Working with MS Office Word documents in Linux OS

Now let’s see what kind of results we get as regards table formatting.

Here is the table made in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2:

As you can see in this example I used: increased table border, cell background, font color and italics.

Here is the picture from OpenOffice 3.1 while opening .doc version of the file with table:

Again perfect!!! We even have increased table border.

Here is the screenshot from OpenOffice 3.1 while opening .docx version of the file with the table:

Pretty decent, but again there are two issues:

• There is no increased table border
• No cell background

As a result I should mention that the compatibility with .doc files is as great as possible. Probably if you check it in more detail, you will be able to find some issues, but regarding the basic formatting it really does a great job. As for the .docx files the compatibility is decent enough, so there is no need to worry about losing some important details in your formatting.

In addition to that it should be emphasized that the latest version of MS Office, Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, has the option to save the documents in OpenDocument format (.odt), the fact that significantly improves the compatibility of this two applications. Unfortunately in OpenOffice 3.1 we don’t have the opportunity to save documents in .docx format, but taking into consideration the overall compatibility this should be considered as a very insignificant issue.