 'Save As' feature to save them down as 'Microsoft Excel 97/2000/XP (.xls)'

This could be a fairly big task as you will probably need to do this for each file individually unless there is a converter out there somewhere, and each file will need to be checked for any incompatible functions that may not bridge between file formats.

Personally I'd be extremely upset if someone did that to my files without my knowledge, especially if things broke and I didn't have the chance to fix it because I had had the original application and files taken away.

Unless of course someone knows of a way to do a mass conversion safely........

Regards
Ken...........

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It's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission
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[ihilton]

When you say mass conversion SAFELY what are the risks? PROS and cons?

 

[ihilton]

What kind of a converter woild I need and where can I start to look? This had to be done for about 55 PC's ...oh geezz...

 

[EBGreen]

I can tell you that there is nothing that I have seen that will convert OOo Basic modules to VBA. So if the document has any custom functions that the user has created, they will go away as a result of tyhe conversion.

As for where to look for any converter I would suggest here:

http://www.google.com

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