How does the current version of OpenOffice.org (OOo) compare with Microsoft Office in its ability to produce slide presentations?

Using a new product requires some re-learning. That’s unavoidable. But you rarely have to learn an entirely new set of skills - it’s just that the new stuff sticks out at us. This article is to emphasize the similarities between the OpenOffice.org Impress and Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation tools. These are the things you can instantly do with no relearning.

Recently, a report (PDF) on a number of students opinions on OpenOffice.org Writer vs. Microsoft Office 2007 Word and OpenOffice .org Impress vs. Microsoft Office 2007 Powerpoint, whose conclusion is down-right depressing to those of us, who would prefer to see open source software introduced into education.

Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 includes 2007 versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote. This is a howto for the Trial version of Office 2007 the howto should also work for the full version as well. If you would like to test or demo Office 2007 on Linux its now possiable without having to purchase Office first.

Go-oo [Windows / Linux / Mac] is an office suite which compared with up-stream OO.o, it has better Microsoft binary file support (with eg. fields support), and it will import WordPerfect graphics beautifully. If you are reliant on Excel VBA macros - then Go-oo offers the best macro fidelity too.

This isn't a howto guide, this is only to show that its currently possible to Install and run Office 2007 in Wine on Linux. This video only shows the actual install of Office 2007 and Word 2007 running, the video posted on December 17th 2007 shows Word 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007 and a couple other Office 2007 apps running.

Under the name Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office, Sun has released its import/export filter for the OpenDocument format (ODF), which the ISO has recognized as a standard, for versions 2000, XP, and 2003 of Microsoft's Office suite; the plug-in can be downloaded via our software repository.

In InfoWorld's tests using complex Word and Excel documents, OpenOffice.org 3.1 failed to deliver on its promise of better Microsoft Office interoperability, severely mangling our Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel test data files. By stark contrast, SoftMaker Office showed excellent compatibility.

As far as I'm concerned, the only thing that forces me to use Windows or Mac from time to time is lack of Microsoft Office World, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 in Linux. In the web you can find info how to install it using wine in Ubuntu, but I could not find much about Fedora, especially Fedora 12. Here I present my experience of installing Office 2007 in Fedora 12.