[K12OSN] Office 2007 and OpenOffice

[John Lucas]

On Tuesday 18 September 2007 08:52, Rita Gibson wrote:
> I guess I've been living under a rock, so I am unaware of what is going
> on between Office 2007 and OpenOffice.
>
> Can anyone fill me in? There are some kids bringing Office 2007
> documents into the building and are unable to open them in OpenOffice. I
> have not seen this myself, but this is what the technology teacher is
> telling me. I did a quick google, but found no practical information
> from a user standpoint, just discussions about Open XML and ODF. I see
> there is an ODF converter for Office 2007, but it would be impossible to
> have parents install a converter. In the past, it was much easier to
> have OpenOffice be able to open Microsoft and save as Microsoft, less
> knowledge on the part of the user necessary....
>
> This may be a huge problem in our building since all of the staff just
> switched to Office 2007 on their windows machines. :^(
>

My wife is a University Professor. She had a student turn in an essay in a 
file made with MS Office 2007 (the extension was ".docx") that she could not 
open with MS Office 2003, so she sent it to me to try to open it on her home 
computer (equipped with Office 2007) which I did. As an experiment, I tried 
it out with NeoOffice v2.2.1 patch 0 (latest OpenOffice code for Mac OS X 
Aqua) which has experimental MS Office 2007 support. It worked fine.

I have downloaded the latest Linux OOo (v2.3.0) but have yet to install it. I 
think it too has MS Office 2007 filters. I'll let you know.

-- 
        "History doesn't repeat itself; at best it rhymes."
                        - Mark Twain

| John Lucas                          MrJohnLucas at gmail.com               |
| St. Thomas, VI 00802                http://mrjohnlucas.googlepages.com/ |
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