Problem viewing Excel charts in odt document

users
#1

Hi.

A colleague received a student's assignment in odt format and
was unable to see any of the charts in it when he opened it
in MS Word.

I tried opening it in LibreOffice 4.4.2.2 on a MacPro (MacOSX
10.10.3) and was able to see one of the graphics, but not all
(there are spaces where the charts should be).

I believe the charts were created in Excel (that was what the
classes used), and I guess they were then copied and pasted into
the odt document.

Any ideas what the problem might be and how it could be avoided
in future? Incompatability between OpenOffice and LibreOffice
(no idea what software was actually used by the student)?

Thanks,
Ron.

#2

Hi Ron,

Without knowing the complete round-trip experience it is a bit difficult
to tell what went wrong. Could be a whole set of little
incompatibilities from different Excel versions to xls/xlsx file format
issues to OLE support between OSes, or even bugs between different
LibreOffice versions - take your pick.

The basic advice is to always stick to one file format, and preferably
the one which the recipient expects to receive. My own experience of
exchanges with clients of spreadsheets containing scientific data and
graphs is to stick to XLS format - the newer xlsx formats are still
prone to lots of import/export errors in LibrOffice. I would also
recomment not embedding Calc/Excel files in other Writer documents, as
more often than not, when crossing OS boundaries, the embedded data is
not always retrievable / editable.

Alex

#3

Hi :slight_smile:
It is increasingly rare to find any problems with opening Odt in any
programs, other than MS Office. MS seem to try to make it difficult to
share documents with other programs but all the other programs have a
vested interest in being as compatible as possible with everyone.

The newer MS formats; XlsX and DocX are notoriously difficult and highly
changeable between different versions of their own programs.

It is generally better to use their old formats; Xls or Doc (without the X
on the end) for MS Office 2003, Xp and earlier. Those are the formats that
do seem to work well on any system at the moment. The ODF formats (ods,
odt, odp and so on) are rapidly becoming much more widely used now that
LibreOffice/OpenOffice and others are becoming much more widely used.

So it might be a good time to start thinking about insisting that students
use ODF and that staff start trying to move that way too, in order to be
ready for the future.

The MS formats are proprietary and secretive so they are unlikely to be
readable in the future (beyond the fairly short-term) whereas the ODF
formats are fully published and implemented as per the published
specifications.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#4

Export as PDF.

Unless you need to edit the document, PDF will let you highlight text and by right clicking, do "highlight text", "strike through text", "Add Note to Relpace Text" and "Add Note to Text".
Goto <File><Save as> and send new document back

These editing tools are available from Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, the most current version available.

Yes, it is not a great answer, but it's an answer.

#5

Hi :slight_smile:
It is a great answer! It's quite normal now for people to rely on Pdfs for
file-sharing.

Just my own opinion here but ...
MS have created a completely tangled mess of uncertainty. Apparently
purely to "lock in" people to their products. Then they ensured that
everyone has to buy their newer and newer versions in line with everyone
around them.
File - Export to Pdf
has been the only viable solution for most people for years now.

At last ODF presents an increasingly viable solution but it is still not
used quite widely enough and MS are not keen to encourage usage of
something that might threaten their market dominance! However ODF is
gaining ground.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#6

Is it possible that the creator of the document used <links> rather than
actually embedding the graphics themselves?

Many times when graphics don't "arrive" with a document, I find that's a
common cause.