The PC world is dominated by Microsoft, and they're not exactly known for making interoperability easy. Despite this, it's possible to interoperate fairly seamlessly in most cases. This chapter addresses the most common issues.

OpenOffice.org defaults to the Open Document Format (*.odt, *.ods, *.odp, etc.) which is an open standard. This format is partially supported by Microsoft Office >= 2007 Service Pack 2. Users of older versions of Microsoft Office can gain ODF support by installing this plugin.
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/

Or you can suggest to your MS Windows and Mac OSX using contacts to install OpenOffice.org themselves, as it's freely available for those platforms too.

OpenOffice.org additionally has both read and write support for the "old" proprietary Microsoft Office formats (*.doc, *.xls,*.ppt, etc.) out of the box. However, there's only read support for the "new" Microsoft Office 2007 default formats (*.docx, *.xlsx,*.pptx, etc.). You can gain write support for these formats by installing the odf-converter plugin for OpenOffice.org available at: http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=NADNBLbBgPY~

The free Liberation Fonts provide metrically identical fonts for the most commonly used Microsoft fonts, and are installed by default. Yet, you may want to install Microsoft fonts to have better document compatibility. This should happen automatically on the first run of the package manager, or manually install the package fetchmsttfonts.

For sharing resources on a local network with MS Windows machines the Samba service is used.

No configuration is needed for this. Simply:

If you don't know the IP-address of the share, you can browse the local network by simply entering 'smb:/' in the Dolphin location bar - unfortunately this will only work if the firewall is disabled.

To share your files with MS Windows users on the local network you must configure Samba Server:

In the tab Start-Up you can select whether to autostart the Samba service during boot and whether to open the firewall ports required for the server. Under the tab Identity you can configure your workgroup and share name.

For simply sharing a folder with everyone, go to the Shares tab, and:

1) Click Add => Select the folder you wish to share and set a name for it and optionally a description and press OK.

2) Now select the newly created share and click on Edit... => Add => Select and enable the options browsable and guest ok respectively. Then click OK.

3) To additionally grant write permissions so others can upload to your share if desired, open Dolphin => Right click the shared folder => Properties => Permissions => Set Others to Can View & Modify Content.

High quality, native GNU/Linux applications exist for almost any purpose, but it's possible that you're dependant on a MS Windows-only application for some job. These are your options in such a case.


Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is an application that enables you to run many MS Windows applications, you can install wine with YaST or zypper. Wine is a command line application, the syntax is:
The Wine project keeps a database for sharing experiences of running applications, see:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appbrowse.php

CrossOver is not gratis. It's specialised in running a select few of the major MS Windows applications - mostly office related.
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxlinux/

As mentioned in the Installation chapter, it's relatively simple to run GNU/Linux and MS Windows on the same computer. If your only need a few applications that you rarely use, maybe it's worth it to reboot into MS Windows now and then, when you need to use these particular apps.

It's possible to run MS Windows on top of GNU/Linux inside a virtual machine, using software such as VirtualBox, KVM, Xen or VMware. This is somewhat advanced, and requires some computer power, as you'll be running two operating systems at once.