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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

I’m rather curious about these claims. What specific formatting issues is he referring to, and what version was he using?

Also, they claim LibreOffice is not available on MacOS.

This article is quite light on detail.

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While I don't know what formatting issues the author was referring to, they do exist. They are typically the product of people doing wonky things in order to format documents in a particular way that looks fine on their own computer, like embedding tables in tables. There are also features that LibreOffice supports in a different way (e.g. multiple page layouts within a word processor or spreadsheet document).

Sure, that’s almost certain. Not even Microsoft gets it completely correct between versions of Office. But I think he’ll eventually find that his new favourite Office suite will also have compatibility issues.

I’m fine with completion, but I’m looking for specific issues. It’s really far too vague to know what they are talking about.

And it does have issues. In fact, LibreOffice offers better compatibility.

I can't speak for the author, of course, but recently while working with LibreOffice Calc I ran into an issue where it was completely mangling cell coloring in spreadsheet that a coworker sent me.

I was using the latest version of LibreOffice in Ubuntu 20.04, and my coworker was running the latest version of Microsoft Office for Mac.

Yup, it can happen. I’m just curious what the issues specifically were.

Do you have an example document? The LO team are always looking at compatibility issues.

The problem with this is that one can't simply submit work documents and these formatting issues are usually edge cases produced by people that are doing things they really shouldn't with Office.

They should add a feedback wizard that guides a user to remove sensitive data and preserve the document format as much as possible.

There is a comprehensive document test suite. It is always being improved.

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