[Discuss] LibreOffice and .docx files

[abreauj at gmail.com (John Abreau)]

Typically, if a Word-generated document gets its formatting trashed by
opening it in something else, it's because it was never truly formatted to
begin with; instead, the author most likely tweaked and poked at it
haphazardly until it looked OK on his or her screen, in which case it would
likely look like crap on someone else's screen if the other person doesn't
have exactly the same version of Word with the same preference settings,
the same screen resolution, the same set of installed fonts, etc.

A document that has been randomly tweaked until it accidentally looks OK is
not the same thing as a document that has been formatted correctly. It also
takes an enormous amount of extra time and effort to randomly tweak a
document than it does to use correct formatting.

If a document was created by someone who has even rudimentary skill at
formatting Word documents, then it can be passed back and forth between the
different programs easily without trashing the formatting. I do this
frequently myself, and I only rarely run across a document that's
problematic.




On Tue, Dec 5, 2017 at 11:15 AM, Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org>
wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 04, 2017 at 08:25:45PM -0500, Nancy Allison wrote:
> > Is there a Word-compatible open source program that truly does not trash
> > the formatting? Or is it simply not possible to pass documents back and
> > forth between Word and an open source program like LibreOffice or
> > OpenOffice? I used Open Office years ago, haven't used it recently, it
> used
> > to trash the files, too.
>
> The Open Office project still exists with different leadership (it's
> now an Apache project), and while my understanding is on the whole
> Libre Office's Word compaitibility is better, it may be possible that
> a recent version of Open Office handles your particular document
> better, depending on exactly what features it is using.  Could be
> worth a try.  As others said, also try upgrading your Libre Office
> version...
>
> --
> Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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