Office 2007 vs. OpenOffice vs. Novell OpenOffice

Ok, first things first. I work for the Mighty MarkLogic in San Carlos. I'm currently doing a series of blog posts on OOXML and MarkLogic Server for our developer network. Today's post came about as my sole focus for the last few months has been OOXML, but I've been a big fan of OpenOffice for quite some time. I thought I'd repeat some of the examples I'm doing for OOXML with ODF. I have no allegiance to any Office Productivity application, my allegiance, if to anything, is to XML and XQuery.

Now that you know this: The opinions and posts on this blog are mine and mine alone and don't necessarily reflect the opinions of MarkLogic Corp. If they like it, I'll let 'em claim it, but if not, they were out of town when I wrote this, capiche?

The following includes my experience testing OpenOffice 2.3.1 , Novell's OpenOffice 2.3, Novell's OpenOffice.OpenXML translator 1.0.0-2, and the Sun ODF Converter 1.1 for Microsoft Office to see how easily they interoperate with a .docx file, and a .odt file.

• Office 2007 Professional out-of-the-box will not open a .odt document, nor save as .odt.
  But we can save as .odt if we install and use Sun's ODF Converter.


• OpenOffice 2.3.1 out-of-the-box will not open a .docx file, nor save as a .docx.


• Novell's 2.3 OpenOffice out-of-the-box will not open a .docx file, nor save as a .docx.
  But we can save as .docx and open from a .docx if we install their translator.

We can get Office 2007 to save as a .odt document if we install the Sun ODF Converter. The download and install is quick and simple. A single file, download, double-click, it installs, open Word, and you can save as .odt. Simple! Sun states on their site for the converter that Office 2007 support is coming and they don't explicitly list Office 2007 as supported, but I believe they are well on their way. I was able to take a sample Word document with multiple pages, formatting, color, and a couple of embedded tables - it wasn't just a "hello-world" document - and save as .odt. When I opened in OpenOffice, or Novell's Open Office, it looked perfect. If there was a difference, I didn't see it. It took a few seconds to save, but I'm impressed. The downside is it's just a one-way converter, I still can't open a .odt in Office 2007.

Novell has an OpenXML translator available, that will allow their version of OpenOffice to open and save .docx files. To install their version of OpenOffice, it's an ISO, so you'll need daemon tools or to burn it to disk. Once installed, you can add the converter by opening OpenOffice and going to tools -> Extensions. Click 'add' in the dialog box and add the addin by browsing to its location. Click ok. Restart OO and you'll now have the option to open and save as .docx. Ok, not too simple for an ordinary user, but it works. I think you'd need to be kind of a geek to even know that Novell has their own version of OpenOffice or the translator or how to install, but its cool that its there.

I have that same sample document I described above that originated as a .docx. I opened in Novell's Open Office, and the formatting was off. It lost the indentations for paragraphs, and it shifted a table halfway down the second page.

I then saved the .docx as a .odt in Word 2007. I opened in Novell's OpenOffice, and it looked perfect. I then saved as .docx from within Novell's OpenOffice. I closed NOO. When I re-opened, the formatting was off again, similar to the original document. When I opened in Word 2007, it had lost the indentation and the bottom 1/2 of the still shifted table was missing.

For simple "Hello World" documents, the formatting was fine when I saved as .docx and re-opened in Office 2007 or Novell's OpenOffice, but for other documents, it appears Novell's OpenOffice OOXML support still needs some work.

I just started reading OASIS OpenDocument Essentials. I hope to post some examples soon.