OpenOffice.org 1.0 Review Capability and Compatibility Eric Grevstad
Capability and Compatibility
Microsoft considers Word's .DOC file format a trade secret as precious as any Windows programming API, and works hard to ensure that neither OpenOffice.org nor WordPerfect Office nor any other program can promise 100-percent accuracy in importing and exporting Office documents. If your company uses worksheets and other files with fancy, in-house-developed macros, OOo is likely to stumble — although the suite does have a programming language that parallels Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications, and offers to set aside and resave the original VBA code when opening, editing, and saving Office-format files.
But 80 if not 90 percent of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint imports and exports go smoothly, including margins, formatting, graphics, footnotes, and tables. Excel worksheets with charts look a bit different but are perfectly readable, unlike the mess of hash marks seen when opening them in Software602's spreadsheet. Like WordPad, OOo Writer ignores old Word for Windows 2.0 documents but loads other Word documents with aplomb, though column (section) breaks and text wrap around images needed minor adjustments. And PowerPoint presentations arrived with transitions and special effects intact.
And while the software you're using 10 or 20 years from now may have trouble opening the Word documents you write today, Sun and the OpenOffice.org community promise that you'll have no trouble reading documents saved in its open-source XML format — which also uses a compression routine to save disk space. The company phone list that took 384K as a Word file shrank to just 30K as a Writer document, though more routine files saw less drastic savings (a 63K, four-page report with columns and graphics shrank to 40K).
