best alternatives for editing MS Word and other Windows apps in Ubuntu
 

Dear all,

I am an experienced Linux user but now want to edit MS Word docs in Ubuntu. The documents are .doc files, produced on Windows XP / MS Office 2003. These are fairly highly formatted documents (footnotes, custom spacings, lots of unicode etc.) and I need their editing and display format to be reproduced with as near 100.0 percent accuracy as possible.

Alternatives I have found include:
Office Libre
WineHQ (1.4?)

I don't know if there are others.

1. Which of these suites reads and edits Word files most accurately?

2. For purposes of editing and display is it better to convert the .doc files to .docx? or can they just as well be left as .doc (MS Word 2003) files?

3. Do any particular problems with formatting recur?

Well, I also need to edit sofistically formated word doc's (and docx's) with exact resulting formatting precision. The only option I've found so far is installing MS Office (2010 for me) either via PlayOnLinux (a free application) or via Crossover Office (this is a paid application). Both ways work for me and pretty straightforward. Any of currently existing alternatives lack in features and can't format precisely (both doc and docx files).

You can judge the quality of using wine or crossover's product based on their reviews.

For the most part OpenOffice and LibreOffice are the same.

Some people might use cloud based such at google docs.

Any time you use a closed format, the results will be less than expected usually with any other app.

I used to get a doc file every month; it's now rtf, as others (less patient than me) complained. It generally displayed well, except if things were very complex. The only thing you can do is try: LibreOffice, OpenOffice, and even Abiword. Don't bother with KOffice or Kalligra. You might find something that works.

Fonts are important. The Liberation fonts have the same metrics as Ariel and Time New Roman, so the line length will be exactly the same. Lines per page are uncontrollable: you can get different spacing switching between versions of Word!