LinuxPlanet: The StartX Files: In-Depth With StarOffice Filters

“Two weeks ago, I reviewed the StarOffice 6.0 Writer
Beta, and last week I examined OpenOffice Build 638C’s version of
Writer. In both cases, I emphasized strongly (translation: gushed
liked a gossipy spinster) about the fact that OpenOffice had
finally managed to put together a Word document filter that carried
over all of the information stored within a Word document, beyond
the straight text: formatting, annotations, comments, and revision
marks. This is an exceptional breakthrough, because it allows full
collaboration between Those Who Use Windows and Those Who Use
Linux.

Admittedly, though, I may have been caught up in my own
excitement just a wee bit too much. I feel obligated to back away
from this cool technology to tell you that since last week’s
column, I have learned quite a bit more about how these filters
work within OpenOffice. It seems that the filtering tools are not
perfect in what they pull over from Word to OpenOffice. Formats and
styles in complex Word documents are not flawlessly brought across
in every case.

And there is a tendency for documents saved in Word format
within OpenOffice to actually become larger in file size than the
original Word document itself–even if no changes were made in the
OpenOffice file.

These two problems were brought to my attention by diligent
reader Neil Cohen, who dropped using his Windows machine at his
Cisco office in favor of Linux some months back, and turned to
OpenOffice to collaborate with his Windows-using colleagues. Cohen
indicated that some of the documents used in his office can carry
very complex templates and formats, which OpenOffice does not
always display properly. I did not notice this during my tests
because the documents I was moving from Word to OpenOffice were,
while very heavy in comments and revisions, not very complex in
terms of formatting.”

Complete
Story