Resolved Open Office & MS Office on same computer

Can Open Office & MS Office 2003 reside on the same OS? My OS is Windows/XP Professional, SP3.

I am trying to decide whether to use Open Office instead of buying MS Office 2007.

Thank you for your help,

Jim

 

Jim,

I have an old version of Microsoft Office - 97 - as well as Open Office. Haven't noticed any problems with the two in operation. When you install OO it will make itself the default. So your file icons will look a bit different.

I pretty much use OO for most of my word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation. You can save any documents or projects created in OO as Microsoft Office files and they open and run fine in Microsoft Office (except for the database function). Open Office will open Microsoft Office files with no problem - my older Microsoft Office will not recognize documents created in and saved as OO documents. Don't know about the later versions of Microsoft Office. If I create a file that I think I may need to provide to someone who only has Microsoft Office, I save a copy as OO and then save a second copy as Microsoft Office - has worked well for me.

I have created several PP type presentations in OO Presentation, saved to a flash drive as a PowerPoint file, and then successfully used them in computers that only run Microsoft Office. Another feature is that OO lets you save documents as PDF which the older versions of Microsoft don't do. This may have changed in the later versions.

Since it's free, you could go ahead and give OO a run and if it doesn't work out you could buy Microsoft Office. Open Office suite looks and operates similarly to Microsoft Office.

Added Note - Jim, sorry about that but I missed that you already had Office 2003. Probably wouldn't have even commented if I had noted that.