3 ms·

True. And I do agree about Libre office, first thing I uninstall on Ubuntu. But you can try and use WPS office. It's made by some Chinese company, it's fast an

by Shorel 10y ago

True. And I do agree about Libre office, first thing I uninstall on Ubuntu. But you can try and use WPS office. It's made by some Chinese company, it's fast and it is compatible with Office files. I had one of my Linux epiphanies with WPS. I got a Powerpoint presentation by email, I plugged the videobeam HDMI adapter to my laptop, pressed the Fn-F8 keys to change from mirroring to using two separate displays, opened the Powerpoint file with WPS presentations and it worked beautifully. The presentation was fullscreen in the external display, and I had the notes in the laptop. The presentation was flawless. I had never had any other software work without issues for me at the very first try and I was very happy that it happened while running Linux.

PeterisP 10y ago
Is it really compatible with Office files? It's not enough to be able to open 99% of the files properly, the main problem that makes libreoffice/openoffice unusable for me is that if I open a MS Office Word or Excel file, change a single character, and send it back, the file is likely to have other unintended changes in formatting or layout.
- Shorel 10y ago
  By your criteria I suspect nothing can be really compatible except the same version of MS Office that created the file. However, it has been compatible enough for all I have done in the last year and a half. If some file doesn't open or save correctly, a bug report can be filled here: http://wps-community.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=10 http://wps-community.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=10
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    Is that really that high bar to say that "nothing can be really compatible"? It comes down to a simple test that can be easily automated - take a test file (created in MS Office), run the load-from-MS-format operation, run the save-to-MS-format operation, verify that the resulting file is identical to the source file. There might be some differences in metadata (e.g. timestamps) but the document file content should be byte-for-byte identical. If not, then the software isn't MS Office compatible yet. It does mean that your internal in-memory document structure must be able to hold all of the information that MS Office files contain, and that the conversions between MS Office data structures and your internal data structures cannot be lossy, so your internal structure can't be so conceptually different in any aspect that you can't unambiguously convert to it and back - but that is required for interoperability, so that multiple people can do long term work on the same document with different tools.
    - Shorel 10y ago
      > Is that really that high bar to say that "nothing can be really compatible"? Yes. Different MS Office versions can produce different results.
      - PeterisP 10y ago
        I certainly experienced such situations back in MS office 95, 97 and 2001, but that has been a long time ago - the last few versions of MS office don't result in layout corruption like Open/Libre office does, even when interchanging the documents between windows and mac MS office versions which are quite a bit different.

by Shorel 10y ago

PeterisP 10y ago

Is it really compatible with Office files? It's not enough to be able to open 99% of the files properly, the main problem that makes libreoffice/openoffice unusable for me is that if I open a MS Office Word or Excel file, change a single character, and send it back, the file is likely to have other unintended changes in formatting or layout.

Shorel 10y ago
By your criteria I suspect nothing can be really compatible except the same version of MS Office that created the file. However, it has been compatible enough for all I have done in the last year and a half. If some file doesn't open or save correctly, a bug report can be filled here: http://wps-community.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=10 http://wps-community.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=10
- PeterisP 10y ago
  Is that really that high bar to say that "nothing can be really compatible"? It comes down to a simple test that can be easily automated - take a test file (created in MS Office), run the load-from-MS-format operation, run the save-to-MS-format operation, verify that the resulting file is identical to the source file. There might be some differences in metadata (e.g. timestamps) but the document file content should be byte-for-byte identical. If not, then the software isn't MS Office compatible yet. It does mean that your internal in-memory document structure must be able to hold all of the information that MS Office files contain, and that the conversions between MS Office data structures and your internal data structures cannot be lossy, so your internal structure can't be so conceptually different in any aspect that you can't unambiguously convert to it and back - but that is required for interoperability, so that multiple people can do long term work on the same document with different tools.
  - Shorel 10y ago
    > Is that really that high bar to say that "nothing can be really compatible"? Yes. Different MS Office versions can produce different results.
    - PeterisP 10y ago
      I certainly experienced such situations back in MS office 95, 97 and 2001, but that has been a long time ago - the last few versions of MS office don't result in layout corruption like Open/Libre office does, even when interchanging the documents between windows and mac MS office versions which are quite a bit different.