Re: [libreoffice-users] SkyDrve: A Tool for Forensics around MS Office <-> LibreOffice conversion issues

If you need Windows then try Wine first.  The Wine forums describe how to get MS 
Office working in Wine although i am not certain that they include the latest 
(2010) release.  If you are on linux then there is also "Play on linux" that 
gives Wine a prettier front-end and some tweaks.  I would try Wine first 
though.  


Then there are options such as Virtual Machines such as Oracle's VirtualBox.  
Oracle seem to have worked reasonably hard to break OpenOffice (or was that just 
incompetence) but they do seem to care about VirtualBox and seem to have made 
some effort there.  Of course there are proprietary components that you might 
need to pay for, such as getting usb devices working.  There are other VM's 
although i don't know of any other OpenSource ones.  Note that if you install 
Windows into a VM it is much easier to deal with malware and other issues.  Also 
you can  re-use the same product-key, license, that has been used on the machine 
before since it is "just a reinstall to the same machine", well, to the same 
hardware.  I have done this a couple of times with Xp quite a long time ago but 
had to phone MS 'Support' to make sure it got activated correctly.  I like VMs 
for short-term usage but i've never had enough ram to make it a viable long-term 
solution, nor the skills and knowledge.  


There is also Xen and such to run a couple of OSes alongside each other at the 
same time.  I have no idea how/if this works.

Dual-boot is my preferred method because then i don't have to touch Windows at 
all apart from the initial back-up (via linux) and the partition resizing (also 
in linux, using gparted usually = err unless the Windows is Vista).  With some 
very old releases of gparted i had a few problems and needed the back-ups but in 
the last couple of years it's been really good.  


Windows is painful to install.  It can be ok for gamers that only want 1 or 2 
games to work but most people seem to need tons of proprietary programs and the 
updates need multiple reboots and further updates and reboots.  Then you'll 
probably need to tweak tons of default settings.  With linux you tend to only 
need to update the once and might not even need to reboot.  The linux updates 
include updates for all the programs many decent ones are included in the 
initial install too.  It can be a bit tricky to sort the tweaks and stuff for 
your and your machine's individual needs but it's a breeze compared to a Windows 
install.  


My normal work-around nowadays for seeing how things look in Windows is to email 
it to my boss and ask him what he thinks.  Or i sneakily save it on the network 
and access it from another machine using a login i shouldn't know.  


There are always options but using Windows feels so unpleasant & slow now that i 
avoid it if at all possible.  


Regards from
Tom :)





________________________________
From: Wayne Borean <wborean@gmail.com>
To: users@libreoffice.org
Sent: Sat, 21 May, 2011 2:53:33
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] SkyDrve: A Tool for Forensics around MS Office 
<-> LibreOffice conversion issues

Installing one of the viewers assumes that you have Windows installed :(

Wayne


On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 4:37 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <dennis.hamilton@acm.org
> wrote:

> I notice that many LibreOffice experts and users do not have MS Office
> installed but need to deal with Microsoft Office files (imported or
> exported), especially when attempting to resolve an interchange or
> conversion problem.
>
> There is a relatively easy way to examine MS Office documents.  One is to
> install one of the supported viewers (which requires a platform on which the
> viewers run).  Better yet, put the Microsoft Office document up on a free
> Windows Live SkyDrive account.  Not all features are available under the
> in-browser editing option, but the in-browser viewing of Microsoft Office
> documents is superb.
>
> I just verified that with a couple of documents I had been conducting
> DOC/OOXML <-> LOffice/ODF forensic work on.  You can use SkyDrive in the
> browser to make screen shots or you can even arrange to share a file
> selectively with other users.  Yes, you need to take a deep breath and get a
> Windows Live ID.  And I don’t know how many different browsers SkyDrive
> works smoothly with.
>
>  - Dennis E. Hamilton
>   Individual OASIS ODF and OIC TC Member
>
> PS: One missing feature of SkyDrive is a way to download an uploaded DOC in
> another format (namely, DOCX).  Being able to see the OOXML equivalent is
> often quite helpful in understanding how a Word feature is handled without
> having to dissect the binary format.
>
> PPS: I have not experimented with Google Docs for this.  There the problem
> is that one has to deal with whatever the feature loss is when going to the
> internal Google Docs format, especially if trying to get from one external
> format to another.  It might work well enough, I just haven't needed to find
> out.
>
>
>
>
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