
If you need to collaborate with others on those files, though, there are other office alternatives that make it much easier. If you just need to work with Microsoft Office formats, and you don’t mind what some would consider a dated interface, Open Office has all the comprehensive formatting and functionality you need.

Where Open Office diverges from Microsoft’s productivity suite is in collaboration. You can also export files to PDF from all three programs. But those instances usually only require minor tweaks to correct.

sxg), the following text document formats, and a variety of legacy formats. Occasionally, it will hiccup as when it removed all the embedded images from a Word doc I had open. fodt), Word Writer can open the formats used by 1.x (.sxw. It does so flawlessly most of the time, even with complexly formatted documents like resumes and multi-column newsletters. The official home page of the Apache OpenOffice open source project, home of OpenOffice Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw and Base. Open Office has excellent compatibility with Office formats and can export to PDF from all three apps.īy default, Open Office uses the Open Document standard for native files, but you can change it to save to Microsoft formats, and it can read and write existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.
