Open Office Vs. Microsott Word...are they compatible?

Question

I'm downloading Open Office on my laptop. I'm mostly looking to create my wedding invitations on it. The invitations are going to be printed on my moms computer. I don't mind taking the laptop over to mom's or anything, but I'm just curious if I send them to her email will her MS Word be able to open them if she doesn't have Open Office?

Answer 1

Yes, in general they are, though there will sometimes be differences in how they interpret the document.  If you stick to MS Office document formats, you'll find the highest level of compatibility.  Sometimes you'll have minor formatting issues when moving between Word and Writer, for example, but that's not true in 100% of cases, and the new OpenOffice.org 3 should fix a lot of these problems when it is released.

If you look under OpenOffice's options, under "Save" you can set the default format to the corresponding Microsoft Office format.  This will ensure that you deal in Word documents instead of the default OpenDocument Format.

If you're concerned about formatting issues cropping up and your mom will only be printing the documents, consider using OpenOffice's "Export to PDF" feature, directly under the File menu, instead.

Answer 2

Your mom would be able to open the Open Office documents as long as you save them in the correct format. When you go to File > Save As, you need to specify the format to Microsoft Word 97-2003 or MS Word 2007.

Answer 3

I use Open Office as well. I recently sent my brother a copy of my resume which I made with Open Office and he wasn't able to open it with Word. Once you make your invitation, you can convert it to a word doc by using Open Office. Open your document, click on File at the top left of the page and then click on Wizards: Document converter.

Answer 4

Yes. They are, provided you save them in Standard ".doc" format

Answer 5

Yes they are compatible.  

Answer 6

Save it in .DOC format, and everything will be compatible b/w Open Office and MS Office.