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Plugins for Microsoft Office for OpenOffice Documents?
DeBaas asks: "We are all in favour of getting Open Standards in place so that we can happily use Open/Star/K Office or whatever without the nagging problem: The Microsoft Office users cannot read our files correctly.
Much of the focus is on providing filters to be able to make and read Microsoft Office files. However, should it not be the other way around, as well? Would it be feasible to make an open source project providing a plugin to MS office so that it can read and write in our preferred open format. Sort of a 'save as open document standard'. Is there a legal problem?, a technical problem? (is it already possible?) I would love it if I could send documents in OpenOffice knowing the other site can actually use and see it the way I meant to, even with MicroSoft Office."
Use Microsoft Security Holes to Auto-Install Open Source Replacements for Everyone.
M$ office users won't notice at all.
It seems to be that, since Microsoft clearly doesn't want open document formats, that they would WANT to make thier products compatable with everybody else's, but not the other way around.
For MS, the perfect office suite would be a package that could read everything and saved in a format nobody else could read. Seems that this is kind if thing would help that along...
Can there be any guarantee that, if we give MS the ability to read OpenOffice files, that OpenOffice will always be able to access MSWord files?
=Smidge=
They will use OpenOffice.org because it's free and i mean not expensive.
To the public the more important thing is more 'free as in beer' than 'free as in speech'.
Not even close to the target. If OpenOffice can read/write MS Office files then the people will send it to you in MS Office format anyway. If they can also read/write OpenOffice files then it is a perfect 2 way street using the default configuration of either Office suite. By showing them that OO files can do everything MS files can do they will consider the switch. Otherwise they will never see the OO format and never think it could be done.
Please stop your lame anti-MS FUD. The problem is not that a lot of people are using MS Office and we want them to use OpenOffice/KWord/etc. It is that we want all the offices to be able to open/save documents in a common format.
In fact, last week, I forgot to put my name on my paper when I saved it. So, when I was at school, I got on my ftp then realized I had saved it as a native OpenOffice document, so I was unable to add my name - and I lost points. Something like this can easily be avoided by all office programs being able to easily comply with AT LEAST one open format.
I especially dont think we should use MS's tactics against MS. We don't like MS simply *because* of its tactics. I could care less if they made a shitty OS - but, its thier tactics that make it so widespread and monopolized.
Again, I repeat -- I am not concerned with other peoples choice of office software, as long as it suits them, but it would be better for the masses if each office suite shared a nice file format.
I'd love to put openoffice on my machines in my somewhat large (and unnamed for the usual reasons) organisation. We've discussed it at the executive level, and the sole reason for staying with MSOffice is *other* organisations.
... eventually.
We rely on communicating with government, military and corporate entities, and their standard is Office. Period.
Whilst the import functions on openoffice are very good, they have to be (from a business critical aspect) absolutely 100% compatible -- and when you're dealing with multi-chapter doc files which use 90% of Word's capability, well, from my testings inhouse, I can't guarantee that level of accuracy. Images can move around, hide text, etc.
What I've done is start a different tactic within the organisation. All documents are PDF unless they require collaboration on the document. If collaboration is required, I'm now looking into a web-based solution (via our portal). Now, this does produce new challenges, but it does break the '.doc' monopoly.
Another damn important point is XML. With MSOffice moving towards their own XML, and with movement on producing an open standard for XML documents (slashdot article | actual link), this may be the approach that ends this problem. But it's going to be some time yet.
This is going to be a slow moving issue. I recommend we all relax, keep working on this, and slow and steady will win the race
Robert Anton Wilson
I'm afraid your solution seemed promising to me at one time as well, but it doesn't work. HTML is not a WYSIWYG language, it shouldn't be, and that's what is frequently needed in papers professional enough to hand in at work/college. And RTF doesn't render many things reliable from one application to another.
Most notably, I've found very serious table issues using when saving something as RTF from Word. Different versions of Word and Wordpad rendered it differently. Ultimately, the only solution for a reliable RTF that I've found is to stick with Wordpad entirely. Afraid that doesn't cut it when I need features found in Word simultaneously such as a self-generating table of contents/index/footnotes, complex page numbering, and so on. Further, RTF doesn't appear to have the capability to generate complicated table structures I need. (This is anectdotal -- I've never saved something complicated in RTF and had it preserved. I do not know for sure whether the format supports it, but the tools I use for it do not.)
Myself, I've only recently discovered OpenOffice.org due to the large amount of talk about it on Slashdot. I haven't used it much. Almost all of the writing I've needed to do lately has been hand, plain-text, or HTML.
But my girlfriend is a chemical engineer minoring in computer science. She didn't have the least bit of trouble with data structures. But she had never heard of OpenOffice.Org until I mentioned it to her recently. Her computer came with Microsoft Works which has interesting problems dealing with Microsoft Office. As such, she was restricted to doing most of her reports at school because her spreadsheets and reports didn't transfer well enough to justify the time of reformating. She hadn't heard of OpenOffice.Org until I mentioned it to her. At present, its ability to convert Microsoft Office documents has made her life easier.
Now here we have a relatively young person who is very technically proficient who could have benefited greatly from a product, but didn't for a long time because she didn't know. Do we see an advantage in increasing the visibility of this product in any fashion possible?
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
I have to do a weekly status report that gets emailed to all my co-workers and several managers. OpenOffice does MAPI, so GroupWise mails the document just fine. And compatible documents by OpenOffice, week after week, will open eyes. However, there is always the one picky manager (PHB) waiting to pounce. If I or another co-worker forget to save the thing in Word97 format just once, he will use it as a club to beat us 'wild ducks' into corporate submission. If I slip up, and he cannot read my status report, I will not be able to tell him the problem is his lack of a plugin. He is running the corporate standard. I'm the outsider trying to open the environment to allow for greater options.
Thankfully, OpenOffice has worked well so far. It even got rid of an annoying startup macro error message I had with the status report sample file. I had just resigned myself to living with this stupid MS Word error - every single time I opened the file, it spit at me. But OpenOffice is smarter than that. Hooray! Thank you Thank you Thank you to the programmers of OpenOffice!
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"