Track changes with MS Office

users
#1

Hi,
Can recent versions of Writer or Calc track changes with Word or Excel?
This did not work with 3.x and I can not try out without MS Office.

tia,
Andreas

#2

Andreas Säger wrote

Can recent versions of Writer or Calc track changes with Word or Excel?
This did not work with 3.x and I can not try out without MS Office.

Yes but no...
If you use ODF you never know what happens when you open with MSO
If you use DOCX you never know what happens when you open with LO
If you use DOC track changes works with text but not with format changes.

I never used track changes with spreadsheets...

This is one of the LO limitations that stops me from switching to LO...

HTH

#3

Andreas Säger wrote

Can recent versions of Writer or Calc track changes with Word or Excel?
This did not work with 3.x and I can not try out without MS Office.

Yes but no...
If you use ODF you never know what happens when you open with MSO
If you use DOCX you never know what happens when you open with LO
If you use DOC track changes works with text but not with format changes.

I never used track changes with spreadsheets...

This is one of the LO limitations that stops me from switching to LO...

I'm not sure what you mean. I use track changes with my editors all the time. Some of them use Word some use LO. There have been issues with highlighting in the past (between Word and LO), but I think that problem has been solved with LO 5.0

#4

This is an important feature. The first thing I use do with incoming
Word docs is reformatting the mess so there is a style based platform
for further editing.

#5

The feature did not work when I needed it with *.doc and LO 3.4 in 2012.
MSWord did not show LO changes and vice versa.

#6

Hi :slight_smile:
You can "compare documents" to see the changes between one
iteration/version of it and another. It doesn't give historical changes
that have been changed again later on and i am not sure how it handles
messing formatting added by using MS Word.

I guess you have tried using this before or are using it while waiting for
the exact feature you want to become available.

Of course it would be better if people just got LibreOffice/OpenOffice (or
pretty much any other non-MS one) on their machines alongside MS Office so
that MS's lack of interoperability is less problematic.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#7

Jack Wallen wrote

If you use DOC track changes works with text but not with format
changes.

This is one of the LO limitations that stops me from switching to LO...

I'm not sure what you mean. I use track changes with my editors all the
time. Some of them use Word some use LO. There have been issues with
highlighting in the past (between Word and LO), but I think that problem
has been solved with LO 5.0

I'm afraid the bugs are still there. If you exchange files with people using
MSO maybe something is lost and you don't even notice...

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91862

Just tested with LO 5.0.2.1 x64 and the problems remain.

Regards,
Pedro

#8

Pedro wrote

I'm afraid the bugs are still there. If you exchange files with people
using MSO maybe something is lost and you don't even notice...

That's OK. I can live with that. MS Office users have horrible formatting
habits. In many cases I redo everything anyway using styles. It's a feature
that these changes are not indicated.