OpenOffice and MS Office - a question about cohabitation

[Powell, James F CONT]

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com]  On Behalf Of Claude Jones
Sent:	Tuesday, July 19, 2005 15:33
To:	For users of Fedora Core releases
Subject:	OpenOffice and MS Office - a question about cohabitation

An associate recently had his computer attacked by viruses and spyware. He's a 
writer and editor, and has worked in the non-profit world, so he's not a 
person of means. I suggested he install Linux to solve his immediate problem, 
and to save money since he had bought the computer some time ago and had lost 
all his discs. Now, he's applying for supplemental editing work and he needs 
a feature in MS Office called 'track changes', which keeps a list as I 
understand it, of changes he makes to a document. I'm not a writer and don't 
use MS Office or OpenOffice much, so I can't tell whether the feature in 
OpenOffice called 'record changes' is equivalent. Is one amongst you 
sufficiently versed in both worlds to tell me if he could use the 'record 
changes' feature in OO, and would these records be accessible in MS Office 
Word when the document was opened on a Windows machine? Alternatively, can 
someone suggest a better place to ask the question? 
-- 

I went through an entire Master's program using OO and used this feature quite often between OO and MS Office.  Within the class structure we used Word, Excel and PowerPoint, so I know the interoperability is quite good within these parts of OO, although I'm not sure if any of the others actually have the change tracking.


Jim Powell
L-3 Communciations, GSI
AV-8B Weapons Integration
(760)939-9089
james.f.powell at navy.mil