My organization is seeking to migrate from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. We have successfully converted many things, including a very cumbersome Mail Merge process. Since the ultimate goal is to get Word removed from most users’ systems, there should come a time when Word is not installed on the majority of systems. I say “most users’ systems” because we are fully anticipating pushback from certain groups who will insist on remaining with Word. That has been built-in to the overall project goals. The objective is to get as many people away from Microsoft Office as we can and only buy as many licenses as are required.
That said, I’ve become stumped as to what to do with what I’m working on now. What I’m trying to get done is embedding a document that has change tracking turned on. The Microsoft Word code has been in place for quite some time and works fine. The change that I made to make the existing code work with OpenOffice works just fine if the embed_object method is handed an ODT file. What I’m trying to get done, however, is to still give the embed_object method a .DOC file. When I do that, Notes fires up Word on its’ own. If Word isn’t there, it won’t be able to do that…
Bear in mind the reason for trying to do it this way is that we do not know who might give us pushback and want to stay with Word, so the thought process is to still save as a .DOC file and have the system handle any conversions needed.
So, in summary, the problem I’m running into is that if OpenOffice Writer saves as a .DOC (Word 97/2000/XP), Notes fires up Word and Word wants to know what type of file it is. Is this something that the EmbedObject method does by default? If Word isn’t even installed, then what?
Thanks!