OO is comparable to and mostly compatible with MS Office. For the usual word, excel and powerpoint files it is completely compatible. Some files using advanced techniques may not be completely compatible.

When documents are created on OO by default the files are saved in the OO format. To make these same documents compatible with Microsoft products the publisher has to save them in a MS format. This is done during the initial saving of the document.

In that process when offered "Save As" a user has to click on the arrowhead and select the appropriate format from the appearing drop down list. An alert may appear regarding presentation, just ignore it.

I transport documents on a thumb drive between home (OO) and work (Word), and have no problems regardless of where they originated at.

DA

I've only found two small things so far that MS Office can do that OOo can't, and they are fairly specialized little tricks that most people would never miss. One is that the mail merge in Writer doesn't have a simple way to create a "catalog" listing, and the other is that the spreadsheet in Calc doesn't have the option to label the cells using the "R1C1" convention, which allows certain types of calculations to be formatted more quickly. Most people have no idea what I'm talking about, so most likely it wouldn't be missed.

OOo will open and allow you to work with documents created in MS Office. You just have to remember to "save as" one of the Word, Excel or PowerPoint formats if you are going to use them under those programs again. Open Office has a different native format, but gives the option to save in several other formats that are compatible to other programs.

I would strongly recommend downloading Open Office and giving it a try. The worst thing that can happen is that you end up buying MS Office down the road, but very likely you'll end up finding it to be just as useful.

if she is a student or teacher she is eligible for MS office at a much much reduced price, She should check with her school. Some schools require MS office.

Here is a link that might be useful: here is the link for the discounted suite

Thank you everyone.

She is just a high school student--not college, but I work at a university and have an .edu address. As an employee but not a student I wonder if I could just use mine to purchase the suite. Do they verify enrollment if you have an .edu address? I may just do that to prevent any issues with her teachers.

When I get my laptop though, I am using OO for sure!

You both qualify for the educational version of MS Office. I think they changed the terms recently so that there's now a "home" version instead of an educational version. But you may be able to get an even bigger discount through the university, so it's worth checking.

as bpgreen stated yes I do believe you would qualify, worth the effort to try.

I am not a student, and I purchased MS Office 2007 and it has the full feature of for home and school - one does not have to be student or connected to education, they just have to say they will not use the software for commercial uses. I think I paid something like $125 a couple of years ago (2007). Besides being low cost, the license allows for installing on up to three computers. We have it on my notebook and my wife's desk top.

That said, I used Open Office in a commercial environment where all the clients used MS Office. I, as a consultant, I had to purchase my own. I opted for free OO, and all went fine - a glitch once and a while. As said, save all documents in the MS formats - OO is updated often.

The only thing missing in the home/student MS Office is it does not have Outlook - an email client and scheduling/calendar application to which I do have a commercial license.

the product the link is to is the full office 2007 ultimate for $59, that is a different product.

I checked with my campus bookstore and they had no special offers for staff. Then I happened to be in a meeting with one of our techie guys and asked him about getting MS Office. He told me that our IT center would sell me the MS Office Enterprise 2007 disk for $15.00!!

I immediately went over there and bought it. I am so excited!

Thanks for all of your advice. I still plan to look into Open Office when I get a new laptop just for myself.

beache