14 DAY TRIAL // Every function of the two rival solutions, Microsoft Office and Google Office, is extremely important because it can make the difference and influence a user to choose one of the products. Now, OpenOffice is regarded as the most powerful alternative for the software giant's product because it is available for free and provides almost the same functions as the famous tool. As you surely know, OpenOffice has a different format than Microsoft, using the ODT format in comparison with Office that is based on two extensions: DOC and DOCX.
Although Microsoft Office is the best suite currently available, it isn't compatible with the OpenOffice format, being unable to work with this type of documents. However, Google's Docs supports the most known formats, allowing users to work with HTML files, plain text documents (.txt), Microsoft Word (.doc), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw).The Google Spreadsheets is compatible with the following formats: Comma Separated Value (.csv), Microsoft Excel (.xls) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods).
As blogger Ionut Alex reports, the Google Search technology is also compatible with the ODT format, allowing users to find this type of documents using the filetype operator. If you didn't know you can type "example filetype:odt" in the Google Search box to filter the search results and get only OpenOffice documents.
"Google offers you the option to read the HTML (or text) version of the cached file, in case you don't have an application that opens the file. Google added OpenDocument format to the list of supported documents. OpenDocument is supported by important office suites like OpenOffice.org, Star Office, KOffice, but also by Google Docs & Spreadsheets. OpenDocument can be used to store many kinds of files, including documents (.odt), spreadsheets (.ods) and presentations (.odp)," the Blogger sustained.