Open Office and MS Office 2003 Conflicts
Open Office and MS Office 2003 Conflicts
(OP)
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

Kim
RE: Open Office and MS Office 2003 Conflicts
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?
RE: Open Office and MS Office 2003 Conflicts
Matthew
The Universe: God's novelty screensaver?
RE: Open Office and MS Office 2003 Conflicts
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.
RE: Open Office and MS Office 2003 Conflicts
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?
RE: Open Office and MS Office 2003 Conflicts
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 :)