For the umtptieth time I am forced to work in a Windows office where MS Office is the standard.

Whatever, ever has been said about LibreOffice, it is simply not MS Office compatible. Every statement even suggesting remote compatibility should be fiercely denied.

MSWord is fairly good in document processing if you want to live with the quirks. LibreOffice is also fairly good in document processing, but also only if you want to live with the quirks.

Expecting to save a LO document in .docx and open it again in MS is totally beyond the capabilities of either one.

A few bugs in a 16 page document containing 4 images and 2 tables:

• When opening in MS Office, MSOffice hangs at page 10
• When printing from LO, the text is fuzzy dark blue instead of black. (Other documents print fine)
• Images shift in their frame, that is, the caption appears above and below instead of below

Now this is only in addition to the normal quirky behaviour of LO. Like images which move to every place on the page except where you want to have it, strange autonumbering issues, both in paragraphs and in headings.

Somehow everytime again I choose to use LO to keep up at least the apearances of no totally alienating myself from the co-office workers. I'd better use Latex. MSOffice compatibility is non-existant anyway, and using Latex I don't have to suffer from LO's peculiarities. At least I create my documents effortless and the layout is always perfect without correcting formatting errors over and over.

jlinkels

LaTeX for the win!

In my experience, word processors puke when you try to do too much with them. Any formatting other than bold or italicized text confuses...images, tables, chapters, sections, etc. are out of the question if you want to stay sane. Fortunately, these are all too easy with LaTeX. I guess it comes down to using the right tool for the job and word processors are rarely the right tool for creating reports. I feel your pain!

docx is not a portable format, it's a mess. odt is the standard portable format. Don't use rdf which has never worked well in LO. html output from Word is also a mess.

Yep. OO/LO compatibility with MS Office is laughable at best. You can use it to read MS Office documents (if you can put up with the insane format changes), but there is no hope of making changes, writing it out, and expecting MS Office to be able to open it up correctly.

Frankly, I'm amazed how many times people on this forum claim they never have a problem with OO/LO's MS Office compatibility.

Unfortunately, not even MSOffice seems compatible with MSOffice, unless it's the same version, but hey, I was always a WordPerfect fan, back when it existed and I actually typed something that had to look good.

I think the reason most people on this forum who claim to have no problems is

(a) We only share in RTF or ODT whenever possible
(b) We think formatting in pico/nano/gedit/emacs/vi is fine, why would you want anything else?
(c) Denial
(d) We only know how to type things in Word that are basically the same as anything in (b)
(e) All of the above

Maybe there should be a poll.

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It was pointed out in another thread that if you use ODT as the interchange format, then you shouldn't have problems, because both MS Office and LibreOffice work well with it.

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No compatibility problem here. On the rare occasion that I receive something like .docx it either opens well enough in LO or I ask the sender to please re-send in a useful format.

For docs that I produce, LaTeX (usually via LyX and templates) when it has to look and print nice.

Vim and plain text email for everything else.

LO for incoming spreadsheets, sc or gnumeric for everything else. I miss VisiCalc, even SuperCalc on CP/M! Who needs .xlsx?!

and there, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the key to happiness. First time someone sent me a .docx, I was using OfficeXP and it couldn't read it... had to download a bunch of extensions just to open it. Then I just asked them to send it to me in Word95 or some such oldie but better format.

My experience is that MSWord is great for short documents; fewer than 100 pages, but it is impossible to use for long documents, even with simple formatting. On the other hand, Open/LibreOffice Write can easily handle large documents (1500-2000 pages). Although there is no arguing withRight tool for the right job. +1

Older versions of MS Office don't open ODF files well. I've had a couple of instances where I have saved something as an ODF and sent it to someone and they open it in Office 2003 or 2007 and it is just scrambled. The more intricate the document the more scrambled it becomes.

Dear friends,

Thank you so much for your support. Good to see it is not just me.

jlinkels

Older versions of MS Office don't open docx either.

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my opinion is that open/libre-writer > microsoft-word:
* seems faster
* no god-awful ribbon bar which takes 1/3rd of the screen
* once upon a time ms-word used to not be able to scroll pages while using the scroll bar which used to be very annoying.
* can save to pdf format without the need of the 3rd party adobe distiller hax.
* can open and save to many (proprietary) formats.

microsoft-excel > open/libre-calc:
* seems faster
* pivot tables seem more straght-forward than data-pilots (although they should be under the data submenu rather than insert ?)
* * maybe i'm just more accustomed to ms-excel since i use it from tiem-to-time in my job.
* dragging single cells is easier in excel.
* 1-point that oo-calc gets is that there is no limit of 64k rows like excel.

open/libre-impress == microsoft-powerpoint:
* i rarely do slideshows so i dont really have an opinion.

You can get plugins that will allow 2003 to open them.

In my experience M$ Office isn't even compatible with itself. Just different version numbers will have problems opening documents of other versions. Libreoffice can open many formats, and although it will mess up the formatting, I have found it useful at least for reading what some people send me.

I always send documents in pdf format, not in any word processing format for sure. In pdf format, I've never had any formatting messed up or any missing images. I will continue to export to pdf format no matter the program I use to build the document.

I've tried Lyx and Texmacs, but I just can't seem to get the hang of them. I started out with word processors, and unfortunately it looks like I'm stuck with 'em. If someone has some other program that is easier to transition from a word processor to a Latex-based system, then do tell me about it.

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