OpenOffice or LibreOfice compability with MS Office documents

Question

Recently our company bought new pc with win7 pro. Now I need to get some document editors. I came up with MS Office, LibreOffice and OpenOffice. But MS costs about 190 EUR.

So I want to ask if there is posibility to open MS Office documents in one of these freware alternatives ? I mean so the document would be completly the same as when opening in MS ?

When I searched on Google, there was no solution to do that..

Answer 1

A short answer: For most of the cases you will be satisfied from the compatibility of LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice (which are same) with MS Office.

More details: Be aware that although both LibreOffice (LO) and Apache OpenOffice (AOO) is capable of reading all MS formats, the exportation of native .odt format in the recent .docx format (offered by LO) has some problems when saving images (sometimes they just disappear) and in general should be avoided.

On the other hand both LO and AOO has great compatibility with older .doc format, you may use without fear both suites to read and write in that format. However, consider that even in that case, some slight differences may appear in very complex layouts, but without loss of information.

Whatever concerns Calc, the spreadsheet offered by LO and AOO, the compatibility is great. Calc is very similar to older Excel XP edition.

A final warning: Star Basic (the language of the macros running by LO and AOO) is different from VBA which is the MS Basic variation. Thus, some "rich" documents that provides additional features supported with a particular macro will not run in the other suite.

Hope the above will help.