Is Microsoft Office compatible with Linux?
Monday, February 28th, 2011 at
19:37
I am trying to get my mom to let me get Ubuntu with OpenOffice and delete windows XP from the family computer. She is worried that if I had to do a project at school (with Word, PowerPoint, or Excel) that I won’t be able to work on it at home. Am I able to put my stuff on a thumb drive and bring it home to work on? Will it work fine?
Tagged with: family computer • mom • openoffice • thumb drive • windows xp
Filed under: Microsoft
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Hello;
I like Ubuntu Linux — and I am happy to give advice to you … For the most part you are right Open Office will read and write to MS Office suite files. You can copy a file (MS Word, MS PowerPoint or MS Excel) to a flash drive and work on it with Open Office with virtually no problems — also you can take Open Office documents and save them in MS Office formats. I am sure that the other people who post will give you same answers.
Sometimes Open Office has the better application —
If it were your machine I would say go to Linux and be happy — But if isn’t your machine! Your mother is the one who decides what Operating System and applications she wants. I would suggest that you offer to make her system a dual boot system installing Ubuntu with the GRUB loader will give you the best of both worlds. She gets the safety of MS Windows — you get to use Open Office. As long as your hard drive has capacity it is a good compromise.
On Last thing you should consider — are all the components of your system compatible with Linux … sometimes printer drivers are not available.
Best of luck,
Bill
Yes. OpenOffice can open any MS Office file format. It can also save your documents or spreedsheets in MS Office format.
OpenOffice can save files in the .doc, .ppt, and .xls formats, and it’s about 99% compatible with Microsoft Office. You may experience some minor formatting issues in complex documents, but you will certainly be able to work on projects in both OpenOffice and MS Office.