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Comment by greyman | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion (and personal experience), if they want to endanger the monopoly of MS Office, they would need, first of all, to provide 100% compatibility with the MS Office formats [read them and write to that format flawlessly].

At least for me, that was the reason my repeated evaluation of OpenOffice always failed - it couldn't handle more complex MS Word files I received from my colleagues, and it just didn't make sense to use both suites. I gave it a chance again and again, but it never worked for me despite my honest attempts to like OO.org.

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Please file your issues in https://bugs.freedesktop.org//enter_bug.cgi -> LibreOffice with an example attachment.

Even better, save as PDF on MS Office as it looks, and a save as PDF as it looks to you, while you describe the difference. It is very hard to find the compatibility mismatches otherwise -- especially the ones you need.

This doesn't seem like a realistic possibility. There isn't 100% compatability even between different versions of Office itself.

I think the point is valid and the possibility realistic if we don't assume a literal interpretation of "100% compatibility".

"Not assuming a literal interpretation of 100%" seems about as sensible as not assuming a literal interpretation of "the coin flip came up heads". Presumably if the poster had meant 80% (or whatever number) they would have said that instead.

"The coin flip came up heads" is provable. I'm not certain 100% compatibility with an MS product is provable.

I don't expect an arbitrary precision like "98.3%" to convey wanting full compatibility because I understand statement's intent. To each their own though.

> I'm not certain 100% compatibility with an MS product is provable.

In order to be provable, you would require it to be properly defined. I don't think even Microsoft has an adequate definition of what an Office document should look when stored on disk.

I believe the on-disk is pretty well defined nowadays by their open document promise.

However, HTML is a published standard, too, yet every copy of IE renders in its own special way. I think that is a far better analogy of what is expected here.

Reading MS's Office Open XML is no trivial exercise without having code from previous versions of Office built into your own program. Not many companies can do it that way.

I agree, but this is harder said than done. And, MS makes it hard by making it a moving target.

And it's not even necessarily complex. Almost any MS Word doc that I get will be rendered incorrectly in OO if the document contains imbedded graphics (e.g. a logo). And vice-versa.

Please file this embedded graphics issue in https://bugs.freedesktop.org//enter_bug.cgi -> LibreOffice with an example attachment of your document (e.g. the logo).

There is no reasonable justification for any individual, institution, or business to be using the newer MS office file formats.

But they already are, so we have to support them now. That is the problem.

The world would be a much better place if people were reasonable.

Unfortunately, lots of people use Office formats like fashion. They don't want to use "outdated" formats.

How about wanting to support more than 65k rows in Excel?

From TFA, "1 million rows in a spreadsheet"

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