MS Word--StarOffice Conversion

[Mark Uygur]

Hello,

I am extremely interested in switching from MS-Word to StarOffice but
I have a few reservations. I was wondering if anyone who has had a lot
of experience using Word and StarOffice might be able to give me some
advice.

I tend to share my documents with a lot of people when we are building
reports, proposals, etc. and most of my colleagues use MS-Word. It is
essential that when they read my documents and I read theirs the
conversion between word processors is seamless. Is this asking too
much of StarOffice?

Thank you,

Mark

[mdb]

Mark Uygur a écrit :

this may be asking too much of WS-Word ! opening a MS-Word document
written in MS-Word 97 into a MS-Word 2000 version is not seamless at
all: copy and paste between MS-Word documents often corrupts some
element of lay-out...

I have a lot of experience between various MS-Word versions. It just is
not seamless at all.

and so it will not be seamless between MS-Word and
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org. However, for text documents, it works as
smoothly as mey ever be possible, and as smoothly as between the various
MS-Word versions. Want to be sure of seamless two way traffic of
documents, then make sure everyone uses the same MS-Word generation,
even better, the same version number.

By the way, the staroffice/OOo uses document formats XML, which is what
MS-Word 2003 uses as well (completely different from previous versions
of MS-Word documents, but Microsoft hides that by using just the same
document extension ".doc". But really, totally different document
structures ! and that is why inter-MS-Word exchanges are not and cannot
be seamless!). Unfortunately, MS-Word 2003 uses a special version of the
XML document standard: it adds things that make the MS-Word document not
compatible for other software.

Once MS-Word 2003 is more widespread, you can all throw away any
previous version of MS-Word, they will be totally unable to even read
the MS-Word 2003 documents...

general rule from my experience:
text documents translate well, if not perfectly, both between MS-Word
versions and between MS-Word and StarOffice/OOo.
spreadsheet translate less beautifully, but my experience here has not
been very extensive, certainly not with version StarOffice 7 / OOo 1,1.

you are right to want to change, try convincing the others ;-)

marc
user of Tasword, Wordstar, Protext, WordPerfect (versions 4,x to today),
Ms-Word (versions 2,0 though 2000),...

[Roderick Stewart]

In article <775bf8ca.04020...@posting.google.com>, Mark Uygur
wrote:

I guess it depends on how many "special effects" you use in a particular
document. If you use some efect that the other program can't handle,
then it won't translate perfectly.

Having said that, I've found that for nearly everything I need to do,
the translation is just fine. So far, I've used basic text documents,
sometimes with tables, sometimes printed in columns, sometimes with an
inserted picture, and all these things have worked, as have lines,
borders, paragraph formatting, headers and footers and page numbering.
In other words, nearly everythiing that most people will ever want to do
with a word processor.

The only awkward thing I have found so far (and it's not insurmountable)
has been Staroffice/Openoffice's handling of shading colours. Word has a
huge number of combinations of foreground and backgeound patterns and
densities for every colour, allowing the selection of fairly light
shades that will print well without destroying the readability of black
text. Staroffice, however, only has 91 shades, most of them too dark for
readability when printed, and although they can all be customised, I
haven't yet found a way of carrying this customisation with a document.
I sometimes need to work regularly on the same document on two different
machines (it's a duty roster in a spreadsheet that needs regular
updating), but have found it necessary to recreate the same
customisations on both copies of the program so that the colours are the
same regardless of which machine I have used. Colours created in Word
will display and print correctly in Staroffice, but cannot be reproduced
without customising the colour table for the whole program.

So I reckon the short answer is "It depends". For nearly everything it
won't make any difference, but if you use any special effects in your
documents you will need to experiment to find the best way of presenting
them. Fortunately you can try it out free of charge by downloading
Openoffice, which appears to be identical to Staroffice except for the
database.

Rod.

[Mark Uygur]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for replying, I appreciate it.

I did download OpenOffice and when I opened up documents created in
Word there were definitely formatting errors once the documents were
converted. I was hoping that StarOffice might be more polished and
would be able to handle my Word docs better.

The docs that my colleagues and I create usually include lots of
variations in bullets, lots of variations in headings, footnoting,
tables and some rudimentary diagrams.

Usually I see things like altered paragraph margins, erroneous entries
in the table of contents, bullets that change style, etc. Just little
things like that.

Can I assume that if these things occur in OpenOffice they will happen
in StarOffice?

Thanks again,

Mark

[Roderick Stewart]

In article <775bf8ca.04021...@posting.google.com>, Mark Uygur
wrote:

> Can I assume that if these things occur in OpenOffice they will happen
> in StarOffice?

I think it's practically certain that whatever occurs with Openoffice
will also occur with Star Office, as they seem to be identical apart
from the name, and the inclusion of "Adabas" with Star Office. I was
hoping that Adabas would enable me to abandon the MS Works database just
as I have abandoned MS Office, but alas it isn't as user-friendly as I
thought.

Rod.