How to edit MS doc(x) files without breaking it for MS?

users
#1

Hello!

A girlfriend of mine was tired of windows and installed the latest Linux
Mint on her netbook, which comes with libre office.
Although Libre is working generally well, she noticed a problem when
working with Docx and Doc.
If the original file is made in LO, both LO and MS office can change it
without problems.
If the original file is made in MS office, then changed in LO, then MS
office can no longer read it.

After googling, it seems to be a bug in the later versions of LO / Open
office.
We tried to locate a debian based LO of version 3.4 or earlier, but without
success.
All links are either dead, or link to the latest version.
Coincidentally, we fail to install Open Office (in the hope their product
does not have this problem)
even after following multiple tutorials to remove LO first before
installing OO.

Obviously, not being able to interact with documents from MS office is not
an option when the
netbook is to be used at school. If we can't solve this, she will have to
return to Windows just for the
sake of being able to share documents with other (non-technical) students.

How can we solve this?

Many thanks in advance,

ET

#2

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hello!

A girlfriend of mine was tired of windows and installed the latest Linux
Mint on her netbook, which comes with libre office.
Although Libre is working generally well, she noticed a problem when
working with Docx and Doc.
If the original file is made in LO, both LO and MS office can change it
without problems.
If the original file is made in MS office, then changed in LO, then MS
office can no longer read it.

After googling, it seems to be a bug in the later versions of LO / Open
office.

Can you provide exact references? Very hard to help without them.

If it's a bug, it will need to get reproduced before anything else. You
may have to provide the document that has this problem (as it may be a
specific featrue provoking this).

[...]

Cheers,

Fabian Rodriguez
http://libreoffice.magicfab.ca

#3

Hi,

enemy troep schrieb:

Hello!

A girlfriend of mine was tired of windows and installed the latest Linux
Mint on her netbook, which comes with libre office.
Although Libre is working generally well, she noticed a problem when
working with Docx and Doc.
If the original file is made in LO, both LO and MS office can change it
without problems.
If the original file is made in MS office, then changed in LO, then MS
office can no longer read it.

If you have an older MS office, than you should use doc-format. The export of docx has some bugs. If you can use a MS office 2013, than you can use odt-format.

Which MS Office is used? Can you provide such documents which are OK in LibreOffice but do not open in MS Office?

After googling, it seems to be a bug in the later versions of LO / Open
office.
We tried to locate a debian based LO of version 3.4 or earlier, but without
success.

For older versions portable versions are useful, because they need no installation. This might help too, if the PCs at school have only MS Office installed.

All links are either dead, or link to the latest version.
Coincidentally, we fail to install Open Office (in the hope their product
does not have this problem)
even after following multiple tutorials to remove LO first before
installing OO.

You can ask on http://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/

Obviously, not being able to interact with documents from MS office is not
an option when the
netbook is to be used at school. If we can't solve this, she will have to
return to Windows just for the
sake of being able to share documents with other (non-technical) students.

How can we solve this?

Keep it simple. Do not use nested tables and frames. This is especially important in MS Word. People tend to put everything into tables and frames, because they do not know how to indent paragraphs or how to use tabulators in Word.
Do not use the new kind of formula editor of Word, more details if needed.

Please provide documents which convert bad. Those are needed to increase interoperability.

Kind regards
Regina

#4

I would save the edited document in the Word .doc format listed for - 97/2000/XP/2003. Then almost all the Word packages out there will work with it properly. Well if you use Word 95 and earlier, it will not but how many are still using that one? The last user I knew upgraded to 2003 last year.

I have a lady that sends MSO 2010 .docx files to everyone. All of the New York State agency people I know cannot use that version of file, since they do not have it in their budgets to go beyond either MSO 2003 or 2007, depending on the agency. I keep telling her to send the files as PDFs, since she can easily do that, plus the files that are sent are not to be edited by the receivers. PDFs would be much better since it should embed the fonts she uses, and she uses a lot that the others do not.

So, just use the "standard" .doc format and leave the OOXML ones alone.

#5

hi all.  i had the same problem receving via email from an office .docx files.  when I try to import the file in libreoffice it crashes and does not allow to import in any way.  the solution I found is to open such file with gwoffice (google office app, you need a google account connected to use it) and save it in odt format always via gwoffice  (then it is exactly in lo format).  I think that opening such files shouldn't  be very difficult  (I am not a programmer at all).

paolo

#6

I must say I find this odd, as I've not experienced similar problems in
Writer. To test, I booted from my usual Ubuntu 12.04 into Windows 7 and
created two .docx documents in MS Office Word 2010 (Swedish version), one
the first strophe of a Swedish poem, the other a line from Thomas
Paine's *Common
Sense*. I had no problem opening either one in LibreOffice (Swedish Version
3.6.3.2 (Build ID: 58f22d5)) ; to test further I sent the latter as an
attachment to a Gmail message to a friend in India who has an
English-language version of LibreOffice (3.5.4.2 Build ID: 350m1(Build:2)).
He also had no trouble in opening and reading the attachment. Both these
two documents were, of course, extremely simple, no embedded hyperlinks or
tables, etc, but for documents of this nature I am unable to reproduce any
difficulties in opening .docx files in recent versions of LibreOffice. From
what I understand, however, things can become more complicated when links
or tables are embedded in documents or when other LibreOffice functions,
like Calc or Impress are used....

Henri

#7

I have only had one document in docx or xlsx format cause problems with LO 3.4 and later out of many. The problem document was a graphics heavy and apparently the picture locations were not very explicit.

If you can post the document on Nabble or somewhere else and provide a link may be we see what the problem is.

I routinely create MSOX and MSO format documents that are sent to MSOffice users and have not heard any complaints.

A common practice is save an MSO file into ODF and then edit the ODF version. When finished save the edited ODF in the appropriate MSO format. This seems to avoid many problems because ODF is the native format for LO/OO.

#8

I has a lady send me a .docx file of a "poster" that was very complex. It would have been easier for it to have been created with Publisher, CorelDraw, Inkscsape, or other non-wordprocessor, but she used Word and .docx. It did not load up properly with 3.5.4 or was it 3.5.5. I told her that the poster should have been sent as a PDF and then she agreed, and resent it out to everyone as a PDF file. That is when I saw how complex it was. I would not have tried anything like that in any wordprocessorlet alone saved it in .docx.

Now that MSO 2013's .docx format will not be completely compatible with the 2010 or 2007 versions of that format, FOSS users will have as much problems as users of earlier version of MSO. Also, I have read that if you want to get all of the package to work correctly, you have to use MSO2013 with Win8. It was designed to work with Win8 and seems not to work completelywith Win7. I also read somewhere that you should not even try to use it on Vista or XP, since the testers had big problems trying to install the 2013 beta on those earilier OSs.

I really think MSO changes the specifications for the OOXML formats so you are "required" to upgrade to the newest version of MSO to get the format to work properly. Forced upgrading as a way to getmore money from their users is as bad as their new "forced" "software rental" policies/penalties on the users. Oh well, I do digress.

So, the best solution is to try to get users to use the non-"OOXML" formats so any version of MSO 2000-2013 can use the files properly. Then there will be no problems with and FOSS office package users as well.

#9

I have used O-O to edit dozens of documents created with MS-Word, and
returned the output to people who used Word to read them. I also
edited many Latex files, receiving them as plain text (though often
with Chinese comments) and sending them back as .doc files because I
wanted changes shown. These were computer science journal or
conference papers, 5-20K words with plenty of math, tables, graphs,
diagrams ... and often complex multi-column formatting. I always had
whatever was current in Ubuntu, from mid-2010 to late 2012. They had
various versions of Word, mostly Chinese but the docs I dealt with
were in English. Mostly, it worked, but there were exceptions.

O-O or L-O fairly often had trouble with .docx files, anything from
just messing up the format to two that crashed O-O whenever it tried
to open them. Usually just going to a Windows box and saving it as
.doc was enough that then I could edit it on the Linux box with O-O,
but not always. Some of the multi-column formats, even in .doc files,
were messed up on O-O. Many of my comments, created on O-O, sent to a
student using Chinese Windows then back to me for a second editing
pass, were messed up when I got them back, lots of illegible
characters shown as odd symbols.

#10

I agree totally. Any Word Perfect document ever created can be read by the latest Word Perfect Version. The European Commission for Interoperable Systems published a report in 2009 about Microsoft. A link to the report can be found here:
http://www.ecis.eu/2009/03/microsofts-history-of-anticompetitive-behaviour-and-consumer-harm/
For the full report, click on the "click here" text at the end of the paragraph.

Don

#11

The problem is that since «Steelie Neelie» (Neelie Kroes) has gone on to
another portfolio, the European Commission's interest in dealing with
anti-competitive behaviour seems to have declined drastically (MS may,
however, still be faced with heavy fines for, after releasing Win7 SP1,
«inadvertently» omitting to display the browser choice window which
constituted part of its previous settlement with the Comptition Authority ;
that was probably a bridge too far). It would be wonderful, for example, if
the Commision were to mandate that any public documents in the Union would
have to be couched in the latest current odt format so that they could be
read by any standards-compatible editing programme, but I deem that
extremely unlikely. We'd probably be bombed....

Henri

#12

Thanks, I will read it later. Just downloaded the PDF file.

Europe seems to be more willing to "go against" MS and their policies and pushings into other places that they should not go. The Library of Congress, for a few months, forced users to get a MS Word reader for MS-Word-2007 since they were publishing "required documents" in the new OOXML format. The documents we by law required to be freely accessible to all US users without needing to buy anythingto read them. That lasted a few months or so till someone high up in the government decided to act and stop the publishing of these documents - that were normally in the non-OOXML or earlier formats - in the newly created OOXML formats.

I wish the US and our state governments would be willing to end the contracts with MS for their products. MS is a big lobbying group over here so "we" need them to the point that our judges' rulings would be either ignored or overturned for the "good of the nation's security". Almost anything is legal if it is in the "Nation's Security Interests", even things thatare against a person's Constitutionally guaranteed rights.

We need to force MS out of politics since a software company should not dictate government policies. That is one reason that the mandates towards using FOSS packages are ignored so easily.

#13

I feel that there is a chance to approach the EU but we need to have a bit less bugs to be successful.
Can LibO join forces with AOO and Virgil mentioned a few days back?