How do I share documents between OpenOffice Writer and Microsoft Word?

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I have never found Open Office to be anything but average. Aside from the fact that it is free, I see no redeeming features that make it better than Word, or any other MS Office products.

While it may not have all the bells and whistles of Word, I have yet to find anything lacking in OpenOffice.org's software. Perhaps I simply don't ask a word processor to do anything more than be a word processor? Nor do I need animated text.

In any case, we suggest it to just about every person whose system we clean up, especially those who have to reinstall MS-Office due to a virus/trojan/whatever and it turns out that the copy they had was "borrowed" from a friend. (Yes, we'll reinstall it if you give us original media and a product key.)

I think the concern most are missing is that this tech removed MS Word (or took it off as the default Word Processor / hid its icons) and put Writer on instead.

I'd be ticked.

highly informative.i did not know that i could save the text in microsoft word document format. thanks

I wouldn't make a happy word user use OpenOffice, because once someone is familiar with one program it can be difficult to adjust to another, but that said, OpenOffice is a nice alternative to Word for those who don't already have it and don't want to buy it.

It is also worth pointing out that if it is just one person who gets a lot of OpenOffice documents and wants to open them in Word, Microsoft have released a plug-in certainly for Office 2007, possibly even Office 2002/2003 that allows ODF import (the OpenDocument Format which is the default of OpenOffice)

Great, and here we go - opensource stuff...
I certainly didn't know about OpenOffice Writer and am very pleased to hear of its existance.
I leaned towards redHat when it first arrived on the scene, but being an oldie, and not particularly computer savvy, I decided against install on the grounds that I couldn't possibly understand what I was supposed to do...
Things of course have moved, and we're now getting quite a surge of opensource stuff - including Joomla, and I think it's great...
Ms have had their pound of flesh - in fact I believe their pound has turned out to be measured in tonnage. Thank you Ms, but it's time to move on and allow some of the newer talents to bring forth their input to the world of computing.
We will all be better for it...

And by the way, if the gent IT man who installed after fixing a virus on this chaps machine the OpenOffice Writer - he actually done the user a favour, as the Word prog was probably not registered anyway...!
and without a desktop prog, he would have been buggered...

opensource forever
Lou

Well I hack for the sake of protecting my own website. And I use RedHat 9 and it comes with OpenOffice.Org. And like Leo said you have to give it a chance. Apart from it being free, it is compatible with any form of office software available and it doesnt have all the security issues that MS Office does. Also did i mention the fact that it is opensource and free. That in its self makes it better because it is so compatible and free. You don't always have to register it or purchase it everytime you wipe your system and also you dont always have to purchase anything for the latest version. You just download it. And to top it all off did i mention that its free?

I've changed my default to word 97/2000 xp and the document is fine until you close out and need to go back into that document, that's when you will discover that the formatting is off and the opendocument will not let you correct the document. You must delete it that file name and retype that document in order to get the formatting right. It looks fine on the screen until you print it or close out and go back into it.

I have just started using Openoffice writer, think it is great. Main reason for the delay was that all other people still use MS word.

Main problem I have now is if I have a OO document with cross-references they do not save into Word/XP format. You also lose the text of the cross-reference. This is an issue for me.

Any idea as to how I can resolve this issue.

I have the openoffice.org suite, and when I try to save a file I get nothing like the drop down menu that you have. Mine only has 5 choices, none of which are microsoft word. Any ideas how to remedy this?

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