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Abstract

macrumors Penryn
Original poster
Dec 27, 2002
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I just installed OpenOffice (from www.openoffice.org) in order to give it a try, which is a free Office suite. I have always used MS Office because it's a universal format in the "real world".

Here's my problem:

I tried opening my resume on OpenOffice's Word Processor program, since it's the most "formatted" and complex MS Word document that I have. It translated fine when I opened it in OpenOffice. Actually, OpenOffice opened it perfectly.

I saved it as an "OpenOffice text document", then I closed it in order to see if I could open it again. Anyway, I reopened my resume file, now in OpenOffice's text document format, and decided to save it as an MS Word document in order to check to see if saving it as a Word document format using OpenOffice would allow me to open my resume in MS Word (perfectly). So I started up MS Word and opened the Word.doc version I saved using OpenOffice. The bullets came out a bit off. Actually, some bullets came out fine, while a few did not. Also, the alignment of the text was a bit screwy. Some of the text was so indented that they were an inch in front of the bullet.

I know I can save in PDF format, but I still want saved files to be compatible with MS Word, with no surprises on how it will come out on someone elses computer.

What can I do? If I use OpenOffice to write a document and need to send it to someone who uses MS Office (since everybody uses it), I would like to be confident that if I were to save the document in Word.doc format, I could send it to someone without any formatting (ie: tabs, margins, bullets) errors.
 
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