Windows 7: can I uninstall openoffice writer - still use word?

If I wanted to uninstall openoffice writer but had reams of text documents on open office can I still open them like - right click / open with - microsoft office word ?

hi !

what is "reams of text documents" ?

hundreds of induvidual text documents i use for work or personal files, say several pages long each one. I can open them now with office word but thats assuming I still have the open office writer still on my computer. I want to know if I can do that when its no longer there.

it was "reams" that made me wonder, as i had never seen it before.

yes, of course you can open *.txt- & *.doc-files with word, even if they have been created with OpenOffice,
i know since i have both MS Office 2007 (now 2010 beta) & OpenOffice.

you can create a document in MS Office and later open it with Openoffice and also the other way around.
in fact i have only once had a problem with an excel-document that OpenOffice couldn´t handle properly.

IMO MS Word 2007 has some problems opening .odt files which are the default save type of OpenOffice Writer. Have you saved them in .odt?

If you have Office SP2 .odt is supported.

I meant if I wanted to unistall open office because microsoft office word is so close to it and I just dont seem to need open office anymore ( disc space / OS speed ) can I still AT THAT POINT open a document in office word that was created in open office writer ?

Yes:

How to open .ODT files in Microsoft Word 2007/2003 | Windows Reference

Huh? My MS Office 2007 doesn't let me open my.odt files from my school. Let me try the link that you just gave. Tnx!

There may be some compatibility issues ,, check that,,,,

THere ARE compaitibilty issues between MS Office and openOffice.
Creating files in one and trying to open them or manipulate them in the other,,, COULD <- Big Could) cause corruption of the files.

You are best to either make a backup of all the files till you are certain that none of them get corrupted.
If they do, you can always recover a copy of the back up, open it in OOW and copy paste to Word to recreate it.

Or, as you use them, Copy and paste from OOW to Word to be certain you don't run into file corruption.

Why am I saying this? Cause we tested Open Office with MS Office and many problems were found and decided to not use OO at this time, there is a lot of tweaking that needs to be done to resolve conflicts.

Just a warning that this was not just myself testing, but about 50 and we all had problems of some kind.

Incidentally, I prefer MS Office over OpenOffice.