Open your OpenOffice files in MS Office 2003 and 2007 !!

I love OpenOffice.org, and have been using it for years. One of the benefits is the sheer amount of space that one can save when using OpenOffice Writer - the ODT files are much smaller. In an age where hard drives and other storage doesn't limit the size of files as much, it seems I am a dinosaur for even considering the amount of bytes I can save. Still, the more free space I have, the more I can store. Plus, when it comes to sending and receiving documents, the smaller they are the less impact it is on a network. In the grand scheme of things, I think bloated documents are as bad as low bandwidth in some areas.

This benefit of OpenOffice.org is lost when I have to send someone a Microsoft Office format for a text file. It bugs me, and I often forget to wipe the converted files to save space - maybe I am getting old. Thus, when I came across How to open ODT (openoffice.org text) files in Microsoft Word, I was surprised and happy.

Quoting from the original site:

Office 2007

1. Install Service Pack 1 for Office 2007.
2. Install Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office.
3. Open ODT document via File > Open, or by double-clicking the ODT file and when prompted for the application to open it with, choose Word.

If you have Office 2003, installing the Sun ODF Plugin should just work.

If you don’t have administrator privileges to install software, you can try an online converter such as Zamzar or Media Convert. You can also upload ODT documents to Google Docs or Zoho Writer.

Thank you. Now, when I accidentally send a smaller file and am short on time, I can simply point people to that and allow me to stop converting files because Microsoft itself had never supported ODT - an open standard with open source software that they could easily have allowed for to be intercompatible.