Everyday should be freedom day

Yesterday I spoke at the Software Freedom Day at Copenhagen Business School. I spoke about my view of the expression Software Freedom. I also gave a brief demonstration of the new features in OpenOffice.org 3.0. The concentration was about the ability to open pdf files for editing in Draw and to save (or export) pdf files as hybrid.

But also the new commenting feature (create a note) found some intereset among people. I explainen that comments could be shared with friends and kollegeas that are using MS Office too. A guy from the audience asked me if the function that registers changes in OpenOffice.org was compatibel with the simular function in MS Office. I had to admit that I couldn't answer that question at the scene.

When I got home from the arrangement I tried to create a document in OpenOffice.org and register som changes. The I saved the document as .doc. I opened the document with MS Office 2003 and I could clearly see and work with the changes. I made some further changes in MS Office 2003 and saved the document again. I then openned the document in OpenOffice.org again and the changes made with MS Office 2003 was tracked as changes and I could approve or dismess the changes as they where made with OpenOffice.org.

Conclusion
The funcion Track changes in OpenOffice.org is fully competibal with Micrsoft Office 2003. Because OpenOffice.org does not write MS Office 2007 format, the track-trace function is obviously not compatible with that format. But I would expect OpenOffice.org 3.0 to show track-trace information when reading files in .docx format but this is not something I have been testing.