Posey's Tips & Tricks
Microsoft Brings OpenOffice 1.4 File Support to Microsoft 365
Microsoft finally providing better support for OpenOffice is very much appreciated.
I have been using Microsoft Office as my go-to productivity suite ever since it was first released several decades ago. Even I now find myself using both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, thanks to a situation that occurred a couple of years ago.
So what happened? A family member had passed away and I was the executor of their estate. The only problem was that this particular person lived 500 miles away. I found myself having to drive back and forth on a relatively frequent basis as I worked on settling the estate.
Needless to say, all of this sudden travel made it tough for me to keep up with my work. Since I was behind, I asked my wife to drive on one of the trips so that I could sit in the back seat with my laptop and try to get some work done. This is where the problems started.
When I launched Word, I received a message stating that I needed to be connected to the Internet in order to verify my subscription. When I am at home, I normally work from a desktop computer and only use my laptop when I travel. Microsoft Office checks every 30 days to make sure that your license is still valid. I just happened to need my laptop at a time when Office decided to perform a license check.
To make a long story short, I was unable to connect to the Internet. I don't have a Wi-Fi hotspot in my car and time constraints prevented me from stopping somewhere to use public Wi-Fi. My only option at that point was to use WordPad to write my blog posts.
As soon as I got home, I decided to install OpenOffice. Like I said, I prefer using Microsoft Office, but I just couldn't risk being in another situation where I was forced to use WordPad.
A few months ago, I once again found myself in a situation where I needed to use Word while on the go. Since it had been a while since I had used my laptop, Word, not surprisingly failed the license check. Since I had already installed OpenOffice, I used it to write the content that I had been planning to write in Word.
Microsoft Office and OpenOffice have long supported one another's file formats, but just barely. OpenOffice can for example, save documents in Word format. However, it only supports older versions of Word. These include Word XP, 2000, 97, 95, and 6.0. The current version of Word can open documents saved in these older formats, but complex documents might not be formatted correctly when opened in Word.
Likewise, Microsoft Office has long been able to save documents in OpenOffice format, using a standard called Open Document Format (ODF) 1.3. The problem however, was that complex documents often suffered problems as a result of being converted into ODF 1.3.
Recently, Microsoft introduced native support for Open Document Format 1.4. Just to be clear, if you have an older version of Office, you can likely already open ODF 1.4 files, but you probably aren't going to be able to save Word documents in ODF 1.4 format.
So why does the ability to save documents in ODF 1.4 format matter? It's because ODF 1.4 does a much better job of preserving a Microsoft Office document's format. In Microsoft Word for example, the ODF 1.4 support allows you to save a Word document in ODF format even if that document contains elements that would have previously proven to be problematic. I am talking about things like tables within shapes, lists that start with 0, odd and even page breaks, and even an option to prevent images from overlapping with one another.
Excel offers similar improvements for those who need to export spreadsheets into the ODF document format. The new file format version now allows for filtering by color and direction, and for decorative objects. There are several other minor improvements that have been made affecting things such as error values and text rotation.
The improvements made to Excel are very similar to those affecting PowerPoint. The new file format allows you to export ODF documents, even if the starting slide number is 0 (which would have caused a problem in the past). Improvements have also been made with regard to support for table cell text direction and decorative objects.
Because Microsoft Office's support for ODF 1.4 is still relatively new, I have only just begun to experiment with the document conversion process. Even so, my guess is that the new ODF 1.4 support will probably make life easier for anyone who, like me, sometimes uses both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.