Open Office Software

I've been in the Print / Publishing trade for the past thirty years and I've been using Open Office for some years now. Since the inception of 2.0 my affection for this software has increased.

It performs faultlessly for me and is also very flexible. As far as I am aware Word can't export to PDF format but Open Office can.

In a world of "freedom for all" it is odd that you can import a Word document into Open Office but not the reverse!

Whenever I find anything it can't do I opt for my installation of Quark Xpress, importing from Open Office.

The only difficulty users may have is the rewording of most Word functions into Open-speak, but they're all sitting in more or less the same places.

Some would have you believe Word is the only proper way to go - I'm not one of them.

Hi there again, sorry I couldn't help you about the Open Doc question, but I do know a bit about Open Office as I downloaded it from the net. My computer came with MS Works which is not really that good so I got rid of it and downloaded OpenOffice. I couldn't quite afford to buy MS Office at the time. Now that I do have MS Office, I uninstalled OpenOffice, but if someone I know needs an office application and their pockets a little light, I wouldn't hesitate to suggest to them to get Open Office.

Its quite compatible with MS office and comes with a word processor, database, spreadsheet, presentational apps (powerpoint) and a program similar to publisher.

Bear in mind though, if you are opening up, for eg, a MS Word document into Open Office, you won't run into any problems as Open Office will recognise it. However, I found that when I tried to open up an Open Office document or whatever in MS Word, it didn't work. I think this is because when you save a file in Open Office, you need to change the file extension. for eg in Opem Office the file extension in word is .dot , not doc
so if you know the file will be opened up in MS office then remember to change the file extension, this applies to all the other apps in Open Office as well.