Anyone using OO in a mixed OO/Microsoft Office environment?

Any issues?

I am thinking of moving some people over to OO v3, but want to make sure some of the old issues have been cleared up .

V2 used to display some MSOffice items differently, and would open DOCX docs in odd formatting schemes.

Anyone have any experience combining the two products under one roof?

 

I use Open Office 3.2.0 on my laptop (in place of MS Word '07, which I hate and deleted on my computer; daughter uses hers) and MS Word '03 at the office.

The borders, headers and footers get moved around/re-formatted with pleading paper and certain memo templates when I create files in one application and open in the other.
The fonts are sometimes altered as well.

I sometimes prepare a document in straight text with no formatting when I know I will be working on a draft in both my office and home; I then paste the text into MS Word and format the text when I'm ready to finalize.

 

GRrrrr... Sounds like the issue persists.

 

 

google apps?

 

I have not yet developed faith in the cloud.

 

we switched 14,000 users to it. I'm not sure how many actually use the apps aspect though. I know I rarely do, mostly because I'm using excel with massive sheets that are too big for it's limitations. I have used it on smaller projects to coordinate across sites and it's been invaluable for things like that. Also saves us about 250K annually.

 

We have a bunch of report templates in Word and they have formatting that gets jacked up when I try to open them in OO, but we need something that is on the desktop (not cloud) to work on the docs. I am just trying to save $280 per machine every time we buy a new computer.

 

Is it an option to convert all of the MS Office docs to PDF and then start off fresh from OO with new docs?

 

Why not download it and try to open a few MS Office templates? The latest version, at least as far as Vista is concerned, is 3.2.1. I haven't used MS office on my home computer in years.

 

I just tried with the newest version of OO, and like Will said, formatting on legal docs gets massacred, as well as any tables or placed graphics on the document. Since not everyone in the office would be using OO, I need the docs to be seen identically in OO and MSWord...

 

looks like your paying $280 per machine then.

edit: here's an interesting concept. In garages mechanics usually have to buy their own tools. Maybe your information workers should buy their own too.

 

Stogie, have you looked into Microsoft volume licensing agreements? I'm fairly out of touch with the current corporate offerings, but I highly doubt you need to be terribly big organization to take advantage of them. They should be able to save you some coin over most any retail channel pricing and the license agreement will likely be tied to the number of employees and not the number of computers.

 

Damn good point Bill. I will look into it on Monday.

Couldn't see the forest for the trees.

 

You get what you pay for...?

 

Yeah, but other than the interoperability, I don't think the workers would really care...

OO is a sound program, it just doesn't play perfectly with MSO yet.

 

We have about 80 store managers using it, but they aren't doing anything more than simple Excel and Word documents.

The main problem is they save in the wrong formats and start emailing documents around that aren't compatible, but after some time they mostly got the hang of it and it works well.

I think Bill's idea is the way to go for now. We've had no problems with volume licensing.

 

Umm, you do know that you can change the default file format don't you?

 

may know it, but many people don't.

My boss still is saving documents with a ".docx" default format, which isn't backwards compatible to MS Word 2003 and prior versions.
We've switched over every other MS Word 2007+ to save in a ".doc" format as a default, but he's usually using Word on his own Mac laptop and hasn't changed the default yet.

 

Why not just switch everyone? Mixed formats is never a good thing.

 

We install it on a person by person basis, but not for major things. The real office people use MS. I haven't seen any problems.

 

They're all set, but many of these guys barely have a high school degree, if any. Severe computer illiteracy. It's amazing the stuff they manage to screw up on these computers, but they're forced into it with no training from the company so I don't blame them for not knowing.

Plus we have a lot of outside people e-mailing stuff in with all different formats and they just get confused. A lot of stuff like Will is talking about, magnified with a couple thousand people.

 

There is a plugin, though, right?

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/wo...010044473.aspx

 

Some of us need the functionality of MSO, plus our clients send and receive in MSO.

 

how many users you talking?

 

5-10 on OO

5 on MSO