[Discuss] LibreOffice and .docx files

[Nancy Allison]

Darn, I was afraid of that. Thanks.

On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 8:43 PM, Dan Ritter <dsr at randomstring.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 04, 2017 at 08:25:45PM -0500, Nancy Allison wrote:
> > Hello, all.
> >
> > I am using Ubuntu 16.04 and LibreOffice 5.1.6.2.
> >
> > I've been sent a .docx file with a fairly complex layout, and the layout
> is
> > trashed immediately upon opening in LibreOffice. I know from past
> > experience that docx files that I've modified in LibreOffice are, if
> > possible, even nastier when reopened in Word.
> >
> > Is there a Word-compatible open source program that truly does not trash
> > the formatting? Or is it simply not possible to pass documents back and
> > forth between Word and an open source program like LibreOffice or
> > OpenOffice? I used Open Office years ago, haven't used it recently, it
> used
> > to trash the files, too.
> >
> > All suggestions gratefully received.
>
> It's an arms race in which Microsoft gets to set the default, and not tell
> anyone what they're doing. Then they get to change it every so often -
> with the advent of Office 360, all the time.
>
> You would think that this poses problems of backwards compatibility with
> older copies of Word, and you would be correct. Sometimes Word can't
> open Word-generated files. There have been significant problems
> with Word for Windows vs Word for MacOS.
>
> Some years its better than others. But no, there's nothing better than
> LibreOffice at handling complex layouts that Word generated,
> except exactly the version of Word that produced it.
>
>
> -dsr-
>