Microsoft Office:
- Costs stupid amounts of money
- Isn’t very good
- Is only available on windows
- …but “usually” works
OpenOffice:
- Is completely free
- Is an almost exact clone of Microsoft Office circa Office 2000/XP
- Is open-source (so that sometimes you can easily fix it yourself, quite surprisingly!)
- …but apart from the Microsoft Word part, “often doesn’t work”
I’ve been using OpenOffice’s Word clone as a complete replacement for Word for the past 3 years, and it’s been perfect. Previously, I used to use Word *and* OpenOffice, because the latter had some big bugs left in it.
Sadly, OpenOffice’s Excel clone is … often shockingly buggy. I won’t go into the details. But this post is about one missing/broken feature in particular: OpenOffice by default saves / exports XML which (for most people, and all simple uses) is unusable/unreadable – and is very hard to convert with XSLT. Read on for a script that will fix this for you…