# Excel, word document on unix



## ITSAMB (May 29, 2008)

Hi,
I am not a unix guy. But may have to worke on it soon. I would like to know that is there any MS office version for unix systems. I have heard about openoffice and staroffice. But have no idea that they will accept MS documents.Additionaly I would like to know the standard document formats like PDF, are they supported on unix ? Where can i get all this information?

Thanks in advance


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## totschkow (May 29, 2008)

Hi, I think there are a lot of possibilites for you in linux to ms documents work. Normally ms office or abi word processor should handle all of them almost the same way how ms word does it, but I still think there will be little differencies when the program displays them.
Pdf of course is also supported. What linux distro do you use ?


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## ITSAMB (May 29, 2008)

you mean we can install MS office and work on unix same way we work on windows. Correct me if I am wrong. 
well, I am not using any linux as of now. But just wanted to make my doubt clear before I work on it as in general.


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## ITSAMB (May 29, 2008)

Also, one more question about unix application. Is there any heavily used application for unix only which might give problem for its document to migrate on windows ? If no, that means all application running on unix works fine on windows. The main intention behind this question is that i am working on documentation of content migration.


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## metalf8801 (May 29, 2008)

No you can't run MS Office natively on Linux or Unix. You can use Open Office which will allows you to open and edit MS Office documents. You can also run Open Office on Windows and its free you can download it here http://www.openoffice.org/ if you want to check it out.


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## lensman3 (Oct 19, 2007)

OpenOffice is transparent to the MS Office documents EXCEPT for the new Office 2007 default file types (the new ones that have the 4th letter x in the extension). If you create a document, speadsheet, powerpoint, etc in Openoffice and do a SaveAs in any of the M$ Office formats, nobody will know the difference. There are some third party converters for the docx, xlsx, etc formats. In fact if you add zip to the end of a docx document and unzip it, you can see the various file types that M$ has created. The docx is really a folder with sub folders.

Rumor has it that M$ will be adding ods (Open Document Standard) to Word in the next service pack. PDF's export have been around for several years and works well. I send most of my correspondence as PDFs. 

The only gotcha I have been hit with lately is that the spread sheet (version 2.4) won't save an xls spreadsheet out as a dbf (DBase). I work with GIS and edit the shapefile;s dbf file regularly. I had to delete OpenOffice 2.4 and reinstall 2.3 so I could work around the bug. This was on a Windows XP 64. (I saw that a bug had been turned in for this problem.) 

The printer support is good. It uses the Windows installed printers, but I cheat and only write to Postscript printers.

Another place I have seen some differences, has been in powerpoint files. The fonts spill over into areas I don't think they should. But most of my experience has been with "jokes" sent to my Linux and not XP. The pictures rendered very well. The text titles actually spilled onto the pictures and out of the frame.

If you review, why don't you install VMware on you XP/Vista machine and add Fedora or Ubuntu Linux. Install the Unix version of OpenOffice and try it out. 

Also OpenOffice works very well on Mac's and OSX. You have to install the X11 on OSX, but it is on the Apple install disks. My daughter is running OpenOffice at Univeristy on a Mac but doesn't like it. Her problem is that she forgets to do a SaveAs to a M$ document format and then the Professors can't open it! This SaveAs could be your biggest problem.

Hope this helps.


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## ITSAMB (May 29, 2008)

surely, that helps a lot in getting clear the idea of MS documents on unix. Thanks a lot to all for your help.


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