For OpenOffice.org (OOo), MS Office (MSO) is the elephant in the living room. As much as the project might want to ignore MSO, it cannot. Many potential users never have used anything except MSO, and most have to share files with MSO users at some point. The lucky exceptions, of course, are those in a free software work or educational environment, who deal only with equally lucky family members and friends.

For these reasons, OpenOffice.org includes design elements and features to making interacting with MS Office and switching from it as easy as possible. Much of the interface as well as the basic work flow is the same in both programs. Many features have the same name and are located in the same place in the menu, although enough differences exist that users occasionally will stumble. In additional, several features exist specifically for interacting with MSO. Yet, in the end, despite all of these provisions, you still need to plan intelligently if you regularly share files between OOo and MSO.

MS Office users will feel at home immediately in OpenOffice.org. Originally designed to imitate MS Office, OpenOffice.org has started to depart from MSO in some ways. Yet the interface for basic tasks is still a close duplicate of MS. For example, in both office suites:

Even the two programs' shortcomings are similar. For example, the menus in both office suites offer the confusing choice of Configure or Option in the Tool menu. Moreover, at times, OOo is overzealous in imitating MSO. Version 2.0, for instance, replaces the Fontwork tool with the less efficient Fontwork Gallery in order to be more like MSO. The same is true for the replacement of the Font Merge tool with the Font Merge Wizard. Still, OOo having basic tools in the same place as MSO does offer the advantage of bringing new users up to speed quickly.

OpenOffice.org and MS Office have some basic similarities, but they can be deceptive. The more you explore OpenOffice.org, the more you start to see differences. Some of these differences are trivial, but many are improvements and go deeper than you might first imagine.

To start with, some features have different names. For instance, Autosummary in MS Word becomes AutoAbstract in Writer. Similarly, Slide Sorter in MS PowerPoint becomes Slides View in Impress. More obscurely, the PivotTable in MS Excel becomes the DataPilot in Calc. There seems to be little reason for these changes except, maybe, to make OpenOffice.org seem more different from MS Office than it actually is. However, with a little imagination, you usually can get past these trivial changes. If you are baffled, "Comparing Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org Terms"--located under Common Help Topics in the Help files--may help to orient you.

More seriously, although OpenOffice.org's basic menu structure is similar to MS Word's, advanced features often are found in different places. Some of these changes, such as the division of font attributes over several tabs in Format -> Characters, are dubious improvements at best. More often, they are a welcome change to MS Office's often haphazard menus. Often, items are placed in more logical locations. At times, advanced features are tucked away in sub-menus.

Differences in OpenOffice.org include:

This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it does cover the differences that users are likely to encounter first when moving from MSO to OOo.

In many ways, OpenOffice.org's interface is the overhaul that MS Office has needed for several versions. I'd compare the differences to those between North American cars and Japanese cars when they were first introduced into the market. Like the first Japanese cars, OpenOffice.org is not superlatively better than its competition, but it's better enough to be a sensible alternative.

Because MS Office is used so widely, OpenOffice.org includes features to help users who need to open or send files in MS Office format:

All of these tools are useful, but none are substitutes for intelligent planning. To start with, you need to make sure that the same font files are available for both OOo and MSO. Don't rely on font names alone, because several non-identical versions of common typefaces often are available. If your free software philosophy allows, you may want to use the Font Wizard to install the free Microsoft fonts on your GNU/Linux installation and use only them when file-sharing.

More importantly, develop and test a template for file-sharing. Your tests should include all of the formatting features that you are likely to use. As you develop workarounds for problems, store the answers in the template so that you can refer to them quickly.

Finally, manage everyone's expectations. Slight changes in line breaks and extra lines are to be expected when files are swapped between OOo and MSO. For complex layouts, such as brochures, your best bet still is likely to be PDF. And, in general, the simpler the formatting, the more likely files are to make the transition successfully.

OOo's relation with the elephant never will be entirely satisfactory. Although the project can change the interface to make it more familiar to MSO refugees, it cannot provide a completely comfortable editing window for them without dropping many of the features that make OOo worth using. Moreover, in the next year or two, OOo will have to decide whether to stick with a traditional user interface or imitate the new interface expected in the next MSO release. Both choices will have advantages and disadvantages.

Similarly, when dealing with file formats, the project will be playing catch-up forever, because it has to reverse-engineer proprietary standards. In addition, OOo can never entirely satisfy users who want the software to be just like MSO, nor the ones who want it to be independent of MSO's influence.

Instead, the OOo project usually opts for a middle ground, satisfying the most pressing needs but only to a certain extent. The result is interconnectivity with Microsoft Office that is less than perfect, but good enough for most purposes.