Open Office good alt to MS Office?

I don't use office suite a lot but I don't have any kind of issue opening M$ files with it. Try it and if does not match you can uninstall easy. They need an email to send you activation code (even if it is free) and you can simply use a temp email as mailinator Is a 40mb installer and no more than 80mb installed.

 

My resume is highly formated to make everything fit just right, with bullet points, divider lines, strictly chosen indents, jobs/educational institutions/etc on the left with dates on the right and so forth, etc.

I opened it with Abiword portable and the format was completely messed up. It spilled from 2 pages onto 3. Dividers were gone. Square bullet points had become round and included background shading, and so forth.

With LibreOffice Writer (latest stable release), my CV was almost intact, but at least one of the lines had spilled over to the next line and thereby pushed one of the section in my CV from page 1 partially to page 2. This is the type of crap you always have to look out for if you want to go between MS Office and LibreOffice or another office suite. Personally I've resigned myself to using whatever programs people I work with use to avoid incompatibility issues.

 

I have noticed the same thing when working with my resume also... So I just pretty much stick with MS Office, as that's what will be opening my resume when it's received in 99% of the cases....

 

Why don´t you distribute your read-only documents as PDFs? Isn´t PDF the standard?

 

PDF might work fine.. I've always used .doc all my life and found that in business, most people use the doc file. Although yes, PDF is quite common as well. Typically , when someone asks for a resume, they ask for it in doc format though.

 

I realize that neither Kingsoft or SoftMaker have "draw" programs. Guess I'll be sticking with OO 3.3 for awhile longer...

 

Save the work in MS Office format to avoid incompatibility issues. When a true open office document standard is adopted, that should become a thing of the past.

 

I use PDF for employers, but sometimes I send my CV to myself so that I can edit it on different computers, or I send it to someone for comments who prefers doc, or someone else who wants see the template I'm using for their own CV. Anyway, I only used a CV as an example because everyone has one and they tend to be highly formatted, so it's a good document to test how compatible different word processors or office suites really are.

 

I do it all the time. I get MS formated documents, edit them in LibreOffice, save them back to the same MS format I received it in and send it back. I also send new documents, mostly word processing and spreadsheets. In general, if I need to send it out, I save it in MS formats, otherwise I save it in OO formats. Occasionally I have had to "Save As" MS format a document I have been using in OO format. No one has ever complained. The receivers have no idea I am using LibreOffice.

Recently I received a .docx form that I needed to complete. Four forms were needed for four individuals. I simply changed what needed to be changed for each individual and then Saved As in .docx format. I noticed that there was a few formating errors on the saved versions. Thinking I needed to go to the real McCoy, I rebooted to Windows, opened the (unedited) received form in Office 2010, filled them in and discovered the same formating error was occurring using the real deal, MS Word 2010. So... I sent the LibreOffice versions, no complaints. A couple of weeks later I personally met with the receiver. Nothing was mentioned regarding my sent product and the printed version was in his hand.

 

While not directed to me, I send PDF when I do not want editing done. An example would be finalized meeting minutes. The drafts go out as an editable document, the final version goes out as PDF. I also have folks that received my documents that do not have MS Office or a LibreOffice type program, but they do have a PDF reader.

 

That's what I'm running and I have not encountered a single issue.

 

How does the resume look when opening in Kingsoft Writer?

http://www.kingsoftstore.com/writer-free.html

 

About the same as with LibreOffice Writer, although different changes. Not as bad as with AbiWord.

Basically one of the dates I had aligned to the right with tabs and spaces in MS Word was off the side, and one of the section titles that started on page 2 in the original CV was now at the bottom of page 1.

fwiw, I use doc format instead of docx for compatibility with MS Word 2003 since some people I know still use that. As for Kingsoft Writer, it looks like a great word processor with a similar interface to MS Word 2003, but it's the same problem as with all these writers; you need to use what others around you use to guarantee compatibility.