Does Microsoft Office 2010 still have incompatibility issues with LibreOffice

Question

I know Microsoft Office 2003 and Microsoft Office 2007 have some incompatibility issues with LibreOffice. For example if I create a document in LibreOffice with doc format and try to open it in Office 2003/2007, the margin, tables and images might/will move a bit around.

Reading that Microsoft Office 2010 is "more compatible" are this issues resolved that when I create a doc or odt file, it will be correctly read in Office 2010.

Note that I say THEY have incompatibility issues. For what I have seen, the correct format is the one used in LibreOffice/OpenOffice and not the other way around. It is more standardized.

UPDATE - Would like to add that in 2 pages of Wikipedia, Microsoft Office 2010 is mentioned as having compatibility for version 1.1 of the ODF.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2010

Because of this, I made the question just to be sure from experience of other LibreOffice users in Ubuntu.

UPDATE 2 - The European IT authorities have come up with several ideas to improve the OOXML compatibility in LibreOffice. they include all the problems I mentioned like images, macros, frames and such. More info here and here.

I want to also add that after LibreOffice 4.x, the compatibility level has risen. There is more compatibility between both office suite.

Answer 1

With my personal experience, I say that NO they are not.

A .doc file created in LibreOffice suffers from some changes when it is reopened in MS Office 2010. You will also feel that your header and footer settings are disturbed.

Same in the case of .ppt files.

I prepared a seminar of robotics in LibreOffice and saved it as a .ppt file. But, at the time of presentation my college offered me a Windows computer with MS Office 2010. When I opened the .ppt on Windows, I have to make several changes before presentation such as page width, table size, heading size and images (specially charts and bars).

Answer 2

In my experience it is completely unrealistic to suggest that in dealing with an organisation of any size that relies on Microsoft products, anyone can survive by using LibreOffice. I work in a university (in theory, more open to experimentation, difference and tolerance than, say, businesses). Our admin constantly bombards us with documents containing complex tables, forms, formating etc. Very soon I realised that opening, modifying or creating anything like that in OpenOffice/LibreOffice is asking for trouble. You can never be sure you are seeing all the (possibly critical) information that is there, and if you fill a document in and forward it, it is almost certain someone will complain and you will have to do it again using MS Word. Line managers and colleagues do not understand the technical issues or politics involved. All they want is the job done and an easy life, so you are left looking weird.

I have LibreOffice on my netbook and I must say I cannot rely on it for self-sufficiency. On one occasion a couple of years ago I couldn't open a password-protected Word doc because OpenOffice back then didn't support passwords! The problem is I was abroad and I had to reply to a work email urgently. That's when I said never again. I had to install Microsoft Word. I nearly abandoned Ubuntu that day. I wish I could rely on LibreOffice, but I am afraid this is not possible. It may be Microsoft's fault but that makes little difference in practice. Clearly, when people don't see compatibility issues either they deal with very, very simple documents, or they are very biased.

Answer 3

I have struggled with this for years. The fact is that you cannot use a workflow that includes passing documents back and forth between any version of Microsoft Office and Libre Office -- with the possible exception of very simple spreadsheets and word documents.

You either need to force your associates to move to Libre Office or conform and use MS Office yourself. It's a huge issue for Libre Office in a world where MS Office is still the dominant player.

Answer 4

On my experience, I really did not saw any bigger change on the way it show the files, still the same kind of formating problems.

on my case i used play on linux to install a MS-office 2007 in my ubuntu so i could open the pptx files in a correct manner.

Answer 5

I think "the margin, tables and images might/will move a bit around" is way too strong definition of incompatibility. This way MS Office is not compatible with itself: you may open the same document on two different computers using the same version of MS Office and get two different results. It is less related to presentations because Power Point presentations are more like sets of objects with implicitly or explicitly given coordinates, but still even in Power Point there may appear, for example, another empty slide or some other discrepancy.

The reason is obvious, .doc is a "flow of text" that has as much information about every piece as possible but still some default settings not included in the document itself may matter. For example, at least in earlier versions the page format was not included in the .doc file, and if two computers have Office with different default page sizes, e.g. US Letter and A4, they will render the same document differently.

To ensure this kind of compatibility everything should be compiled to PostScript or PDF. But even pdf may look different on another computer (though, those are mostly font-related issues when fonts are not embedded into the document). Luckily, the Acrobat Reader is available on every computer and even allows to show presentations full-screen etc.

Since you asked about own experience: for me the real issue is when one program cannot open the document created in the other one, and I believe (and from my own little experience -- little because I prefer TeX) by now they are 99%-compatible. Except for VBA and macros -- there are still a lot of issues even though LibreOffice has VBA-compatible mode. The last issue I had was when I was trying to modify a VBA macro using LibreOffice: it run the changed macro beautifully, but just did not save any changes, and did not show any errors when I was saving it... Beware.