Reacting to the favorable N.Y.Times article, I downloaded and installed OpenOffice. I tried out the compatability of Writer. I opened an MS Word document in it, which it was able to do easily. Editing was fine, except that it doesn't delete the space after a word, which is annoying. (I tried using the help system to find out of there is a preference for this, but was unsuccessful. The help material is poorly organized.) Anyway, I saved the modified document in OpenOffice format. MS Word was unable to open it, which was expected (just checking). So I resaved it in Word 2000 format. This time Word was able to open it without complaint, and everything seemed fine. But when I went to save it, Word crashed with an illegal instruction!
I'm afraid that's enough for me. My conclusion: the compatability isn't adequate yet.
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Reacting to the favorable N.Y.Times article, I downloaded and installed OpenOffice. I tried out the compatability of Writer. I opened an MS Word document in it, which it was able to do easily. Editing was fine, except that it doesn't delete the space after a word, which is annoying. (I tried using the help system to find out of there is a preference for this, but was unsuccessful. The help material is poorly organized.) Anyway, I saved the modified document in OpenOffice format. MS Word was unable to open it, which was expected (just checking). So I resaved it in Word 2000 format. This time Word was able to open it without complaint, and everything seemed fine. But when I went to save it, Word crashed with an illegal instruction! I'm afraid that's enough for me. My conclusion: the compatability isn't adequate yet.