Hi Gary,

If you want to know how incompatible Open Office is, just take a look in any Office application's help file for all the functionality that is not supported by the Open Office file formats. Presumably, Open Office will have the same kind of info relating to the MS Office file formats.

Even in Excel, the incompatabilities span much more than a few "complex issues". They include such basic stuff as themes, named ranges and expressions, workbook/worksheet protection, Active X & form controls, limited chart support, etc.

When we get to Word, we find no support for: ActiveX controls, Bibliographies, Captions, Content Controls, Tables of Authority, Table of Figures, Text orientation in table cells, Themes or Watermarks. Tables of Contents are also not fully supported.



That's just Word & Excel - and we haven't even got to the advanced stuff! For someone trying to resolve MS Office issues, using Open Office may bail them into far greater problems than they started with.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]