I understand that MS Office documents can be read in OpenOffice, but with the possiblility of losing some formating. The question is, how good is it the other way around? Do you still lose formating by taking a .doc file created & saved from OpenOffice and opening it in Word? What version of Wine (or any other emulator) is best for preserving the formatting of MS Office files?

I have not explored the issue thoroughly, but I have had essentially no trouble with formatting taking documents from Open Office and opening them in Word 97. This includes some fairly complicated documents with textboxes, multiple fonts, and so forth. The compatibility between OO and Word actually seems to be better than the compatibility between Word and Wordperfect.

WRT OO and Excel, the subject is a bit fuzzier. OO doesn't graph nearly as well as Excel, though it does do a decent job, and I have experienced trouble taking graphs from Excel to OO.

The major limitation of OO is that VBA macros don't run, though I understand the OO team is working on that.

You mean using wine to run msword? If you get msword to run you are pretty much fine with preserving format

I actually bought crossover office from codeweavers and got officeXP to install fine. Havent had any complaints with format preservation except that when I do
File --> open
in word, it usually hangs for a little until the file open dialogue comes up, but I think that has something to do with word trying to read your cdrom drive

It's actually pretty good. The only problem I've had was saving expanded text in the presentation part (as powerpoint).

ooo docs in word will not work, but word docs in ooo will work just fine, macros and all. The main issue is taking .sxw docs into word - I wish ooo would just save as rtf by default, but otherwise it's fine. For things i'm going to transfer I just resave them as a .doc onto my thumbdrive and go from there. Woot to OoO

TomalakBORG

"I wish ooo would just save as rtf by default"

it does if you set it up that way. under one of the menus is an "options" choice and under that is a sub-section that allows you to select the default save types for all of the components of Open Office.

i know crappy instructions, trying a new distro and it is still installing or i'd check for the actual menu names.

Woot~!

I am assuming that means somethig good?

BTW: Go terps!

From OOp to word I had some trouble with manual page breaks it looks. Also some pictures gone weird. Maybe the margins are different in them. But generally whether I took something from word to ooo or the other way around I have some problems with it. Now I'm exporting to doc and spellcheck in word (ooo is a bit strange and the list isn't complete which is annoying) and then export to pdf to print in windows or print immediately from the sxw file in windows.

Though the documents sometimes aren't formatted heavily it will look different for me :S