Crossing the digital divide with Openoffice.org

The Openoffice.org productivity suite, whose main modules are the Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet and Impress presentation package, has extremely good filters for exchanging files.

You can use these to open and edit Microsoft Office format documents in Openoffice.org and vice versa. You can save Openoffice.org files as Word documents, Excel tables or Powerpoint presentations, in a range of Microsoft Office formats, such as Office 97, 2000 or XP.

In this feature we’ll give you some practical tips on how to share documents between these two suites with the minimum of fuss, plus we’ll show you where problems are likely to arise and how to avoid compatibility issues.

The exchange of text documents between Microsoft Word and Writer works very well. Even long documents retain their text formatting intact, although version 2.x of the open source suite is much improved compared with version 1.x. Even so, transfer works better from Openoffice.org to Office than the other way round.

To read or edit an Office file in Openoffice.org, all you have to do is to select the file in the Open dialogue and click on Open – conversion is automatic. To export an Openoffice.org file in a Microsoft format, choose ‘Save as’ from the File menu and click on the down arrow by the file type to show a list of alternatives. Simply select the relevant Microsoft file format. When you click on Save, the program will convert the Openoffice.org document data into the selected Microsoft format.

Instead of converting one file at a time, you can convert several Microsoft Office documents and templates using a batch process. To do this, first you need to copy all the Microsoft format documents or template files into a dedicated folder. Start the batch conversion process from the File menu, choosing Wizards, Document Converter and tick the Microsoft Office checkbox.

Tick the types of documents you want to convert, hit Next and specify the source and target folders. After confirming the settings, all the documents in the source folder will be converted and saved as Openoffice.org documents in the target folder. If you select a template instead of a document, then the resulting file will be an Openoffice.org template.

File exchange problems
On the whole, files can be converted between Office and Openoffice.org without any substantial loss of formatting. However, this only goes for comparatively simple documents, by which we mean those that don’t contain macros, proprietary graphics, complicated formatting or elements such as footnotes, tables or indices.

If your documents do contain one or more of these elements, then some loss of data and other problems can occur. This is particularly the case when the documents to be converted contain elements that are not available in Openoffice.org. When that’s the case, the imported document will lose parts of its function or its content.

For example, Excel tables that have been embedded as OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) objects will be missing altogether – not entirely surprising, since if the data server (Excel) is no longer present, it can’t pass the contents of the XLS file to the Openoffice.org converter.

Many problems have their root in the conceptual differences between the programs. One example is the treatment of mailmerge documents for which another Word document serves as the data source; as Writer can only work with Openoffice.org data sources, when it imports the template it deletes all of the fields that refer to external data sources.

This applies to Microsoft Office documents using buttons and other objects from the Controls Toolbox. Openoffice.org displays the controls, but because of incompatibilities with macros, it deletes the underlying VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) code.