Opening .ods / .odt / .odp with MS Office Apps

Having installed MS Office Standard last week, tonight I started sifting through old spreadsheets. I didn't want to mess with them too much and end up saving them as .ods with Open Office. So I decided to convert what OO files I did have (about two dozen) into MS files.

Imagine my horror when I discovered that .ods files wouldn't open with Excel.

Anyway, if you ever want to convert OO to MS, there's an extremely handy add-in:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_i...

Just download, double click, assign OO extentions to be opened by MS and you're ready to go. When opening the files it seems to open them in a tmp folder on the system, and there's a bit of file name fiddling, cos it names it as "Copy of filename_tmp". A lot less hassle than using Google Docs or having to re-install OO to your system though.

So much for OO being compatable to Office!

I'd like to know what is so much 'hassle' about actually installing OO?

I think it's a question of Office not being compatible with OO. OO has no problem with Office files, but it seems that Office isn't up to the job of handling OO files.

142MB is a lot of hassle for my system space, registry and time, versus a simple 4MB add-in.

Nuff said.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

Nuff said.

Yep, you need a computer made after 1990. Can't help you there.

OO has no problem with Office files

That's not entirely true. OO is almost as good at messing up complex Word documents as Word itself. Also Office doesn't claim compatibiility with OO but OO does claim complete compatibility with Office.

OO is almost as good at messing up complex Word documents as Word itself.

That's what I call compatibility!

I'm aware that Microsoft products do not claim, nor make any effort, to be compatible with other software. However, when OO can open Office files, but Office cannot open OO files, it seems to be turning logic on it's head to say that OO is not compatible with Office. Office doesn't claim to be compatible with OO and it is 100% correct to (not) make that claim.

Back to your bridge.

'camieabz' is a pretty cool guy, eh thinks OpenOffice wrecks his computer and doesn't afraid of anything.