this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Privacy
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"Compatible" with Microsoft Office, just don't expect for your colleagues to be able to open the document in Microsoft Office after you edited it in LibreOffice.
Edit: Don't expect your colleagues to be able to open it without the layout being broken.
LibreOffice is compatible with Microsoft's OOXML spec. They sold every suite on it in the nearly 20 years ago to stop fines from the EU. They sold competing suites on it instead of using anything else available.
Microsoft however never actually fully supported their own spec and will save as "OOXML Transition" or whatever they call it now because they've been in 'transition' for nearly 20 years but still have proprietary blobs inside of it. You can however make MS Office save in OOXML Strict which is supposed to be compliant to the now ISO spec that LibreOffice actually supports.
This isn't LibreOffice's fault.
It really depends on the document. I've never had a issue personally but when I heard about issues its normally with specific elements.
Microsoft doesn't follow there own spec but with each libreoffice release they fix the issues created by Microsoft
In my experience, it's normally the other way around. I have no trouble opening doc and docx files made in libreoffice with MS office, but vice versa can sometimes be a little bit chancey.
Of course PowerPoint vs Impress just destroys the formatting both ways.
Have you used it lately? Broken layouts don’t happen for me very often in the last few years (I work in an office with libreoffice/word used beside each other daily).
OnlyOffice seems to have really good compatibility to me. And runs native in-browser for Next cloud integration.
as long as you save it as a compatible .doc .docx or something, it should work. obviously word can't open a .odt file.
Word can in fact open odt files. It was added quite a long time ago. Don't know how good the compatibility is, though
From my experince, an odt made in Libreoffice is what works best in both it and Word. But that's just how it's been for me, so who knows what weird things happen to other people when going back and forth between them.
Hmm I'll just send documents as .odt then. Embrace the libre way
and please do as .pdf aswell if you have students. Sometimes one of our profs powerpoint slides dont show equasions with a libre Software. So annoying!
My physics prof made it a whole thing and told us that the slides on Canvas are uploaded with .pdf so you can open it in the browser just fine without needing open office or something on Linux. First time a prof ever recognized the Linux community. I love physicists.
huh, the more you know.
Microsoft office has been able to open odt files since 2010.
Furthermore, LibreOffice does not always create/save files 100% compatible with MSO. I used to use Libre office because free. Word documents I have created/edited in LibreOffice were always a little broken layout wise when the document is opened in Word.
Whether it is because LibreOffice does a shitty job converting to docx when saving, Microsoft added in some anti competitor shit in Word or that the docx standard is vague is a discussion for another time.
that's interesting to learn. cool of them to implement it despite there not (directly) being anything in it for them.
"Can open" and 'can open without the layout being broken" are different things.