Using a new product requires some re-learning. That’s unavoidable. But you rarely have to learn an entirely new set of skills—it’s just that the new stuff sticks out at us. This article is to emphasize the similarities between OpenOffice Writer and Microsoft Office Word; the things you don’t have to re-learn.

Using a new product requires some re-learning. That’s unavoidable. But you rarely have to learn an entirely new set of skills - it’s just that the new stuff sticks out at us. This article is to emphasize the similarities between the OpenOffice.org Impress and Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation tools. These are the things you can instantly do with no relearning.

This isn't a howto guide, this is only to show that its currently possible to Install and run Office 2007 in Wine on Linux. This video only shows the actual install of Office 2007 and Word 2007 running, the video posted on December 17th 2007 shows Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007 and a couple other Office 2007 apps running.

Some people get sniffy about OpenOffice.org, calling it mickey mouse in comparison to the “serious” and “grown-up” Microsoft Office. That may have been a vaguely plausible jibe for version 1, but I've found version 2 to be incredibly fast and powerful – it really does everything I need in an office suite, and it does it well. And yet OpenOffice.org rarely gets the respect it deserves.

Although Microsoft publicly testifies from every available pulpit of their deep longing for multiple document formats, a quick glance at reality shows that this love remains unrequited in their products. For example, what new formats does Office 2007 include out of the box?

Users regularly cite lack of compatibility with Microsoft Office files as a reason for not using OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org does include Microsoft Office export filters, as well as a number of settings for increased compatibility, but these features provide only good, not complete, compatibility.

Microsoft declared yesterday (May 21st, 2008) that Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 would include (among others such as PDF 1.5, PDF/A and some more) built-in support for OASIS OpenDocument Format version 1.1 (finalized, submitted to ISO, supported by OpenOffice.org, Kofffice, GNOME office apps and their forks) while ISO-submitted OOXML support would wait for Office 14.
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How does the current version of OpenOffice.org (OOo) compare with Microsoft Office in its ability to produce slide presentations?

Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not all there is to it!