Table presented totally wrong.

users
#1

Hi,

I got a template.docx of my education institution, and tried to open
it using LibreOffice.
I found out too late - after I sent it, I got comments of receiver - that writer
did show the table totally wrong.

Until now I was convinced LibreOffice is a good alternative for MS
Office, but I doubt it very much now. I had to use the (Microsoft
Windows) computers on the school with a recent MS Office to get it
right.

I've been talking with members of parlement about the use of open
source by the government, and was convinced it's a right thing. Now
I'm not so sure anymore.

I think it's not a very exotic table. It's a table in a table.
One note: I've tried Google Docs also, and that did not do it right either.

Attached you find the Template, and where there should be information
under the column "Lesplan", but it's not shown at all.
Also attached you find the complete new document based on the
template. I added text, but the first column I left unchanged. You see
ther are different rows there, which are ignored in the original
document (Template)

I hope you can solve this,

Stef Bon
Voorburg
the Netherlans

#2

Stef Bon wrote:

Hi,

I got a template.docx of my education institution, and tried to open
it using LibreOffice.
I found out too late - after I sent it, I got comments of receiver - that writer
did show the table totally wrong.

The .docx format changes slightly with each version of MS Office. Even newer versions of MS Office sometimes display documents created in an older version differently. For compatibility between MS Office and LibreOffice, the older .doc format is more reliable.

Also when working in LibreOffice, you should save your work it in Open Document Format (ODF), even if it was originally imported from an MS Office format. That way you avoid corruption which may occur by repeatedly exporting and importing the document. Only export a copy back to MS Office format if that's needed for sending it to someone else - keep your working copy in ODF.

Until now I was convinced LibreOffice is a good alternative for MS
Office, but I doubt it very much now. I had to use the (Microsoft
Windows) computers on the school with a recent MS Office to get it
right.

So LibreOffice is useless because it can't fully understand a format defined by a private company? Despite the name, "Office Open XML" (the .docx etc. formats) as used by MS Office does contain some proprietary elements so is not completely open for others to reliably implement.

I've been talking with members of parlement about the use of open
source by the government, and was convinced it's a right thing. Now
I'm not so sure anymore.

Several governments have recently moved over to specifying that ODF should be used for documents. That's the main format used by LibreOffice. If transitioning to LibreOffice, it would be a good idea to also transition to using ODF.

I think it's not a very exotic table. It's a table in a table.
One note: I've tried Google Docs also, and that did not do it right either.

Attached you find the Template, and where there should be information
under the column "Lesplan", but it's not shown at all.
Also attached you find the complete new document based on the
template. I added text, but the first column I left unchanged. You see
ther are different rows there, which are ignored in the original
document (Template)

This mailing list strips attachments from emails, so they don't get through. You can either upload them to another hosting service and include links, or I believe the Nabble interface to the mailing list at http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/ can do this for you.

I hope you can solve this,

If you believe there is a bug in LibreOffice here (which is certainly possible), you can report it at https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/bug/ where it will be tracked (rather than forgotten in someone's email inbox) and you can also attach the document there.

Be aware that this mailing list and the bug tracker are publicly accessible, so don't include anything confidential or otherwise sensitive.

Sorry I can't be more help. Others here may be able to suggest workarounds to this specific problem.

Mark.

#3

Hello Stef

Are you suggesting that you are standardizing on LibreOffice Templates or Microsoft Word Templates.

Templates are unique to each system.

Did you save your LibreOffice Writer document to a Microsoft Word format?
If PDF is ok, you could "export as pdf" and send that.
If the person you are sending your document has LibreOffice, it will look exactly the same.

I applaud your thoughts about bringing LibreOffice to the Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal.

Some help might be required and you can try and contact the following.

The user group at
Home ยป Dutch NL Project
https://nl.libreoffice.org/

Linux Professional Institute Central Europe: Home
http://www.lpice.eu/nl/home.html

Nederlandse Linux Gebruikers Groep
http://www.nllgg.nl/

There is also Thom Holwerda, Editor at OSNews (I just like the way the guy thinks.)
His basic info is at http://www.osnews.com/user/uid:5/

LibreOffice document standards:
The easy explanation is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
For the deepest understanding of the format go to http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/OpenDocument-v1.2.html

Documents are not allowed to be attached in this user group mailing.
Try sending to http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Dutch-f1816654.html

Sorry I can not help you further.
Paul

#4

Hi :slight_smile:
Both Google docs and LibreOffice are consistent with each other and any
version of either on any platform. Likewise with OpenOffice,
Calligra/KOffice, Lotus Symphony and almost all others. Even newer
documents prepared by the latest releases of those can usually be read by
older versions of any.

This is in stark contrast to documents written in MS Office and using their
newer 'format' (really several different "transitional" formats but all
given the same name). Documents written in MS Office 2007 often have
problems opening in MS Office 2010 or 2013, at best they open in
"compatibility mode". Hence why so many people have taken to using PDFs to
share documents in the last few years, or at least 1 reason for it.

It helps to use the native ODF 1.2 (Extended) format in any of the non-MS
office programs or office suites. The 1.2 (Extended) is backwards
compatible with the older 1.1/1.0. Newer programs can read the older
formats so easily it's almost natural. No need for any "compatibility
mode". The full ODF specification is thoroughly documented as implemented
in all the different programs by all the different companies, etc and
contains no proprietary blobs so there is nothing to make it difficult for
people to create new software that can implement the full specification as
used "out in the wild".

The ODF 1.1 or 1.0 was set as an internationally agreed standard by the ISO
committees after extensive field-testing and deliberation by members of the
independent OASIS committee. OASIS remains independent by allowing each
company, government or other organisation to have a set maximum number of
members so that no company, government or organisation is able to dominate
the proceedings. Several hundred organisations etc from around the world
take part in preparing, writing and field-testing the specifications to
make sure the format is easy to implement in as many real-world scenarios
and on as many real-world machines as possible.

The ODF 1.2 (Extended) as used in many programs and suites is, in effect,
field-testing to prepare for the next iteration of the ODF standard. That
is likely to take many years during which;
1. Many organisations etc will be using the same 1.2 (Extended) as each
other
2. It is easy to switch any of the programs back to 1.2 or even back to
1.1/1.0

The only organisation which seems to have any trouble at all with
implementing any ODF specification seems to be Microsoft. By being unable
to implement their own or anyone else's formats consistently it seems to
force people to constantly buy the same version of MS Office that is used
by people they work with, and to buy newer versions at the same time as
each other. Currently many companies are buying the 2010, so that is what
other people need to get. However newer computers are sold with 2013 so
some of them will need to buy 2010 although at the same time it creates a
push to buy the 2013 even though organisations have only just bought the
2010.

It is interesting that the new Microsoft formats came out just after their
older formats finally seemed to stablise such that everyone else was able
to consistently implement them. It also came out just after MS lost the
court-case about their RTF format, for which they had promised full
interoperability but actually seemed to deliver about the same level of
that as their newer format.

People who insist on using DocX, XlsX and the other OOXML formats are
effectively insisting that people only ever use Windows (that's the only OS
that suffers from so many viruses and security issues, right?) and buy the
same version of MS Office that they used. So, take a stand and insist on
being given files in a format that is consistent with ISO formats.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#5

I have seen that some tables do not show proper spacing when opened in LO. I suppose that the proper thing to do (which I have been lax on) is to create a bug report so that it can be fixed. I have no idea if the problem is with Word or Write.

If I see this problem then I generally either fall back to use Word (if I have it available) or I fix the problem in LO and then save it as a doc file. I have not checked to see if fixing in LO and then saving it as a DOCX file produces a similar format in Word.

#6

Hi,

I got a template.docx of my education institution, and tried to open
it using LibreOffice.

Templates in MS-Word are not stored with the extension '.docx'

I found out too late - after I sent it, I got comments of receiver - that writer
did show the table totally wrong.

Until now I was convinced LibreOffice is a good alternative for MS
Office, but I doubt it very much now. I had to use the (Microsoft
Windows) computers on the school with a recent MS Office to get it
right.

I've been talking with members of parlement about the use of open
source by the government, and was convinced it's a right thing. Now
I'm not so sure anymore.

Based on the assumption that you think a '.docx' is a template, i do not think that your advice will be good.

#7

Hi :slight_smile:
In common usage people mean something quite different when they say
"template". Proper templates, as we would use the term, are quite
different and would probably be more useful to them.

Many people have no idea what a real template is so they just make up
something else and then call that a template. It can make things a bit
confusing sometimes!
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

I sure hope he does not 'confuse' the 'government',
as this will cost /me money ;(

#8

Hi Mark an others like Tom,

first of all there seams to be a misunderstanding. I meant with
template a guide given by the teacher
to me, as a layout the teachers expect the results will have.
So not the technical term for it, it's just a document in the docx format.

second I see myself since two weeks now in an university environement
with all new things, new people I meet
and a lot of impressions.

And one of the things I have to deal with is that they all work on
microsoft desktops and microsoft office software.
And I got a lot documents I have to read, and write a lot of papers,
and with a lot of them a template (see above) is provided.

I ran into problems when the template (yes in docx) format is not read
properly, and that's why I did not get the results right.

And yes, I think "LibreOffice is useless because it can't fully
understand a format defined by a private company".
You can publish about, go to court to start a trial against that
private company, but that is useless. It's the simple reality, that
almost everyone is using their software.

Nonetheless, I will do the following:

a. whenever I can I will provide the results in PDF format. But that
won't solve the problem when LibreOffice does not read the tables good
in the first place.

b. what should I ask the institute what format is best? I've
understood that the ODF format is not supported by MS Office. What
then?
I already spoke to several people about the use of english terms, and
they are used a lot on the university. I do not have a problem with
that, but I'm living in the Netherlands, and everyone should speak and
write dutch. But I think I'm losing that battle also. And I have to
use all of my energy for my work for the university....

c. I will provide a bug report. With stripped data. I really think
that the importing and exporting "foreign" formats like docx, and
especially the different versions of it, is very important. You speak
about different versions. I know with Samba, the project leaders are
provided the latest details from microsoft about the different
versions SMB2, 2.1 and 3 to get maximal compatibility. Isn't that
possible with their docx format?

Stef Bon

#9

Stef Bon wrote:

Hi Mark an others like Tom,

first of all there seams to be a misunderstanding. I meant with
template a guide given by the teacher
to me, as a layout the teachers expect the results will have.
So not the technical term for it, it's just a document in the docx format.

Yes, I realised that; apologies if I wasn't clear. I was trying to explain the background to the problem, and probably ended up rambling on a bit!

In summary: .doc is a more reliable format than .docx for transferring between MS Office and LibreOffice. If you can get whoever supplies the template to save it from MS Office into that format, it will probably work better for you.

Nonetheless, I will do the following:

a. whenever I can I will provide the results in PDF format. But that
won't solve the problem when LibreOffice does not read the tables good
in the first place.

That's a good idea, if they don't need to be able to modify the file.

b. what should I ask the institute what format is best? I've
understood that the ODF format is not supported by MS Office. What
then?

Support for ODF is improving in newer versions of MS Office, so it might be possible to save from MS Office directly into ODF. If that doesn't work properly, the older MS Office formats (.doc for Word, .xls for Excel) generally work better than the newer .docx or .xlsx formats.

c. I will provide a bug report. With stripped data. I really think
that the importing and exporting "foreign" formats like docx, and
especially the different versions of it, is very important. You speak
about different versions. I know with Samba, the project leaders are
provided the latest details from microsoft about the different
versions SMB2, 2.1 and 3 to get maximal compatibility. Isn't that
possible with their docx format?

I don't know much of the details. From my understanding, Office Open XML (OOXML - the format used in docx, xlsx, and related files) is a supposedly open standard. i.e. anyone can get the details of how to read and write files in that format. But that standard allows some data to be included in an application-specific format, which MS does to make it easier for themselves to port MS Office to using it. Unfortunately that means it's not so easy for anyone else to figure out how to read and write those parts of the file.

These compatibility problems are the reason that several governments and other organisations have started moving over to using ODF instead of Microsoft's formats for their files. That way they're not dependent on a single company continuing to support the format in order to read their files in future. I don't know about other countries, but there's some info about the UK's implementation at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-for-government

and, specifically relating to editable documents:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-for-government/sharing-or-collaborating-with-government-documents

From a quick search, it looks like the Dutch government are already doing something similar:
https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/english/

Mark.

#10

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chrisrae/archive/2010/09/25/where-is-the-documentation-for-office-2010-s-docx-xlsx-pptx-formats.aspx

and

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee908654(v=office.12).aspx

A quooot from the first link:
"The good news is that ECMA-376 is freely available and almost everything Office 2007 writes is covered by that standard"

They talk about 'Office 2007', not about the versions after that one....

The last 2 years of revisions (2nd link) are all "No changes to the meaning...." effectively making the specs old, and making it hard to make a piece of software capable of reading/writing office 2013 documents.

#11

Hi all,

Thanks a lot for your reactions and support.

I will add two things to my actions list, although I do not promise
anything. I need my time.

a. try to contact student organisations/university to ask them to
provide more options.

Brian Barker suugested I do convert it first at the university to a
format I use (ODF). That's not an option.
Here we use the tool with the very dutch name (being sarcastic)
BlackBoard. That tool provides the papers
from the browser. So I access these documents from my home computers.

b.

If you can prove that MS Office does not provide follow the OOXML
standard, you have a case againt MS.
It's that simple. Get some good cases to prove that! It has been done
before. I know that the SAMBA project leader has been
asked by the EU about not sharing information, and after that MS got a
hughe fine (good work from Mevr. Kroes!).
An option?

Stef

#12

No, I didn't suggest that! I suggested using Microsoft Word (where you have it at the university) to save a copy of your .docx as PDF. And I also recommended Mark Bourne's suggestion of converting it there to .doc. Take the result home on a flash drive or e-mail them to yourself. You can display and reproduce the appearance of the PDF at home. You may find that the .doc works better in LibreOffice at home. These *are* options - but you are of course welcome to dismiss them if you wish.

It may indeed be a simple job to persuade your university to require lecturers to make the templates available in either PDF or .doc format instead - or perhaps as well.

Brian Barker

#13

Hi :slight_smile:
For sharing and editing the Doc format is best. Errr, for spreadsheets
xls, for presentations ppt.

Everyone seems to be able to use them perfectly fine. It's an editable
format so the text re-flows depending on the settings of whichever machine
it happens to be on. However it rarely suffers from incompatibility
issues. So it's probably the best format to use these days.

If you want people to see exactly what the document was meant to look like,
ie to show it before the text reflows, it can be a good idea to also give
people a Pdf too. Pdfs are not usually editable so it's a good idea to
normally share documents in both formats at the same time. Even Pdfs don't
always disaply exactly the same on all systems because they often depend on
the system having the right fonts.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#14

Mark Bourne wrote

The .docx format changes slightly with each version of MS Office.

So do the Microsoft Binary (DOC et al.) formats. Major revisions for DOC
were on 2009-07-13, 2010-06-07, 2012-01-20, and 2014-07-31.

Mark Bourne wrote

For compatibility between MS Office and LibreOffice, the older .doc format
is more reliable.

Probably only because of the mechanics of this format (it is effectively a
memory dump to file). There have been many recent improvements to LO with
respect to supporting OOXML. The level of support may not be equal to that
for the MS Binary formats (yet) but it hopefully will be in the
not-too-distant future. TDF has partner organisations working on these
improvements. List of links to recent (2013-2014) blog posts about
improvements here:

http://en.libreofficeforum.org/node/7505#comment-34131

Mark Bourne wrote

From my understanding, Office Open XML (OOXML - the format used in docx,
xlsx, and related files) is a
supposedly open standard. i.e. anyone can get the details of how to read
and write files in that format. But that standard allows some data to be
included in an application-specific format, which MS does to make it
easier for themselves to port MS Office to using it. Unfortunately that
means it's not so easy for anyone else to figure out how to read and write
those parts of the file.

These compatibility blobs only exist in OOXML Transitional; OOXML Strict
essentially eliminates them.

Best wishes, Owen.

#15

Luuk wrote

They talk about 'Office 2007', not about the versions after that one....

The article was written late 2010. MS Office 2010 is mentioned (four times).

Luuk wrote

The last 2 years of revisions (2nd link) are all "No changes to the
meaning...." effectively making the specs old, and making it hard to
make a piece of software capable of reading/writing office 2013 documents.

[MS-OE376] is a document referencing the standard (EMCA-376 4th Ed. /
ISO/IEC 29500:2012 3rd Ed.). It is mainly notes with some examples designed
to accompany the specification. Naturally it is not going to change that
much as the specification is what contains the technical detail.

Unfortunately, none of this is going to assist with the original (or
follow-up) query.

Best wishes, Owen.

#16

Hi :slight_smile:
The older MS formats (Doc, Xls etc) have stopped changing around so much in
the MS Office 2007, 2010, 2013 and 365 releases, ie since they stopped
being the default formats in MS Office. Before 2007 the older MS formats
were a bit of a nightmare but for the last 7 or more years they have been
quite stable.

MS are apparently focussing on developing their newer format more, which
might be what makes it so problematic at the moment. While there is a
"strict" format that is possible to use in MS Office 2013 it is not the
default. To use it people have to use
File - "Save As ..."
and that seem to be beyond the skill level of most MS Office users. Also
have you actually tried using "strict" rather than the various
"transitional" defaults? When you try to open a "strict" OOXML file then
2010 and 2007 pop-up an alert warning allegeding that the file is a
security risk and probably contains malware. This might be a left-over
from when non-MS programs were able to implement the OOXML ISO format
before MS were able to implement it themselves! Since then non-MS programs
and suites have had to try to add-in compatibility with all the proprietary
or binary blobs and stuff that isn't in their ISO specification.

The Doc, Xls and other older formats are only good for file-sharing right
now. The specification is not properly documented so creating programs to
read it in the future is unlikely. Similarly with the Rtf format
apparently.

Document storage is safer if ODF is used but for sharing and working with
people right now the older MS format seems to be about the only one that
everyone, even MS Office, can read fairly consistently.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: