[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
Quoting Tom Potts <tompotts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > sun has a plugin that can save MSoffice files in ODF > format.tp://www.sun.com/software/star/openoffice/ > down the page a bit > > Has anyone tried it - no M$ office here thanks? Okay I've had a play with it now, it isn't too bad. I don't any complicated spreadsheets or Word Documents but what I did try on Word and Excel did export as ODF format okay. The Powerpoint conversions were a little more rough around the edges but any errors appear to be fixable easily enough. After the plugin is installed it will add a file type to the Open and Save boxes and also icons on the toolbar saying 'Import ODF' and 'Export ODF'. The problems I did have with it were.... Downloading it was a pain. I couldn't get it from the Sun site, the Java download manager didn't work properly in Windows and I couldn't manually download it (using either Firefox or IE 6). I managed to do a Google search for the executable file (odp-1.0-bin-windows-en-US.exe) and then download it from another site. Also converting some of the files seemed to eat up the system resources (I'm working on a Dual Core Pentium D 820 running at 2.8GHz with 1GB Ram) although this may be to do with the fact I have quite a lot of things open at the moment. It also doesn't appear to be scriptable, at least I couldn't find any option for scripting or batch converting files although it may be possible to write a VBA macro to do this. It is possible to select more than one file in the Open box although it comes up with a message about a possible security risk (it does this with every file that you import or export). Still I can certainly see it being of some use and considering it is written by Sun it is more likely to conform to the ODT standard. Hope this helps anyway. What it could do with is some international mirrors (the installer is a 30MB EXE file) and a bit of publicity. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html