Hi Sam
This was copied from OpenOffice website, you may get more information on that
website.
Microsoft Office interoperability
In response to Microsoft's recent movement towards using the Office Open XML
format in Microsoft Office 2007, Novell released an Office Open XML converter
for OOo under a liberal BSD license (along with GNU GPL and LGPL licensed
libraries), that will be submitted for inclusion into the OpenOffice.org
project. This allows OOo to read and write Microsoft OpenXML-formatted word
processing documents (.docx) in OpenOffice.org. Currently it works only with the
latest Novell edition of OpenOffice.org.
Sun Microsystems has developed an ODF plugin for Microsoft Office which enables
users of Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint to read and write ODF
documents. The plugin currently works with Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft
Office XP and Microsoft Office 2000. Support for Microsoft Office 2007 is only
available in combination with Microsoft Office 2007 SP1.
Several software companies (including Microsoft and Novell) are working on an
add-in for Microsoft Office that allows reading and writing ODF files. It
presently only works for Microsoft Word 2007 / XP / 2003.
Microsoft provides a compatibility pack to read and write Office Open XML files
with Office 2000, XP and 2003. The compatibility pack can also be used as a
stand-alone converter with Microsoft Office 97. This might be helpful in
converting older Microsoft Office files via Office Open XML to ODF if a direct
conversion doesn't work as expected. However, the Office compatibility pack does
not install for Office 2000 or Office XP on Windows 9x.
Note that some office applications built with Microsoft components may refuse to
import OpenOffice data. Simply Accounting, for example, can import Excel xls
files, but refuses to accept OpenOffice xls files for the reason that the OO xls
files are not "genuine Microsoft" xls files.
HTH
John
