Word 2003 templates

Thanks for your feedback and comments, which are much appreciated.

I've tinkered around with this to establish what works and what doesn't. My findings are not universally true but appear generally to apply and offer a practical solution to those who work is an MS-orientated office (no pun intended) but prefer to use PortableApps for a truly liberating and portable working experience.

Essentially, MS Word can't really read the Open Office file format and, perhaps more dangerously, Open Office can't properly manage the MS Word file format, though it gives the impression that it can - until you attempt to open a previously saved document.

You can create an Open Office Writer Portable document by starting with an MS Word template (.dot) then add your content and finally save as and Open Document Text file (.odt). The resultant file loads fine in Writer but not in Word. No Solution here.

Doing the same but saving as a Word xml file loses the .doc stuff (headers, images, etc.) and has some odd effects on the text (altering fonts and font sizes are examples - this seems particularly true with a hyperlink in the body of the document). No Solution here either.

Saving as a Microsoft XP, 2000, 97 format (.doc) seems to result in a file that may be correctly read and modified on both platforms. This seems to be the solution.

Clearly the XP/2000/97 file format is now a grandparent since 2003 uses xml and 2007 uses docx but at least it seems to work in both applications and changes in one are correctly read in t'other.

The importance of this cannot be overemphasized. From a personal point of view one may use whatever solution one prefers but when one is dealing with documents created by others or if one is obliged to use one package in one place but has different software in another (or PortableApps) then one may simply save any document in the XP/2000/97 format and, as the saying goes, Robert is, in short, your father's brother:-).