As I am working (mostly) on Linux I do not use Microsoft Office documents, even if sometimes I have to manage to handle them. OpenOffice is a free altenative to MS Office and it is also OS independent. It also can handle all the MS Office document types, but sometimes not with so much success.
For instance, what should looks like this:
the equation in MS Office
in fact is imported like this:
the same equation imported in OpenOffice
or, what should looks like this:
the identity determinant in MS Office
ends up in OpenOffice like this:
the same determinant but in OpenOffice
or, what should looks like this:
how it looks in MS Office
ends up in OpenOffice like this:
the same relation as above but imported in OpenOffice
The cause for this could be the fact that the OpenOffice's equation editor does not recognize some symbols imported from the MS Office's equation editor.
What can we do about this?
Well, if you can access the MS Office document by a direct link (i.e. http://the-place-where-my-doc-is/mydoc.doc) then you could use Google Docs Viewer application to view your MS Office document then you could just print it as a PDF document.
If the document is not available online and if you have a Google account then you could use the Google Drive application to upload your MS Office document on you Google drive, then you can view it within Google Doc viewer (just click on your document uploaded to your Google drive) to print it out as a PDF document.
Google knows how to properly open a MS Office document so all those problems mentioned above will be no problems anymore. In fact all the images shown above as "how they look in MS Office" were taken from the resulted PDF document (I don't have MS Office, remember?).
The method I described does not imply you to have either MS Office or OpenOffice, all you need is an Internet connection and a browser. If you don't need the document as a local PDF copy then you could just use the Google Docs viewer.
Now, if you think that this article was interesting don't forget to rate it. It shows me that you care and thus I will continue write about these things.
Eugen Mihailescu
Latest posts by Eugen Mihailescu (see all)
- Dual monitor setup in Xfce - January 9, 2019
- Gentoo AMD Ryzen stabilizator - April 29, 2018
- Symfony Compile Error Failed opening required Proxies - January 22, 2018