On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:18:02 +0100 (BST), "Dave Liquorice"
wrote:
All I'm saying is that telling people to switch to OO and you won't
have any problems with Word documents is not very accurate. Those
problems may well stem from MS but as a user that isn't overly
relevant. OO either works as advertised (read/write/interchange Word
docs)or it doesn't. In my experience it made a bigger mess than any
experienced inter Word fup ups.


My experience also. Documents in Word 95 & 97 work perfectly in OO,
and I have only had one problem with Word 2003, but the .docx format
in Word 2007 causes severe problems, as does .xlsx in Excel. No doubt
Microsoft made it so, but as you say, it doesn't matter who is to
blame, it just doesn't work.

There is also the disappointing news that Sun, under whose wing
OpenOffice was developed, has curtailed development of OpenOffice by
mostly disbanding the StarOffice team. StarOffice is Sun's paid-for
version of OpenOffice, the two packages benefitting from each other's
development, most of it being done for free because of the way the
OpenOffice Foundation was set up. But StarOffice apparently isn't
selling enough copies to pay for the team that supports it - not
surprising when people can get OpenOffice for free. So development of
the two packages will have, or has already come almost to a stop.

To be fair to Microsoft - and believe me, that doesn't come easy! -
they have reduced the retail price of MS Office so it is now truly
affordable, at least in the base versions.

I still use OpenOffice but every now and again I have to exchange
files with someone who uses MS Office 2007, and getting them to save
their files in Word 97 or 2003 format so I can read and edit them
without problems is becoming very tiresome. I don't think it will be
too long before I take advantage of MS Office's current low prices.