Assignment H

In my MIST 7700 class, I have had the opportunity to work with OpenOffice. Though I had heard of it many times before and had been sent odt files, I held off on downloading it until this class. One feature I really appreciate is "find & replace". This has been useful in my conversion of two Managing Data Exchange chapters from XML format to Global Text Project Format. Without "find & replace, this process can be rather gruesome. Thankfully, this function enables you to select all text in the document that has the same style, and change that entire group of text to a different style. With the extremely long document I had to change, being able to do this in a couple of clicks made all of the difference. Also, completing this task was completed with less errors in changing styles.

In general, the transition to OpenOffice from Microsoft Office has not been as smooth as expected. Though I have no problem at all opening preexisting .doc files in OpenOffice and also have the option to save it as a .doc or odt. file, I have not had the same luck in opening my Access database files. I'm still trying to research and see if I may be missing something (i.e. some other method of perhaps converting the database file before trying to open it), but nothing has worked initially. I still need to try opening spreadsheets, but I assume this will not be an issue.