On Thu, 2005-02-24 at 07:41 -0800, Chris wrote:
I haven't tried Open Office before... Will it be compatible with, say, Office 2003? I don't mean that that is so good, but when you do business, many people may send you a
Yes, for the most part.
I use it a lot. Here are the areas I have trouble with:
PDF format documents: Many recipients find they do not have the flexibility with my documents that they have with "genuine" PDFs when it comes to printing n-up pages. In addition, OO doesn't provide "tagged" PDFs that I need to port a document to my PDA.
OO Impress: Impress documents don't hold their format from version to version. After a version upgrade of OO, I find I have to adjust typefaces, sizes and other layout items in order to make slides display in a readable way (this is a big problem for me). Handling of PowerPoint animations is also sometimes troublesome, but I don't have enough examples and time to sort this out specifically. Opening exported presentations from OO seems to work OK.
OO Writer: Not all the features of Word XP work. This is only an issue when I read complicated documents using footnotes, annotations, change bars, etc. Not a big problem, unless you need these features.
Operation: OO occasionally freezes or crashes for me, usually in Impress, and usually in front of a crowd. Sometimes, it will hog the system in full-screen mode so I can't rotate among windows. I can usually work around these issues, although its embarrassing when it happens.
Nothing really terrible here, but I recommend that you test it under your conditions and your requirements. If it works for you, it works great. Erik
