Converting to open office

[MMMdude]

I track my expenses via Excel using a pivot table.  I do this at work.  I have a new laptop that had trial version of Excel and I am certainly not going to purchase it.  I downloaded Open Office at home.  My question - how can I get the data out of Excel into OpenOffice when Excel is essentially on read only mode now that the trial version is done?  I tried simply saving it as .odt extension and it didn't work.  I suppose I can download OpenOffice at work and then move over the stuff in Excel to it - we're not supposed to download stuff at work though.

[darkk2b2]

I am pretty sure if you have the file you can just right click on it and say "open with open office". Or run open office, then go to file->open->then find your document, open it->then save it in open office format. (But I don't use excel so I am just guessing here)

[fidgiegirl]

Open Office can use Excel files AS Excel files.  You can save and open Excel file format in Open Office.  It's has simple as putting it on a flash drive and then opening it with open office at home.  You can even continue to maintain it as an Excel file if you like, or not.

[grantmeaname]

You should use LibreOffice instead, because the open source community sees Oracle on a similar level as Hitler and the devil and so OpenOffice isn't contributed to anymore.

If you're moving from one suite to another, it's much better to use LO/OO to do your conversions than Microsoft Office: the LO/OO import filters for Office documents are sometimes faulty, but the Office export rules for .ods and other Open Document Format files are consistently terrible. You could also just never convert it, and continue working with the .xls or .xlsx file in LO/OO.

[Spork]

I think I understand what you're asking...  when you open an attachment (i.e. launched off of an email) it opens "read only".  There is a button right there on the top line to convert it to read/write.  (I'm LibreOffice... but I am pretty sure it's exactly the same.)  In Libre it is a little icon of a piece of paper with a pencil on it.  Click and it says "do you want to edit a copy of the document?"

//the one Linux guy in an entire office full of MS Win people....

[Nords]

I think I understand what you're asking...  when you open an attachment (i.e. launched off of an email) it opens "read only".  There is a button right there on the top line to convert it to read/write.  (I'm LibreOffice... but I am pretty sure it's exactly the same.)  In Libre it is a little icon of a piece of paper with a pencil on it.  Click and it says "do you want to edit a copy of the document?"

Another option is "Save as" on your own directory/hard drive, and then it's yours to open & edit as you please.