MS vs. Open Source Office Suite Compatibility

Anonymous Coward writes "Though Microsoft may soon be blocking Office suite compatability with open source productivity tools, in the mean time Hal Varian (of Berkeley) has conducted the Microsoft Office-Linux Interoperability Experiment which shows a surprising amount of interoperability. Hey, another reason NOT to upgrade to the new version!"

Comments

Re:Lock in

[archeopterix]

All this stuff about lock-in is BS. Just save the file from the supposedly `locked it` files as CSV or HTML or whatever. No problem. You could write a script to do it, one for each app (Access, Outlook, Excel etc).

You miss the point.

The problem is when someone important (a customer, a government) expects you to read a file in the locked-in format and you don't have MS Office. It's troublesome to convince your customers to save the files into HTML/CSV/TXT/whatever before sending them to you or publishing on the Web. So practically you have to pay for the MS Office licence to be compatible with everyone else. Hopefully this will change.

office compatibility is not a problem

[dcordeiro]

You really should care if you can log in via LDAP in a Windows AD; or if you can share a file betweens different OSs, or be able to map a network drive.. but file formats ?

If you want to send anything to outside your organization, send if in PDF format. Its portable and "write-protected".
And inside your organization, for sure someone already has ditacted a office package as "the standart". If it is Windows Office, KOffice or StarOffice, it doesn't matter, because everybody will use the same product.
If you get some of this files from outside, just use one of the many converters available around.

The problem with the Linux Office packages is simply one:
Everybody that already worked 2 days with a computer knows how to work with MS word, MS powerpoint and MS excel. Switching to another office package is seen as a dificult task, because the interface is always diferent.

My 2euros (cents dont buy you anything these days)

Re:Outlook 97

[MKalus]

Great,

so I buy an entire Office Suit for an email client?

Something must be amiss here.

It is starting to get funny sort off, as I unwrangled myself at home from Windows now for a couple of years and see just how far OpenOffice has come. Even at work most of the stuff I work on I create in OpenOffice and then save it into Windows format so that others can use it.

I was starting to think last night and realized the only reason I do HAVE to use windows at work is so that I can use Exchange (calendar) and get virus scanned 3 times a day from the Helldesk.