For the most part, transitioning between OO and Office is pretty straight forward. The most important part of sharing files is communication. If you know what you are trying to achieve and how each person is formatting their documents, you can avoid stress down the road. Some issues are unavoidable because once you get into the more complex formatting is when you will find  more issues but with a little preparation on both the OO and Office end before sharing can alleviate headaches.

Knowing the outcome is half the battle:

By knowing how the content of your document is going to be used can save you time and effort.

When .rtf is appropriate:
If it's just the content of your document, and not the formatting that is important, then you or your fellow file sharer can save in .rtf. This will save the content of what is in the document without worrying about the formatting. It can be opened by either user and manipulated with more advanced formatting.

When to use .PDF:
Both Office and OO allow you to convert your documents as .PDF's without too much trouble. This can freeze the formatting of your document for others to open and read on their computer, with programs like Adobe. There are ways to create writable .PDF's that can be edited but generally it is easier to use this option when you are looking for proof reading to occur.

For Office to OO file sharing, see below to see how to format your programs to reduce problems and formatting issues.

For the Microsoft User:

The first thing to remember is that OO is open source, so that means that it does not have access to all of the formatting options that you may take for granted. This includes fonts. Some are protected by licenses that make them inaccessible to the OO user, and even though the font has the same name does not mean that it has the same coding (so, in other words, they are not the same thing). The way to avoid any major problems in sharing is to stick with the standard, common fonts, such as Times Roman and Helvetica.

Generally speaking, the older the version of Word or Office (such as 97/XP) the easier a time you will have when its time for file sharing but communicating with any OO user will save you time and headache.

For the Open Office User:

For the most part, importing and exporting files between OO and Office is as simple as formatting your defaults once and then letting the computer do the rest, except for a few exceptions (which we will touch upon later). The most important thing is always making sure your computer has the most up to date version of OO. Because OO is open source people are always rewriting the format to make our lives a bit easier.

The great thing about OO is that it has a variety of formats that you can save in, though not always seemless. Since file sharing most often occurs for us between OO and Office, the first thing to do is to make sure that your computer is saving your files as .doc extensions. In a blank document, use the following path:

Tools> Options> +Load/Save> +Microsoft

Once you get to this point, make sure that all of the boxes have a green check next to them. This means that you are now saving as .doc. Even though this has some differences, you are now one step closer but you aren't done yet. Before closing out this box, go back to the menu tree on the left and choose the following path:

Load/Save> VBA Properties

Make sure that all the boxes are checked, as you did before, and click the "Set as Default" button then "Ok" if prompted. What you just did will help to preserve any complex structures that you create within your document. One last step and you should be good to go:

Tools> Options> OpenOffice.org Writer> Compatibility

Make sure the following boxes are checked:

  • Use Printer metrics for document formatting
  • Add spacing between paragraphs and tables (in current document)
  • Do not add leading (extra space) between lines of text
  • Add paragraph and tables spaces at the bottom of table cells
  • Consider wrapping style when positioning objects

Once again, set these as your defaults but the tricky part is that some of these options are only for the current document and rather than trying to remember to do this for every document that you create, it is easier to save this document as a TEMPLATE. This way you can open it, change it as you need to and then use Save as... to create it as a new document.

OO is user friendly once you understand the in's and out's of the setup. In the beginning it will require a bit of communicating between you and your fellow file sharers but before you know it, it will all be second nature to you.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 
Open Office