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Comment by SomeCallMeTim | Hacker News Reader

> Find me an office suite that does (2) that interops basically seamlessly across other businesses and old versions of my own business.

Microsoft Office basically doesn't satisfy this requirement itself.

I get frustrated with LibreOffice not importing files correctly, but then when I went to an Office 2007 to attempt to import an Office 2003 file, I found it was also failing to import correctly there.

The .doc format is such garbage that they can't even manage to import it correctly in their own software reliably.

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Half the files I have to work with come in pre-OOXML formats, and I don't think it ever failed to properly open it.

I don't say it's not possible at all, but extremely unlikely.

Well, I've had a different experience. More than once. So I'd say it's not that extremely unlikely.

Maybe my lawyer has a really old version of Word or something and he keeps sending me files in an old format that isn't supported as well.

I've also had a lot of files opened flawlessly by LibreOffice; it depends on how many features you're using. Maybe you're trading documents that aren't that complicated?

It would be helpful if you could indicate what is missing or what you mean by correctly importing.

If there are no detailed Word error messages or diagnostics, perhaps you could ask your lawyer to send you a PDF or paper version, so you can tell if there are any differences.

I for one would be very attentive to the possibility of missing or incorrect information in legal documents...

It's not information so much as formatting that's always what gets messed up.

One document went back and forth between Word and LibreOffice and the numbering was always screwed up. Instead of:

1. 2. 3.

...it would come in:

.1 .2 .3

No actual missing information. Just screwed up formatting.

Are you sure your lawyer is even using Word? Many still use word perfect. I was just at the office of a state legislature yesterday and they are 100% a word perfect shop.

Word has its flaws, yes, just like anything else. Still, I've tried every other thing available, and nothing comes close.

You see, it is the word processor for all the non-techie people out there. They have no idea how to properly use it (and pc's in general), so they blame Word for all their faults.

LibreOffice, on the other hand, has much more competent userbase (in average), and despite the lack of certain features LibreOffice has more positive image.

In my experience, OpenOffice/LibreOffice screws up non-trivial formatting on import, and Microsoft Office screws up non trivial embeddings from previous versions. I've had both screw up old Word documents.

I prefer LibreOffice when I need to open old files -- the format is often botched, but all the content is always there -- which was not my experience with Microsoft Word.

Also, in my experience LibreOffice will happily open documents Microsoft Office complains about as being corrupt.

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