atw: OpenOffice and Word

Hi all,

I happened to be passing by and noticed this discussion thread - a bit
late, but here are my experiences in case they are of any interest. This is
based on the version that was current late last year. 

I used OOo Writer as the backbone for an international collaboration
between eight universities and scientific organisations. Some had zero
budget for software, some had an ideological problem with using anything
from Microsoft and some will never give up on LaTeK.

Good things
* The master document is a killer. It can pull in any combination of Word
docs and OOo writer docs and bind them together. Much more solid than
Word’s flaky master document.

* Lists number properly throughout the life of the document

Bad things
* The template doc only binds loosely to its child docs. You get a snapshot
of the styles at the time the doc is created, but any subsequent changes in
the template doc are not reflected in the child doc.

* (showstopper) The template doc cannot be on a different LAN drive to the
child doc. The link is simply not resolved. 

Overall I found the best compromise was to keep Word child docs (for the
template binding) and pull them into an OOo master doc (for the stability).
Six months is a long time in the open source world so these problems may
have been resolved by now.

regards
Colin

Info Action Pty Ltd
P (02) 9674 7025
F (02) 9620 8441
www.info-action.com.au
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