ODT MSO to LO

users
#1

Hi,

we hear about people experiencing problems when opening documents in LO after they were created by MS Office in the .DOC/.DOCX formats.

How about documents created in MS Office in the .ODF format? Does anyone have experience opening these documents in LO? Similarly LO documents created as ODF and subsequently opened in MS Office. Any experiences?

Not surprisingly I am thinking this way after the UK government proposals. It would be interesting to know what challenges European governments have faced since adopting ODF.

Cheers

#2

I've had several occasions when MSO says there's corrupted info in the
document and it can't open it.
Unfortunately I can't remember what versions of LO and MSO did this -
probably MSO 2010 and LU 4.1.x...

#3

"..when opening a valid ODF 1.2 file in MS Office 2010, itirritates the
user by declaring the document of being corrupt (FUD
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt>?).
The reason is that a new version attribute had been added to the ODF spec."

Incidentally, I just wrote about it on the libreofffie marketing list
just a minute ago:
http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/msg16573.html

Cheers,
Svante

#4

Hi :slight_smile:
Prior to MS Office 2013 MS used the excuse that ODF 1.2 had not been
officially released so they tried to implement the 1.1 but of course
they had a vested interest in making sure it didn't work properly so
that they could blame the format. ODF 1.2 had been being used for
years in many office suites and programs with no troubles at all but
since it was still in beta-pre-release MS were able to get away with
justifying their pathetic excuse out in the world.

Since ODF 1.2 did get fully released shortly after MS Office 2010 and
since many people have now seen ODF working fine in every other office
suite and program it's beginning to look a bit weird that it only
doesn't work in MS Office. So MSO 2013 and 365 do use the 1.2 version
but just not very well. It is still in MS's best profit-making
interests to make sure ODF doesn't work properly and gets a bad
reputation.

According to the comments in the UK Gov's consultation some people
have had trouble when saving files in ODF in MS Office. It wasn't
clear if that was FUD, user-error, or specific machine issues. This
is why i think it would be great if people from this mailing list
could branch out into answering questions in comments in various
articles about LibreOffice or OpenOffice or give them links back to
here or act as liaison.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#5

Hi :slight_smile:
Actually the Doc format works just fine in LibreOffice and almost all
other office suites and programs. It's only the DocX that really has
problems.

Many people don't even have any idea of what format they are using.
Windows defaults hide the file-extensions so it's difficult to find
out. Doc was around for so many years that people assume they are
still using that when they run into problems but we invariably find
that they were really on DocX and that when they do "Save As" into the
older format the problems evaporate.

From the comments it looks like there might be some problem with

trying to open some ppt (Powerpoint presentations) in some versions of
LibreOffice. I think we even had a couple of threads about that on
this mailing list. However again it's not completely certain that
they really knew what they were talking about and there is a good
chance they were really using PptX.

Any editable document is likely to appear slightly differently on each
different machine it opens on due to settings, configurations, types
of printers attached, A4 vs US Letter page sizes and so on. That is
why PDF exists as it is meant to look identical on all machines.
Sadly it's not always true now but that is the basic idea of PDF.
These slight variations are NOT really the main problem. If people
really care about the precise layout then they should really be using
a proper DTP and apparently LibreOffice (and OpenOffice) make it
really easy to move documents into LaTeX and such but people are less
likely to have heard of those and more likely to think of the
expensive alternatives (that are probably not as good) where you have
to keep buying a new program every couple of years to keep up.

However the interoperability issue is much bigger than that it's just
that people are more likely to have noticed the fairly trivial issues
so it's easier to explain it using those as examples.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#6

Hi :slight_smile:

From what i have read about other large scale migrations to OpenOffice

or LibreOffice it's a good idea to get in contact with some of our BoD
(Board of Directors) and through them maybe some on TDF's Advisory
Board
http://www.documentfoundation.org/contact/
and / or people from the Free Software Foundation
https://fsf.org/

These can arrange to assign, for the long term, experts who have quite
a bit of experience guiding organisations through the migration
process. There are other organisations such as Redhat, Canonical and
so on along with other apparently distro-specific organisations who
would be happy to help even if you do end up going with some other
distro. There are also many 3rd party organisations and even
individuals who have expertise in helping with these sorts of things.
OpenSuSE budded a new one called Collabora which includes many of the
devs they had working on LibreOffice, including the famous Micheal
Meeks (who i see as a sort-of lead dev as he is naturally charismatic
and gives good interviews that kinda inspire people)
http://www.collabora.com/

The extremely few cases that don't manage to break away from MS have
employed purely MS experts and ignored the advice of their FSF people
(or other OpenSource experts). Even so they have typically enjoyed
savings during the initial phases of the migration. Sadly, by then
reverting to MS they have then had to buy into all the stuff they
would have had to buy along the way but had to buy it all at once.
Also since MS only has a slash&burn approach rather than any gradual
migration routes they have had additional expenses such as retraining.
They could have used FSF support to gradually return to MS but chose
not to accept that route.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: