Open Office and Microsoft Office Files

[greg.rundlett at gmail.com (Greg Rundlett)]

You can certainly open, edit, save and/or create files in Microsoft
document formats using OpenOffice applications.  For those who want to
use OpenOffice software but work primarily with Microsoft formats, you
can even set the default 'save' format to be one of Microsofts
formats.

There are a couple benefits. You won't get complaints from other users
who don't know how to install software on their computer.  Meanwhile
(assuming you are new to OpenOffice) you get familiar with the
OpenOffice applications.

There are downsides to using Microsoft document formats, and since
OpenOffice has one-click conversion to PDF, that is often a good
option for sharing documents if the recipient does not want to install
OpenOffice.  Of course the Microsoft formats are much larger in file
size than OpenOffice formatted documents, so they are slower to send
via email and take up more disk space.

The latest OpenOffice document format (ODF) is based on XML and thus
it is completely machine readable.  It is sweet.

fyi. Linux Journal just wrote about an extension (plugs in to
OpenOffice) that looks up articles in Wikipedia.  As you read a
document in OpenOffice you can highlight a word to lookup, and it will
check wikipedia for articles on that subject, opening them in your web
browser. http://www.indesko.com/en/downloads/ooowikipedia/view
note: I had trouble downloading the english link, so I successfully
tried the download link from the French language article.
http://www.indesko.com/sites/fr/telechargements/ooowikipedia/view