Working with MS Office Word documents in Linux OS

Now it’s time to talk about the compatibility issues which probably represent the greatest obstacle for the users who would like to start using something cheaper or free. Logically all the applications of the same kind have to be compatible with each other in order to simplify the user’s workflow, but in reality we often get something completely different. On the one hand it’s understandable why different products have their own formats, but on the other – this forces people to use the most popular software, even if they don’t want to, in order to have as much compatibility as possible.

The great thing is that in this certain case (as far as the OpenOffice.org is concerned) the compatibility issues with every new release become less and less noticeable. In order to demonstrate it I decided to take the first part of given review (introduction), apply some basic formatting to it in Microsoft Word and save it both in .doc and .docx formats. After that I tested if there were some compatibility issues while opening this document with all the word processing programs mentioned above.

Let’s check the results of text formatting…

Here is the introduction with formatted text in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2:

I used the following basic formatting techniques: strikethrough, italics, bold, superscript, font background, font color, and list with a special bullet symbol.

Here is the picture made OpenOffice 3.1 while opening .doc version of the file:

Everything is perfect – no mistakes at all!!! The only thing is the font itself, but we will talk about that a little bit later.

Here is the screenshot made in OpenOffice 3.1 while opening .docx version of the file:

At this time it’s very decent but there are two small issues:

• Something wrong with the line spacing in the last paragraph (before list)
• Instead of special bullets symbols we got rectangles