Open SUNY

Open Office 3.0 has those spiffy comment bubbles that you may be accustomed to in MS Word. However, they appear outside of the margins in your screen (rather than inside the margins in MS Word).

This is all fine and good if you’re collaborating completely online, but if you wanted to print the paper with the comments in the margins, you can’t do this directly in Open Office. Again, the reason for this is that OpenOffice displays the comments outside the printable margins.

Good news: the comments in Open Office translate well into MS Word. A file saved as an MS Word (.doc) in Open Office will move the comments inside the margins if opened in MS Word (or an MS Word viewer).

This is easy if you’re a Windows user, using Open Office in Windows. Simply download the MS Word viewer, and you’re all set.

For Ubuntu/Linux users - You’ll have to run MS Word Viewer in Wine. Here’s a write up that I wrote last year that explains how.