Re: FWD: Open Office experience out there?

[Megan Golding <mgolding -at- secureworks -dot- com>]

On Wed, 2002-05-15 at 09:49, Anonymous wrote:
> My company's in the process of considering a switch from Microsoft
> Office to Open Office software. 

Congratulations!

> If anyone else on the list has already had some experience in
> doing this, good or bad, I would be interested to hear about 
> their experience.

I've worked with StarOffice (SO) and Word fairly extensively in an
environment that uses both products. Since OO is the open source version
of SO, I'm basing my comments on the assumption that they're pretty
similar. (crosses fingers)

What follows are some tips I've found helpful:

1. A one-off conversion seems simpler than trying to work with both
products. Converting a Word doc to OO (Open Office) WILL require some
handiwork on your part. Try not to do this work every time you open the
file after the Word user has edited the file. When y'all make the
switch, make it cleanly -- no leaning on the Word crutch after the
cutover date.

2. Word styles (heading 1, etc.) convert pretty well. Phew! That's good
news.

3. Before converting, edit your styles in Word so that you're using
basic fonts that'll be available to OO. Now that I've said that, this
may not be an issue if using OO on a Windows machine where TrueType
fonts are available. I've been doing my switching from Word/Windows to
SO/Linux, so TrueType fonts aren't available and the font substitution
isn't always the best.

4. Embedded images -- yuck. Since SO for Linux doesn't do OLE, the
images won't work if you've copy-pasted them into the original Word
document. Before trying to convert, switch over to linked images saved
in a common format. I like gif and jpg.

5. Bulleted lists. For some reason that seemed odd to me, any lists of
bullets I had in Word got converted into SO as the ugliest lists I've
ever seen. Don't know why and never investigated it fully to figure it
out. Just something to keep an eye on.

6. When switching over, you may find it helpful to use Word to save the
docs as RTF. Rich Text Format is supposedly tool-independent (though
Word violates this). Your conversions may come through cleaner.

In the original post, Anon mentions "some nagging worries about the
switch." Yes, switching to OO will cause pain to a Word power user. The
pain will be in the switching, though. That's the good news -- once
you've switched to OO, working with the documents is about the same as
in Word.

Good luck, Anon, with the switch!

Meg


-- 

Megan Golding (mgolding -at- secureworks -dot- net)
SecureWorks, Inc.

Make your life a mission - not an intermission.
         -- Arnold Glasgow



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