open office compatibility with word

[historian]

is it possible to convert open office to word and vice versa? I have office xp which is a bit old but works well. thanks

[CK_John]

1. OO does a pretty good job with word documents and vice-versa, excepting

macros and embedded clip art.

Between MS is the biggest headache. Word 97 will not read word 2000, word 2003 or word 2007. Most MS will read backward but not forward.

On Window downloads page you can find Word file convert programs. Word 2007 MS began creating document files ending in .docx (xml format) while prior Word products were .doc file(rich text format).

Open Office has an option that you set when opening OO for the first time to set OO documents with MS file types or native file types.

OO is free, so download and install and play around with it.
Caution: is normally too big for dialup cd's available for small fee.

[RoyGBiv]

2. Pretty much ...

Depends on how fancy the document is.

CK_John raised the major issues. Also, tables can get mangled when switching between the programs. That is, documents with tables saved using Word may not be formatted properly when opened with OO. You can get the same situation when you save a document with OO in .DOC format, open it in Word, and then save it there. When you try to open it in OO again, it may be screwed up, even if you've made no changes.

I've never tried to diagnose exactly what causes this. It doesn't always happen, but it happens enough it can be annoying if you switch back and forth between the programs. I realized this was happening because I was creating documents with OO, sending them to someone who'd commissioned them who was using Word, and if I got them back for changes, they were very often messed up.

[Gore1FL]

3. 2007 does with SP2.

I have no idea what the functionality is with 2003.

[backscatter712]

4. I've had pretty good luck.

Occasionally, formatting gets mutilated when importing Word documents into OpenOffice, and you have to mind the combatibility issues when dealing with older versions of Word, as mentioned, but I've had pretty good luck.

Bear in mind that the Word format (and the other MS Office document formats) are insanely complex, with tons of legacy junk in them, were originally implemented in pure binary with all sorts of obscure optimizations designed to make performance tolerable when people were using 386's with 4 megs of RAM, and built upon over dozens of versions.

Even Microsoft can't get backwards compatibility right, though they're at least going in the right direction by moving to XML-based formats - that should help with some of the compatibility difficulties in the future (as long as Microsoft doesn't enforce its patents...)