I have Open Office just to be able to save some files in pdf format. I like using MS Word and Excel for everything else. Recently however, my excel files began opening in Open Office vs MS and I want to stop that from happening. I tried to right click and open in MS and got garbage.

This is an easy queston to answer. You need to change the attributes in Windows for you *.xls files back to Excel. Its currently set to Open Ofice Calc. However, you could just use Open Office and make the default format for Calc file to *.xls. The differenc, however, may be with cells with blank values in the formulas. I use Open Office as much as possible as I stay on the Ubuntu side of my computer. Saving Calc files to *.xls let’s us stay with Open Office but be able to send work to others that they can open successfully.