All your friends and business partners run Microsoft Office and you cannot afford to have any blunders when reading their documents. Likewise, you don't want to have your presentations all garbled up when you import them from Impress to PowerPoint. What about Office 2007? What about macros in your Excel sheets?

Under the name Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office, Sun has released its import/export filter for the OpenDocument format (ODF), which the ISO has recognized as a standard, for versions 2000, XP, and 2003 of Microsoft's Office suite; the plug-in can be downloaded via our software repository.

Typing documents, use of spreadsheets and slideshows are essential tools in the life of almost every professional. The largest of the problems found in Microsoft Office according to the vast majority of users is its price. This obligation on having to pay for an Office application suite has stimulated the development of OpenOffice.

If you love using macros in spreadsheets, OpenOffice's macros might suit all of your needs

OpenOffice 3.0 adds updated ODF format support, Microsoft Office XML format support (reading only), usability improvements, a new start center, improved annotations in Writer, and improved PDF support.

Bordeaux 1.4 was released today and its a significant upgrade over the prior 1.2 release, version 1.4 comes with support for Microsoft Office 2003, Visio 2003 and Project 2003. Version 1.4 has improved Office 2000 menu support and Cellar support fixes.

In InfoWorld's tests using complex Word and Excel documents, OpenOffice.org 3.1 failed to deliver on its promise of better Microsoft Office interoperability, severely mangling our Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel test data files. By stark contrast, SoftMaker Office showed excellent compatibility.

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!

OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite. It is a free office suite. A new version OpenOffice 2.3 is officially released today (September 17th, 2007) for Linux fans. OpenOffice 2.3 boasts of some improved features