Have tried to open documents from emails sent from Windows systems using MS Office and have had the document freeze on opening or open showing nothing in any fields. Is compatibility with MS Office Doc files just not possible in Libre Office or Open Office?

It's most definitely possible with both Libre and Open Office.

what is the document? are there macros built into the document? typically OOo and LibreOffice have next to zero problems opening MS Office documents. The only time ive seen any type of major issue is with spreadsheets containing customized macros. then the macros can/will fail.

if the system is hanging when opening an word document, then the document is corrupt and i would call it questionable in safety to any system that can open it.

edit to add:

you might want to try uploading the MS Office document to google drive and using their built in viewer for MS Office products to see if the file is corrupt or not.

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I have never found a reasonably-complex MS Office doc file that opened properly in any version of OO or LO. It usually doesn't lock up or appear blank, as you're seeing, but there are always problems. The only ones that open correctly are the docs with absolutely nothing but text. No images, no tables, no header/footer, no fancy formatting.

I'm not picking on OO/LO, even other versions of MS Office sometimes can't open reasonably-complex MS Office files without problems, just pointing out that OO/LO compatibility with MS Office is far from perfect.

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I would reverse the subject and object in your last statement. Be that as it may, I've never encountered anything like the situation described by the OP. I would follow lleb's suggestion given above. Perhaps the documents are corrupted.
jdk

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With contemporary LibreOffice, I have not yet encountered a *.doc or *.docx that I couldn't open properly, but I haven't dealt with extremely complex documents with complicated internal formatting. Could you provide more detail about the documents you are attempting to open (are they manuals; do they have lots of tables, embedded lists, text boxes, etc.)?

I do know that, when you look under the surface of many wordprocessor users' documents, you find an absolute hash of mucked up formatting.

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Thanks to all you guys. The docs in question have all been complex and more than half have been spreadsheets. Likely, the object and subject do need to be reversed.

If the spreadsheets are heavily dependent on Excel macros, I understand there can be issues, because the macros are written in Visual Basic, which is a Microsoft thing. As far as I know, though, the structure of formulae are the same: [sum]=[equation].

You may find Gnumeric better with Excel spreadsheets: this is something I've been told, and not experienced personally.

In my experience, Word documents always load into OpenOffice, but very complicated layouts can give trouble, especially over-complicated tables which have not been optimally created. You can never guarantee perfect layout: even if you use the same font, different word-processors take a different approach with inter-linear spacing for example (generally ignoring the specification inside the font!)