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Comment by av500 | Hacker News Reader

Does it import Microsoft document formats 100% better? That' the biggest issue that Open/LibreOffice has and until that one is solved for good, the rest does not matter much...

EDIT: not wanting to contribute further to the fall of HN, I edited M$ into Microsoft

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The problem started to haunt Microsoft as well -- there are (simple) cases where their files don't open up correctly in slightly different versions of Office. In fact, I've recently had to open some .doc files with LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office (on Mac) because of this.

It's hardly news. In fact I switched from MS Office to StarOffice 5 in 2000 precisely because of never ending problems with documents. I even had trouble with doc files that one of my colleague made on the very same version (MS Office 2000) running on the same OS (Win98SE), apparently because we had different default printers.

Coincidentally I am currently building a few template ODT/ODG documents on a up-to-date Mac in LibreOffice 3.5.4 that are subsequently filled and converted to PDFs via JODConverter 2.x on...

    $ cat /etc/lsb-release            
    DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
    DISTRIB_RELEASE=7.04
    DISTRIB_CODENAME=feisty
    DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 7.04"
    $ dpkg -l | grep "openoffice.org "
    ii  openoffice.org                  2.2.0-1ubuntu3                         OpenOffice.org Office suite

and the output is virtually the same, barring a slight difference in font rendering.

(and I too, ditched Office when it completely failed to open my final home produced Word 97-produced document in Word 97 at the university, while Word 2000 did open it with all images suddenly placed at the top-left corner of the first page. StarOffice on the Sun workstations opened it without a hitch, with few pictures offseted by only millimeters. At that stage I could care less about font substitution.)

I would argue that's a Microsoft problem... I don't think office files are even compatible with their own standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML .

It IS the user's problem as he will be forced to use MS Office for most documents where there are other people involved.

Note: Both google docs and iWorks handle this significantly better.

A problem for Microsoft? or one by Microsoft? Yes, sure it's caused by Microsoft, but it has to be fixed on the LibreOffice side, since I am sure Microsoft won't do anything about it.

I've had compatibility problems between different versions of Microsoft Office.

This is also Microsoft's problem.

Not until they have competition able to break their lock-in, till then the craziness of their format acts as a barrier to entry. So again, it's a problem created by Microsoft, but it's a problem for their users and competitors. And that's why it's not going to be fixed.

It's not nearly as big a problem for Microsoft. First of all, the compatibility problems are much bigger between LibreOffice and MS Office than between different versions of MS Office. Secondly, if you tell your colleague, "Oh, the margins are screwed up because I upgraded to MS Office 2051", they'll just shrug it off. If you tell them, "Oh, I'm using this new software called LibreOffice because blah blah blah", they'll probably yell at you for being a moron and wasting their time.

If my colleagues ever said I'm a moron and that I'm waisting their time for using LibreOffice ... I would tell them to either buy a Windows+Office license for me, or otherwise go fuck themselves.

And if you're in a position to tell your colleagues to go fuck themselves, then you can do what you want. The rest of us aren't so lucky.

Also, the cost of a Windows+Office license is so small that pretty much any company will happily buy it for an employee.

One by Microsoft for everyone, including themselves. Not respecting standards is just retarded on too many levels.

EDIT: Unless, of course, they have a private internal standard...

> Yes, sure it's caused by Microsoft, but it has to be fixed on the LibreOffice side

You can't really fix something when the spec is incomplete, ambiguous, and refers to non-disclosed information, all the while multiple official implementations exist that contradict both themselves and the spec about the behavior to have.

Now what about Microsoft implementing ODT correctly?

I just downloaded it because its been bogging down my machine. Its running notably smoother and quicker but I've got a regression on how its rendering the document I'm working from. Whats really stinks, its an internal document so I can't send it upstream so they can fix the issue.

The rendering bugs with Microsoft formats are understandable but still extremely frustrating.

I love Open/LibreOffice but you are 100% correct.

Solution: email who sent you the file "hi, my Microsoft word 2011 can't open the file. Can you send it back saved (insert format you can open)"

I see that as a workaround rather than a solution. Solutions solve problems.

It will draw more attention to the core of the problem: people using Microsoft products deliberately breaking standards for lockin reasons

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

M$? Wow, HN has fallen.

Does his comment contribute something? I think it does. Does yours? I don't think so.

So which one you think lowers the standards of HN?

Yours.

By your own metric, yours is the most useless comment in this thread.

To make mine better, I leave you with this very relevant gem from 10 years ago.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/7/22/

I thought about it, but no... When we're talking about office file formats, it was Micro$oft at its best. the last big case of them acting like compete jerks with lots of money that I can remember.

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