Open Office 2007 Documents in OpenOffice

I don't use OpenOffice much but it comes installed on the Cloudbook so I think I'm going to start. (Though I also plan on using Google Docs a lot more too.) Anyway, since most of my current files are in Office 2007 format I was concerned about moving between the two programs. Well, a solution is now available: the Open XML Translator.

Expand OpenOffice.org's document opening, saving, and conversion powers to Office 2007 documents with the Open XML Translator, a free plug-in intended for Ubuntu systems.

lifehacker also says that "conversion from Microsoft Office-authored files remains hit-and-miss, but it's a nice step forward for the free and open-source office suite." I'll have to give it a test when I get my Cloudbook.

(Oh, and I'm officially declaring this my blog post for Thing #7: Blog about anything dealing with technology.)

Another Blogging via Word 2007 test

Since someone just asked me "how clean is the code Office 2007 puts out" for blogging I figured I'd do another test. This post contains much more complicated formatting and an image pulled in from MS ClipArt.

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Here's some right-aligned text.

And some centered text in another font.

Outlook 2007 Performance Update

Some have noticed that Outlook 2007 runs a little slower than the 2003 version did. Those of us that have massive amounts of e-mail and calendar data just chalked it up to the amount of data we're making it crunch. However, it seems that 2007 is actually running slower than 2003 as stated by a recent, yet unpromoted, Outlook 2007 update released this past April 13th.

"This update fixes a problem in which a calendar item that is marked as private is opened if it is found by using the Search Desktop feature. The update also fixes performance issues that occur when you work with items in a large .pst file or .ost file."

Believe it or not, the difference post update is noticeable.

Slow Performance From Outlook 2007?

I'm not experiencing slowdowns but it does make me wonder about usuing Outlook 2007 as a feed agregator.

"Adding RSS feeds can quickly swell the in-boxes of many users to more than 2GB of data, according to O'Kelly. He said that causes Outlook 2007, especially when it's running on PCs that don't have large amounts of memory, to write to the hard drive much more often than it typically does -- resulting in performance slowdowns. Hopefully, Microsoft will be able to better tune that part of the software before the next major release, O'Kelly said."

Save as PDF or XPS directly from Office 2007

I'm assuming this is a result of the PDF format going open source but you can now install an add-on for Office 2007 to give you the ability to directly save your documents in the PDF or XPS file formats.