you've spent a night wrestling with why Word's autonumbered lists are so
screwed up, you'll be happy to know that OOo Writer's autonumbering works
perfectly every time.
and Autocorrect? They're in there, and you can customize them and turn
them on or off. Envelopes and labels, fields, outlining, track changes, ver-
sioning? They're in there--maybe by different names and in different menus,
but they're in there. The developers of OOo were determined to provide
everything Word offers, and since there haven't been many real innovations
added to Word since about 1995, it's an easy target.
such as the STYLEREF field (which OOo Writer converts to ordinary text). I've
also discovered anomalies importing Word docs that use cross-references--
although you can use OOo Writer to create cross-references without a prob-
lem. Forms don't translate well, and macros are either ignored or preserved
for future use with Word (if you intend to save your document in the Word
doc format).
does not support Visual Basic or any form of internal macro, so even if the document's
macros contained a virus, it most likely would not harm your computer. The program
does give you the option of preserving macros in Word documents, so that they can be
used when someone opens the document in Word again. In other words, you can import
the Word doc into OpenOffice.org Writer, bypassing any virus, save the document back
in Word format, and pass that virus along to someone else who still uses Word. But it
wouldn't be very nice to do that.
the Word user has the same fonts you used, the document should look the
same, except that the bullets in a bulleted list may use an unexpected char-
acter rather than a bullet symbol. (You can avoid that problem by setting the
bullet character in OOo Writer's Options tab for the list style.) Without the
same fonts, the document might have differences in pagination, paragraph
length, and paragraph alignment. You can also import or save HTML or RTF
files and save a PDF file that looks exactly like the document in OOo Writer,
fonts and everything, no matter what computer you use to view and print it.
OpenOffice.org's filters have problems, but that they have so few. Still, you
should be prepared to do a bit of manual cleanup when importing Word
docs into OOo Writer (or into any other program for that matter).