Easy Way for Sharing OpenOffice.org Documents?

rekrutacja asks: "I'm trying to find easy way for reading OpenOffice.org documents in places where you can't (or don't want to) install the full OOo suite. I found an on-line reader, but I would like something for offline viewing. There is a Java-based standalone program that you can download from here, but I can't seem to get it running to my liking. OOo Lite/Reader/Viewer should be easy to install (especially for Windows) and I'd like it to be small enough to fit my 16MB pen-drive. Even a Firefox/IE plugin is better than nothing. Does anyone know of such a beast?"

Comments

Re:Since you are focusing on reading and not editi

[Creepy Crawler]

Wow.. Talk about moronic moderation... I reccomend a solution that actually would fit on the 16 MB memstick (my god, get a bigger one doofus).

And for a reccomendation, Im a "troll". This is why K5 is getting better.

Hello, it's open source!

[akgunkel]

Download the source and make your own reader!
Real geeks do stuff like that all the time!

It's not like it would be hard or anything...

Just use Microsoft Office

[Dink Paisy]

I hate to sound troll-ish, but the solution to both your problem and the original poster's is to use Microsoft Office.

Microsoft makes stand-alone viewers for Powerpoint (97-2003) and Word (97-2000). Microsoft also makes a browser plugin for IE that understands WordML and will correctly display Word 2003 documents that are saved in XML format. The old viewer will show Word XP and non-XML Word 2003 documents, however some features may be unavailable, so the document may not look exactly right. You can fit any, or all, of the viewers on your 16 megabyte flash drive.

If alternate formats are an option, you can also convince a host of programs to read RTF. It's not as versatile as Word native format, but chances are any computer with an OS less than ten years old can read it.

OpenOffice.org is something that you suffer through when forced to use Linux to read or prepare editable documents for distribution. It's definitely not something you should ever force on anyone else.

P.S. When I used Linux exclusively, I distributed KOffice presentations by exporting to HTML format. Unfortunately KOffice does (or at least it did; it may be fixed by now) that by converting the presentations into graphics files, so it is resolution dependent. If you know what display resolution the other computer has, that will work. A better solution is probably to distribute presentations as PDF format, and use Adobe Reader as the small viewer program. I believe OpenOffice.org supports saving to PDF directly, and if not you can get a PDF printer driver.