Crossing the digital divide with Openoffice.org

Preparing your documents
Most of the problems that arise when exchanging data between Microsoft Office and Openoffice.org have their roots in the details of the individual applications.

You can usually avoid minor issues by preparing your Microsoft Office documents first.

Above all, this means making sure that the original text is cleanly formatted; or, in other words, that formatting in Word or Openoffice.org is done using paragraph and character styles.

For example, you should never create blank lines between paragraphs simply by pressing the Return key. Instead, you should define the spacing in the corresponding paragraph style. Indents, too, should be defined in the paragraph style, rather than by repeated use of the spacebar or of the tab key.

Large and complex spreadsheets need to be checked for particular formatting techniques and any logical functions, such as formulas or application-specific add-ins. A major cause of problems is formulas that contain optional arguments, as they are often not translated correctly.

For example, some of Excel’s finance functions accept dates as a character sequence, whereas Calc expects a date serial number. Openoffice.org doesn’t recognise formulas such as Hyperlink; if you insert hyperlinks, Calc will display them correctly but won’t make them available as formulas.

And the functionality of Calc’s ‘Data Pilot’ is noticeably weaker than that of Excel’s Pivot Table Wizard.

Additionally, the lack of VBA support means that user-defined formulas don’t get transferred. Diagrams are generally transferred satisfactorily.

Openoffice.org to Microsoft Office
The conversion of Openoffice.org documents to Microsoft’s formats tends to go much more smoothly than in the other direction.

Openoffice.org’s numerous export filters make it possible to save documents in almost any format that you can think of. That said, not all the filters are of the same quality. The best results are usually achieved with the filters for Microsoft Office 97, 2000 or XP.

Even if your target system is Office 2003 or 2007, it’s best to leave the XML export filter alone, as our tests show that it doesn’t always export documents correctly.

Problems can arise if you’ve used Openoffice.org functions that don’t have a counterpart in Office. For example, documents created under Windows will normally use different fonts to those created under Linux. Although Openoffice.org displays Windows fonts in converted documents, substitute fonts are used for printing. The upshot is that if you use Openoffice.org and want maximum compatibility you should restrict yourself to using fonts that Microsoft Office recognises.

Sometimes, using objects causes problems. Hyperlinks, notes and edits can be exported to Word, however they may not be placed in a frame. Also, the export filter doesn’t work at all for transferring animations and embedded Openoffice.org documents.