Compatable issues with MS Office/Word?

[videobruce]

I have been using Ability Write Office for my word processing program. I can open & view a M$ Word document with no known problem. If I compose a document, when it is viewed on 'Word', the spell checker is either disabled, or it just can't see misspelled words. Ability Write's tech suuport confirms this. There were a few other 'quirks' with Ability that I wasn't really happy about, but worked around them, But a number of pluses (not M$ and smaller).

Now I am trying 'Open Office' (which I tried before many years ago) and to my surprise the same thing is happening.

Any input here?

BTW; The only M$ product I use is the O/S. Nothing else, so don't even suggest using Office.

[Paul Komski]

As far as I can tell the spell checker only works on OO formatted docs so if you have opened a word.doc type document just try saving it as an odt text document. Then save it back in word format if that is necessary.

[videobruce]

I forgot to add, the documents are saved in the 'Word' format with both programs, not the proprietary format of the software.

[mjc]

To steal Paul's penchant for being pedantic...Word is the proprietary format, here. The default format for OpenOffice.org is an open standards 'universal' format.

As far as it goes, there have been many issues going between different versions of MS Office...usually trying to open a document mad in a newer version in an older version of Office, even with the MS provided 'translators'. There is no such thing as 100% compatibility between versions/apps. Usually this manifests in just simple formatting errors, that usually can be easily corrected. But it can include things like spell checking not working, macros (if used) being removed/undone...which can be a real PITA if the macros did a lot of formatting or special functions on their own. Although, with OO I haven't had too many problems with documents written in older MS versions...just the latest two. I regularly use OO, KWord (native KDE office), Scirbus and AbiWord. All of them understand the odt format and have no problems with documents saved in that format.

The best I've been able to do, in most cases is open the document then save it in the 'native' format for the program I'm using, then open it again...usually after that, spell checking works. Then, after I'm finished with the edits, save it back in the original format.

[videobruce]

There is no such thing as 100% compatibility between versions/apps.I completely understand this. I expect some issues between software. After all, it wouldn't be software if it actually worked properly. ;)
One other thing. I find OO documents are considerable larger than AW. The same document in OO is around 80k and in AW it was around 20k. Sounds awfully large for a single page of text.

[mjc]

Well, OO, like MS Office includes a lot of 'metadata' in the save file.

Did you know that an MS Office document includes, at least some 'edit history' among the many non-text parts of the file? OO does the same with an 'undo' history.

All the formatting data, in some cases machine info...default language, codepage, etc are all retained.

I just did a a quick check...a 6000 word/33000 character document. Written and saved in odt format in Kword 35K. Open and resaved in OO...29K. Opened and resaved in AbiWord...19K. (scribus seems to only handle certain oo documents...not all of them like I thought). A 3000 character rtf document...40.2K. Opened in kword and saved as an odt...10K. Opened in OO and saved as odt...14.7K. Opened and saved in AbiWord...5.3K. A 3000 word .doc file...39K in Word. In Kword...19K. In OO...21K. In Abiword...10.2K.

The big thing is how much and how the program is saving the formatting data and anything else it includes in the file. The actual 'text' part stayed the same.

[videobruce]

Did you know that an MS Office document includes, at least some 'edit history' among the many non-text parts of the file? OO does the same with an 'undo' history.No. You are saying I can re-open a document and undo saved changes from the last time I saved the document? :eek:
That would account for the size difference.

I took a short document that I composed with OO, saved it (73k), opened it in AW, saved it as a .rft (7k), then saved it as a .txt (2k) file.
Going from over 70k down to 2k? :confused:

[videobruce]

Ok, can the amount of changes be reduced to limit the size of the saved document in OO?

[mjc]

in the OO options...Load/Save make sure "Size optimization for XML format" is ticked...most, including odt, formats these days are XML.

Another thing was that there was a bug in OOo versions before the 2.4 series where large thumbnail previews were being generated...which are saved in the file itself. The 2.4 series should have the thumbnails turned off, by default. This can be checked in In "Office.Common/Filter/Microsoft/Export"
following three attributes determine if preview creation is enabled:
"EnablePowerPointPreview", "EnableCalcPreview" and "EnableWordPreview" config.