Optimize Microsoft Office documents

Written by Shanx March 31st, 2007

optimize ms office with openoffice

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Have slow loading Word documents, or password protected Excel spreadsheets for which you have forgotten a password? Who’d have thunk of this solution to your MS Office woes..

Have a bunch of clumsy Word documents that become huge and it takes the good old MS Word minutes to open it? Here’s a tip.

Open the file in OpenOffice (at version 2.2 at the time of this writing), save it as Word .doc, reopen in Word itself, and voila — the file opens without much pain. This is especially useful with documents written in languages other than English, and if you have pictures in them.

Same with Excel. Have password-protected cells? Open the spreadsheet with in OpenOffice Calc, just uncheck ‘protection’, re-save as an Excel file, and you’re good to go. Really helps when the original spreadsheet designer has left the company and something needs changed.

For those who say OpenOffice isn’t “truly compatible with MS Office”, well, MS Office isn’t fully compatible with MS Office. Tried Office 2007 yet? The interface revamp was supposed to be a major breakthrough, but it’s just pesky. Here’s a quote from OpenOffice 2.2 release notes.

“Overall, version 2.2 should appear better to users thanks to its support for kerning, a technique that improves the appearance of text written in proportional fonts; kerning is now enabled by default. OpenOffice’s PDF (Portable Document Format) export function has also been enhanced with the addition of the optional creation of bookmarks feature, and with support for user-definable export of form fields. A quick look at the release notes also reveals that many minor bugs have been repaired in this new version. Most of these appear to relate to the Calc spreadsheet and Base database programs.”

While OO isn’t exactly the most efficient (memory hog alert) it is a fantastic option for start-ups and people who’re unwilling to fork for an overpriced office suite when office tools are going online (think Google Docs, thinkfree, and such).

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