On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 05:31:34PM +0100, Bev Nicolson wrote:
I sent a document to someone recently and their machine kept crashing when they tried to put changes into it. (They use MS.) I've not had this problem before and I'm wondering exactly how compatible Open Office and Word are. What's your experience?
My experience is that MS products crash as soon as you look at them, back in the NT4 days, whilst at Uni, I used to be able to blue screen the workstations within abou 15 minutes of my average usage (which at that time involved having a few windows open for coding, a browser window for JDK documentation, putty connected to a machine in the student union and occasionally a VNC session to my person box hosted on campus)... Now I don't find it *quite* so easy to crash Windows, but that might just be because I've come to expect that I can't run much at the same time!
Now, the obvious question is, why don't you just get the other party to install OpenOffice, it's Free after all... and then you can just exchange documents with each other nicely.
Otherwise, you'll hit some incompatibilities whatever happens, and occasionally some will crash word... (I've had it the other way round too, word documents crashing open office... but then I shift to abiword, or wv - I generally only want the content anyways - why people can't learn ReST, docbook, markdown or similar I'll never know - it makes life so much *easier* - none of the problems of a large memory hungry "word processor").
*Anyways* - that was a bit off topic and random! The basic answer is, yes, there reasonably compatible, but you will hit problems every now and again.
Thanks,