working on Mac and sharing documents with PC users

[duende]

I have an MacBook Air which I've had for a few months but I've only started using it more recently and now I'm about to go back to work after mat leave I've started using it for work things. I'm preparing some text documents and some spreadsheets which i will be sharing with colleagues using PCs. What is the least frustrating way of doing this? I've downloaded open office, what's people's experience of using it on different OS's? Or should I just bite the bullet and pay for Office for Mac?

If people only need to view, then export as PDF.

If people need to edit, see what file formats can be exported. Choose something as universal as possible, Word95 .doc format perhaps for text, .xls for spreadsheet (also do a version as csv, as a backup).

Cindy, thank you. People need to be able to edit.
So if i save something in open office as .doc and send to someone who will edit it in MS Office and save as .doc again, the formatting won't get lost?

You will need to try it. Some formatting may get lost, in particular if someone with Word does an amendment and includes a feature only in a newer version of Word.

If it is simple text, bold, headings, that sort of thing it should be fine. Be prepared to check layout of things like graphics, tables, when you get the document back.

thank you!

Incidentally, Office for Mac and PC are not as compatible as you might think.

You can configure OpenOffice/LibreOffice to save as doc or docx by default. These days, I'd probably use docx.