open office and MS office

vaio

Just a quick one.......Anyone had experience of an add on for MS Office that enables you to open native Open Office files?

fwor

I didn't think MS would allow such a thing to exist (they must hate OpenOffice/LibreOffice with a vengeance) but Google suggested this:

http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/

Have to say I've never tried it, though.

InsideInsurance

There was a Sun plug in for Office to allow it to open ODF documents http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/Other-Office-Tools/Sun-ODF-Plugin-for-Microsoft-Office.shtml

Personally even when I used to use OpenOffice and its related projects I always saved in MS format rather than ODF

John_Gray

I used the Sun ODT plugin for Office (versions 1.2 and 3.1) but it is not very well implemented and became annoyingly intrusive, so I uninstalled it. I agree with InsideInsurance that people should save in one of the MS formats (but not .DOCX, .XLSX, and so on).

TonyF123

I disagree - always save in ODF format. Only save in Microsoft format if you want to send to someone who only has Microsoft office, and even then make an additional copy saved in ODF to keep safe. The Microsoft file format is not guaranteed to keep the formatting correctly.

TimothyEBaldwin

It is standard feature in Office 2010, Microsoft did this because of several laws requiring the use of ISO standards, and the native format of OpenOffice is an ISO Standard. They also successfully put their format though the ISO standard process, and have been accused of corruption in the process.