Beginning OpenOffice 3: From Novice to Professional

Chapter 9. Working with Others

Collaboration is an important part of document creation for many people, so a piece of software's ability to deal with anything thrown at it can be important. However, file formats are skittish things, and even different versions of the same product—for example, MS Office 2003 and MS Office 2007—will sometimes balk at opening a file from the other. OpenOffice.org has the challenge of transferring data not just across applications, but sometimes even across platforms (see Figure 9-1), which can create additional problems. Despite this, OO.o still manages to open, display, and edit most of these files adequately.

Figure 9-1. The ...