Want to work with documents made in Windows but don't know how

[Krister Ekstrom]

Hi listers,
I have a partition mounted in my linux system Ubuntu Edgy, that has
windows files on it, so it's a vfat partition. On this mounted partition
i have a folder with some documents i would like to be able to work with
both from Ubuntu and from Windows. I can't use Openoffice in Linux to
edit the files unless i'm root, and i don't have the permissions to
change owner of the files even if i'm root and from Gnome i can't even
copy the files to Linux. Is there a way to work around this even though
i know that VFat doesn't support permissions and so on? I could move the
folder to a linux partition and work on them there, because then i could
Chown as much as i wanted to, however, when i moved the files back to
the Windows partition, they lose their permissions. So, is it best to
make a copy of the folder, put it in say my home directory, work on the
files there, and then do some kind of synchronizing between the Linux
folder and the windows one or is there another way?
/Krister