The ease of working with Linux

Jolly_Roger

As a freelance journalist, I write most of my material using Word or Excel, which is easily manipulated by the various editors that I work for. However, I am seriously thinking of adopting a Linux-based operating system on my next computer, which will include Open Office. What I would like to know is whether there is inter-operability between Word and its word processing equivalent in Open Office. For example, if I were to send an article in an Open Office word processing format, would somebody with Word be able to read it? Or would I also have to acquire Word? I am also curious about Excel documents.
The aim is to try and entirely eliminate Microsoft from my new computer. How easy will that be?

newfoundglory

As long as when you are saving an open office document you select Word from the list to make it compatible with Microsoft Office you should have no trouble opening it with Word.

The only issues you are likely to have are if you are opening Word documents in Open Office which have lots of complex microsoft-specific features which are unsupported in Open Office. Complex and nested tables in Word are another area to watch out for as an example.

If as a journalist you are just writing articles with text formatting, you arent likely to encounter any issues. The same goes for excel.... basic forumulas etc.

You could easily test this now.... go grab a copy of Open Office for windows.... its the same across all platforms, including linux. Try opening/saving documents between Word and OO on your machine and see what happens.

albertross_2

Have you tried any Linux Live CD's? You will be lucky to get drivers for a lot of things, and will have to turn into a geek to get things working.

http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

A random example of what you'll have to deal with:

If you want to make your wireless network secure with WPA..

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Wpa_supplicant

Can't find a driver for Linux, then you'll have to try this:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Installation

which probably won't work either.

Much as I dislike many "features" of Windows, Linux is hard work in comparison..

(Preparing for the onslaught)..

wolfman

Yeah Linux is great but I certainly wouldn't use it as a way of eliminating Microsoft from your system.

Linux does require time and patience for setting it up/using it, but will give you full control over your system. Things such as WPA (mentioned above) can be quite a pain to get working.

Running it in dual boot with XP to start with is probably a better idea so that you can slowly move across to Linux rather than jumping in at the deep end.

Download OpenOffice for Windows and see how you go with it. It definitely a great alternative, although if working professionally you may want to stick with Word, if not for it's features/ease of use, then at least to be fully compatible with other users.