Excel vs. Open Office's "Calc"

[dolfan]

I know several of you here use the Open Office versions of Micro$oft Office. If you make a spreadsheet in Calc (OO's version of Excel), do any of you know about difficulties in opening the file in Excel elsewhere? We don't have the latest Excel at home, and buying it will be silly, but my wife does need Excel at home at times for her work; her company is heavy on Excel stuff. She needs to create spreadsheets or edit them at home; I know you can open Excel in OO, but I'm not so sure about the other way around, or any problems with it.

Thx.

[beckrl]

Here's a guide to the differences of OOffice and Excel
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wik ... _and_Excel

I don't use OO but I think you would be able to convert a OO file to excel format by "save as" a file to xls. So you would be able to open file with excel and edit.

Or maybe something like this, which i haven't again used but is just a plugin for OO.
http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/index.jsp

[sinceresoldier]

Hi Dolfan,

I noticed you don't have the latest Excel; might you have the 2003 edition of the software? If so, there is a compatibility pack made available by Micro$oft that will allow you to modifiy/convert documents between the two Excel formats. I had to shorten the URL:

http://bit.ly/1Sn5mJ


Also, I used to use OpenOffice, and I didn't have much of a complication with the older 2003 version of Excel, but I'm not too sure on the 2007 format.

[Jeremy Gault]

Last time I tried to use anything from 2007 with OpenOffice, it was a bit hairy. I think they added support for it in OpenOffice, but even then, I had better results having the sender save as 2003 and sending. Otherwise, formatting got messed up.

Of course, if you simply wholesale move everyone to OpenOffice and save in an open format, problem solved.