OT Openoffice

I've found .docx is also somewhat incompatible between Windows and MacOS Office. Try to avoid it, is my policy.

ODP (Open Document Presentation) is mostly used as an alternative subset file format for PowerPoint. There are limitations and incompatibilities: Where is says not supported, it just won't work. Where is says partly supported, you'll get "unexpected results" which are indistinguishable from garbage on the screen. Best to stay with PPT or PPTX file format.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Sure but I *hate* Open Office. It is *not* the same as MS Office. It may or may not be compatible and its UI is certainly not the same. I've been thinking about buying MS Office because OO sucks so badly.

OO reads and writes Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files fine for me.

There are font issues that make the documents not paginate or print quite the same, and various bits of paragraph numbering weirdness. This is irritating when collaborating but can probably be fixed.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

I use Libre Office 4.2 and have done for years (give or take the occasional down-loaded upgrade).

Calc seems to handle IEEE generated .xls files just fine, and what I send back to the IEEE hasn't yet worried anybody.

I was treasurer for the NSW branch of the IEEE for 2014, so I saw a few IEEE generated .xls files, and generated three .xlsx files of my own.

Write reads and generates .docx files without any problems that I've noticed.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

OpenOffice now has some limited support for saving docx (and it can read it reasonably well). But LibreOffice has much more mature support and covers more features - there is no reason to use OpenOffice when LibreOffice is also freely available (and with a more open development model, if you care about these things), and is superior in every way.

Some people insist on .docx files because they think they are "better" than .doc files, or perhaps that they conform to an international standard (LibreOffice writes .docx files that conform to the ISO standards - MS programs do not). So sometimes writing docx files is a requirement even if there is no good reason for it.

MS Office for the Mac has always been intentionally incompatible with MS Office for Windows - the idea is to make Mac users understand that they are using a weird, incompatible system that doesn't play well with the rest of the world - they should dump it and get a /proper/ Windows computer.

Either that, or MS's Office developers have always been incompetent. Pick whatever conspiracy you think best fits MS's profile!

(Presumably you meant .odt files here.)

MS Office has partial support for the .odt standard, but it is carefully limited so that people will understand that their own non-standard version of docx is far superior. MS Office is not too bad at reading odt files, but can make a mess when saving them.

No, the default file type is a zip file (but named .odt, etc.) containing xml format for the basic document, and image files for any pictures. Since the odt xml format is relatively simple (for an xml document), and compressed, it is quite small - much smaller than .docx formats (which uses the same idea, but the xml is a nightmare), and not much bigger than .doc.

LibreOffice is slower than Excel for very big graphs. On the other hand, LO is much better if the graph contains missing or invalid data - Excel treats the missing data as 0 and draws those 0 points, while LO treats them as missing data and omits them.

Hi David, Thanks for this and all the other feedback. I've got no love for docx format. I save data files on the apparatus we sell. (Words, graphs, tables...) I save it all in doc format. This is both for legacy reasons, and because I like the older version of word.

George H.

Those words (no pun intended) could have been mine. I use MSO

2000 most of the time. For those infrequent times when I need to open docx files, I install Microsoft's own compatibility pack - downloadable for free from the MS site. Compatibility is not perfect and it sometimes doesn't quite get everything right, but so far it's good enough for me.

Maybe I missed your reason for abandoning MSOffice, George. Can you post it again? Sorry for asking.

It used to be true, but now not so much. I regularly carry Word and Excel documents between MacOS (at home, on intel) and Win7 (at work) versions of MS Office, with very little trouble.

Nor was the incompatibility a matter of strategy as stove-pipes within Microsoft - there were two development organizations. I assume that they had their heads banged together, because the incompatibilities mostly vanished some years ago.

Joe Gwinn

At least in XL 2003 and 2007, you can tell it to omit points, or gloss over them; it's in the button in the Select Data dialog.

Tim

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Seven Transistor Labs 
Electrical Engineering Consultation 
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

Well it's ~$200-300, and I don't really like it.

George H.

Oops. Y'er right. ODT files are mostly compressed. At one time, I was saving them, or rather storing them, in uncompressed format, which I assumed was the default. Sorry(tm).

Also, the ODT file is not just XML and image files. It also includes an uncompressed MIME header and a META tag file. These need to be uncompressed in order for LibreOffice to read the file. This rather unusual construct causes problems when one wants to manual assemble and ZIP and ODT file. Here's what one of the LibreOffice demo files looks like using 7-Zip: Note the "stored" which means uncompressed.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

You can "subscribe" to MS Office 365 for between $5 to $12.50 per month. For biz: or $100/year for home: That's for up to 5 machines and devices.

However, using one machine and the $150 home and student version as a price point, you'll break even in about 2 years depending on Office

365 plan and number of machines. It's a lousy deal for just one machine, which will break even in about 2 years. However, if you have 5 machines, it's much cheaper than buying Office for each machine seperately.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

I haven't read the entire thread, but to add my two cents worth... When I used Open Office I never found much in the way of problems reading MS Office files. Since I have switched to Libre Office, I can't say that. I've seen *some* incompatibilities in page formatting when opening Word DOC files. I don't know how much of this has to do with the program itself or the fact that I am using a new computer which may have somewhat different fonts standard. Libre Office does seem to read and write DOCX files although I have not used that feature extensively.

For the most part the problems have to do with text that is supposed to be on one page spilling over to a new page.

In spreadsheets I have found internal issues when any sort of line drawing is used on the page. I position the lines where I want them save and reopen the file and the lines are all shoved up to the left corner of the spreadsheet.

There are also a few formatting issues when attempting to use scientific notation. MS Word does it as a standard feature at this point. OO has a "workaround" that seems to work, IIRC. Libre Office may have a workaround as well, but I don't recall that it is easy to use at all.

I think these are all pretty minor differences, but there are differences.

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Rick