Over the weekend, I had to download about 10 different documents written is Microsoft Office 2003 or earlier. Because I really want to move away from Windows and stay Linux only, I said to myself; “Self – Let’s use OpenOffice to open all of these documents, fill out what needs to be filled out, save, print, and e-mail them to the correct recipients.”
So I downloaded all 10 documents, saved them into a folder on the Desktop, and then used OpenOffice to to read them. Now comes the problem, each document opened, and I could see all the text, and logos, but each document had tables. The tables were setup in a form format, and they were a mess. I then said; “There is no way these documents are supposed to look like this.” I tried to modify the tables and set cell the way it should be. But I don’t know how they should look. So I had to save the documents to my XP partition and reboot to Windows.
So now I am back in XP, I open each document with Microsoft Office 2007, and the documents look 100% better!! All the cells are aligned correctly, even documents that I opened in OpenOffice which were two pages long, were actually only one page in Office 2007.
I completed my work in Office 2007, printed and saved and rebooted into Ubuntu 9.04. I copied each document back from the XP partition, into a new sub-folder on my Desktop, and then opened each in OpenOffice. And each document still looked like a mess, but now the mess had my information in each field.
I’m not sure why Open Office was giving me a hard time about documents with tables. To me, this is ridiculous, how can anyone expect OpenOffice to be a replacement for Microsoft Office when it can’t open documents with tables? I’m going to search the Internet for some answers, maybe even post in Ubuntu Forums. You can give Microsoft all the grief you want about Vista, but in my opinion, Microsoft Office is still the best. If Microsoft would build a version to run native in Linux, I would purchase it today, or yesterday when I needed it.
Drahusz 