Open Office and MS Office 2003 Conflicts

[kklegman]

We are thinking of using OOo along with MS office 2003 in a terminal service/citrix environment with restrictions via group policy. Has anyone had any experience or problems doing something similar? Our main concern is formatting being lost saving word or excel docs in either program. Thanks in advance for any replies!

Kim

 

[mattaw]

I can answer this one fairly well:

This is not a good idea, really. OpenOffice is not a drop in replacement for microsoft using microsofts file formats. It is great with its own formats.

Its converters are quite good but there are major issues with macros and the more advanced functions. They should be used to extract information from word documents after converting to OOo but are not of production quality for constant interchange.

You should either convert to OOo or continue to use MS.

Matthew



The Universe: God's novelty screensaver?

 

[mattaw]

As a follow on I have heard (hearsay warning on!) that Sun StarOffice has proper licenses for MS office formats and so should actually work with them

Matthew

The Universe: God's novelty screensaver?

 

[jad]

that'd be great if MS actually stuck to it's own formats ... (this isn't sposed to be an MS flame, but they really don't) we have excel sheets that won't work in new versions because they use features differently than the spec says they should work.

OO is a great App (Version 2 looks very wierd) but it's not a patch on MS for it's macro support, and the documentation sucks for coding new macros, although it can be done easily enough, with enough time.

As far as i'm aware StarOffice is OO with a few extras on top (Adabas, etc.) rather than a complete rewrite of the import/export routines.

 

[mattaw]

That is possibly true. But the cross licensing should allow sun to code high quality translators.

And for macros the openoffice format is a zipped directory of xml files. Its designed to be scripted outside the app, as opposed to MS who built a whole language inside their office.

You can use perl, python or other programming languages to manipulate them.

At the moment I am not sure if I like that approach better (i.e. being able to use any language but having to learn a scripting language) or ms variety where you rely on them having provided what you wanted. Plus with MS you can add your own buttons etc into the doc.

Matthew

The Universe: God's novelty screensaver?

 

[jad]

you can add buttons etc. to OOo documents as well ... in fact it seems to me a whole lot easier than MS ...
it's just the writing of the script behind it that seems harder, with very little help and instructions ...

you can find some stuff on the web if you look damn hard ... the best document i found for it is in french. only trouble is i don't speak french