The OpenOffice.org community receive occasional emails from grateful Microsoft Office users. Somehow, Microsoft Office has corrupted critical documents and can no longer open them. However, the users have been able to open the documents in OpenOffice.org and save themselves hours of work.

It’s nice to see this anecdotal evidence confirmed by Microsoft experts:

When “Open and Repair” (in Microsoft Word) failed to resuscitate a corrupt Word .doc file, I would then try and open the file using OpenOffice, which usually did the trick.

Chris Wolf, MCSE, MCT, CCNA, a Microsoft MVP for Windows Server-File System/Storage, in Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine

There are technical reasons why this should be the case – in simplistic terms, as Microsoft file formats are not published, OpenOffice.org has to ‘try harder’ to open the files – but it’s good to see it confirmed by Microsoft experts. It’s a shame they don’t yet go the whole hog, and just advise frustrated Microsoft Office users to do the obvious and switch to OpenOffice.org for good.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 9:55 am and is filed under OpenDocument. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.