Yes. This is my method as well.

If I stick to using Linux, I do not really have much of a choice, do I?

I ran into issues with this about a year ago. My wife in the process of being offered a job, and the employer sent her some docx documents that she needed to fill out and print. I tried loading them into the latest libreoffice at the time and the formatting was all screwy. I tried for a while to get them to work, and every time I just ended up frustrated. I eventually decided to just load them in Microsoft's Google Docs equivalent online (Office 365? or is that some subscription?). This showed the format correctly, I was able to have my wife fill them out and print them (I think we saved them as pdf as well).

So, if you're running into issues with opening up docx on libreoffice, give Microsoft's free online office suite a try. I think it just requires a microsoft email (msn, hotmail, and probably others all work).

That being said, I still prefer using libreoffice, and I'll still try opening up docx files using that before I resort to online (it isn't very easy, because, IIRC, you have to first upload your document to Microsoft OneDrive, and then import it into Word).

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I didn't personally like any of the available methods so I went and hacked together my own libreoffice from source slackbuild borrowing heavily from several other build scripts, it works well on current and probably does on 14.1 too, but it needs more testing there. If anyone wants to try it out there are several options so see the README. Additionally, there are slackbuilds for several optional dependencies not yet on SBo in the 'dependencies' directory.

LibreOffice-5.3.0.2
md5sum: 50a03ceb078791faccd0aac4b2cdeb1f

You do. Save your DOCX file in ODT format, then edit it.

That's how I do things. When I am done, I save it to docx again and send it. However, I used a colleague's computer with Microsoft office 2010 to check the layout of the document. It was almost perfect.

I spoke about this with our local school's director. When someone sends him a DOC or DOCX file, he just asks the person to "send a normal ODT file, or a PDF".

Unfortunately, that isn't always an option. Especially in my wife's case when she was trying to get a job at a bank. If I'm in a non-technical position and someone asked me that, I would be annoyed, not impressed. It would probably reflect on my decision to hire said person.

Luckily, I don't run into docx files often at home (I do all the time at work, since we are a Microsoft Office reliant company -- heh, if I asked someone to send me a ODT or PDF, I'd then have to walk through how to do that... even though we have Adobe Acrobat installed, people don't even know about printing as a pdf).

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You can use the LibreOffice packaging from SlackBuilds itself. In fact, the SlackBuilds script does not compile the LibreOffice from source, as this would probably take a couple of hours, but it only repackages a compiled version into an SBo package compatible with your Slackware. It will not take that long. Just make sure that you know what architecture you are on (32-bit or x86_64).

I also use LibreOffice for compatibility reasons. Hopefully, in the future, people will use LibreOffice on MS Windows as well due to the ever rising price of Microsoft Office.

All the best.

That's how hiring works at the school. The director explained to me what he calls "the first step of selection". When someone sends him a résumé in DOC or DOCX format, he doesn't even look at it. A bit less than half of the job applicants send DOC or DOCX files, a bit more than half send either PDF (most of them) or ODT. But then, this is a FOSS-friendly school, running 100 % on free software (and 100 % on Slackware, by the way).

Is the required format stated clearly, so that applicants know? If not, this kind of attitude is really unprofessional.

Yea, with my 6 core amd cpu compiling with 6 jobs takes over 2 hours, but this is taxing on the cpu so I started compiling with only 1 job, that takes over 7 hours...