Thursday, November 12, 2009

ODT being read in MS Word

Maybe I am late with this, but ...

Until 2 weeks ago, I could not have my ODT document edited in MS Word 2007. All of a sudden, I open my work with Vista Home Premium (Legal Copy), and I saw my work with MS Word Icon. WOW!!! These last couple of days, Vista has warned several times it needed to restart, because of updates, and things like that. I understand updates, but I don't agree with all that everlastings restartings.

Anyway, I tried to watch the way MS Word understood my book. In past days, OpenOffice tried to understand DOC documents, but several troubles of formatting always were there, for
sarcasm of all: "it is awful, it will never do it, you will loose your work", and on.








MS did a really good job, except for some details:




1) Headings got off the margin:












2) Bullets were not correctly interpreted








3) Background images were not imported. In this image, there is a wall image behind the text "notas importantes", but it was not imported. Notice that, when I wrote this box, I inserted the image in the original ODT file. Also the watermark I defined (a Creative Commons license, converted to JPG) was not imported.




Other features I used in OOWrite worked perfectly. After all, opening ODT files in this updated version of Word was not as complicated as opening old DOCs format in OOWriter, but it was not perfect. Anyway, it is a good step for MS, having in mind interoperactivity.

If you know about more details, let me know. Also, do not forget to comment and to tell if this was useful or not.

Update:
MSWord also does not natively export to PDF documents.

No comments: