OT: Open Office Calc

Not compatible in what way? Will it not read word files? (One would guess that it's microsoft f-ing around with word.)

I've been using LO on my home computer and my kids use it for school projects... no problems so far with simple stuff.

George H.

It reads Word files, but sometimes does weird things to pictures, diagrams, tables, things like that.

It doesn't *always* read in complex Word files correctly. But that has improved over the last year alone.

I have some trouble opening Excel files as well. But those are mostly the files with suffixes ending in 'x'. I just ask the suppliers of those files to send them as the older .DOC or .XLS files and it works

I really don't give a rat's ass about being compatible with MSoffice anymore. I don't have any problems I can't work around regarding that and I like using LO so much more that I'm happy dealing with the occasional issue. When push comes to shove, I exchange data in PDF or CSV format. Actually, I get more CSV files than I do .XLS.

When I have trouble with file compatibility I've found I can read the MSO file into an MSO app and spit out a LO compatible file just fine. Seems even MS has found they need to be compatible.

Well that sounds like it is 'more' Word compatible. I mean doesn't your copy of Word do weird things to pictures, graphs etc... :^)

(I just put tables every in Word where I want a picture/ graph. And then stick the picture in the table. That's the one way I've found to stop things randomly moving around.)

George H.

One issue is that you have to really breathe on the font installation to get the line wraps and pagination in Word and LO to match. That's a PITA with contracts and stuff.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Will anything in the Open Office Suite open Publisher (.pub) files?

My wife did all her Girl Scout flyers, etc, with Publisher (which, personally, I view as crap of the finest vintage). ...Jim Thompson

I don't know... here's what the web has to say.

Sounds like you have the correct characterization of publisher.

George H.

Word behaves pretty well, as long as you don't use a lot of macros and styles and boxes and such advanced features.

I just upgraded to Word 2010 (gotta keep up with the times!) with the ribbon menus and DOCX compatibility. It's OK. The auto table-of-contents is an awful mess.

I just drag/drop JPEG and EMF files on top of white space, "behind text" mode. Seems to work.

What about laptops and tablets? There's a lot of device dependent stuff on there.

Yes, I found you can run VB macros with OO or LibreOffice, but you cannot write or modify them. And writing in yet another language, just to reinvent stuff I already have in Excel seems a PITA.

You mean you never had MS Word do wierd things with pictures and other embedded objects even when created as a MS Word file ? You are lucky !

Sounds like everyone has a different experience. I found MS Word the worst, but I quite like Publisher. Did a Club newsletter with it for years, and never had a problem with pictures, graphics or anything. In fact I thought it was one of MS better efforts.

That's true - but it is also true when exchanging Word documents between two installations of MS Word (especially if they are different versions, or different fonts installed on the machines). For any file that needs to be accurate, pdf is the only practical format.

Have you looked in the control panel? Lots of programs don't have an explicit "uninstall" option in the Start Menu, but simply rely on the standard Windows add/remove software control panel entry.

Yes, and Excel is one of MSoffice better components. Visio is the best as it was developed by a third party and bought by MS with little modification.

But overall, MSO is a PITA. I'm happy to abandon my prior MSO work and reinvent the wheel to get to a point where I won't be wanting to switch but held captive. But maybe I don't have as many wheels as you. I stuck my toe in the water some years back with Open Office. When I upgraded my laptop a couple of years ago I gave up on MSO and just use LibreOffice exclusively, in spite of the fact that Excel handles engineering notation natively.

• Meaning extra HDDS cannot be used, since hard drives have NO password.