Thread: Looking for Microsoft's Word

Many of us are so used to looking for Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint that Open Office's alternatives-Writer, Calc and Impress - can seem a little bit confusing at first. Writer is obviously a word processor, Calc is a spreadsheet rather like Excel and Impress is designed, like Powerpoint, for creating and showing presentations.
There are three other programs in the Open Office suite, known as Base, Draw and Math - these are less commonly used, so we'll come to them later.



Even if you are blown away by Open Office, Microsoft's programs remain overwhelmingly dominant in the offices, so it's likely that most of the documents you receive by email will be saved as .doc or .xls files. Fortunately, Open Office recognises these, and can open, save and create these files, making sharing documents with people who use Microsoft Office simple.

There is, however, one significant exception: when it created Office 2007, Microsoft introduced new document types with the file extension .docx and .xlsx. Open Office cannot currently open these fi les. This problem isn't limited to Open Office users, as Microsoft's own earlier versions of Office can't open them without installing an extra convel1er. For the moment, the only solution is to ask any Office 2007 users to save any documents as standard .doc and .xls files instead.