11 ms·
"LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word"
- vrmiguel 3y agoUnsurprising this would be the case since LibreOffice strives for compatibility while MS would want clients to upgrade versions to newer, more lucrative editions
- what-the-grump 3y agoOr you know, standard open formats if you prefer them. But then there is always that MS trolls in comments. I converted, 100gb of xls/doc files to upload to SharePoint and netted something like 5x space savings just by resaving in an open format. I am not surprised at all that Libre is better at opening old files, there are files that Microsoft wont let you open without going back into security settings and allowing them, we were converting a library that goes back nearly 30 years, lots of stuff dated 20+ years ago, why would you carry compat for this trash today?
- chris_wot 3y agoStandard formats? I don't think so. The "standard format" they use for OOXML is not compliant with the strict version - so loose LibreOffice couldn't go to the standard to fix the compatibility issues.
- hajile 3y agoIt was never a standard to begin with. Countries were refusing to use MS office because it didn't support open document standards. MS basically showed up to the spec committee with a bunch of MS Word documentation and said it was a new spec. It was flatly rejected, but then at the last second, a whole bunch of the committee changed their minds for no logical reason (I suspect they were simply paid off) and the "standard" was adopted. Of course, it's impossible to write something compliant with their garbage and Office didn't comply with the "spec" in the slightest. At the same time, MS refused to keep up with ODF standards in a massive case of malicious compliance. In the end, it worked out for MS. They faked being open just enough for European governments to continue giving them huge piles of money for systems that are as locked down and proprietary as ever and consumers (like always) were the big losers.
- pmontra 3y agoI remember that I was following the saga on Slashdot. It went on for months. There is a Wikipedia page about that standardization process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xp84 3y agoIs it not a lot better on that front than .doc was, though? I realize a lot of stuff can read .doc today but it's due to a lot of reverse engineering that happened over like 20 years because it was entirely proprietary.
- GuB-42 3y agoBack in the days, Microsoft took backwards compatibility very seriously, maybe more than anyone else besides mainframes. Going as far as making special cases so that applications that relied on some bugs or undocumented features continued working.
- coryrc 3y agoIIRC not for Word file formats. Usually only the previous version would definitely convert, any older and things started breaking. And it would always save in the newest version by default so everyone else has to update to edit your file (there were free readers, but they were separate programs and I don't know how popular they were).
- crazygringo 3y agoYup, exactly this. And there would usually be an official plugin you could optionally install to read files from ~2 versions ago, presumably because businesses demanded it, but still wouldn't go back farther. I can't think of any other program that removed the ability to open older versions of its own files. Kinda crazy.
- wolverine876 3y agoAren't there only two word file formats, going back to the 1990s? I've never seen a conversion problem.
- xeromal 3y agoDOC and DOCX right? I feel like there might have been some DOC 97 and DOC 2003 etc stuff going on but my memory fails me
- lwkl 3y agoThere are three .doc pre office 97, .doc after 97 and .docx.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoHow I imagine the conversation: "It took a lot of work, but LibreOffice 7.6.4 can now open a wide range of word processor documents from pre-1994 on both Windows and Mac machines." "Can it edit .docx files without screwing up formatting yet?" "No, but who uses THAT?" (shamelessly adapted from https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/)
- david422 3y agoMany many years ago I was distributing my resume as MSWord documents that I had so nicely crafted in LibreOffice. Years later I happened to open one of those resumes in actual Word and realized all my careful formatting was completely trashed.
- toast0 3y agoThat's ok. HR departments were going to trash the formatting even if it looked good in MS Word. They manage to trash the formattimg for plain text resumes too.
- vidmak 3y agoIt's not just between LibreOffice and Word. Up until at least Office 2016, .docx formatting would regularly break for me between Word versions or between Office for Windows/Mac. Admittedly, Microsoft has got better with this as of late, but the .odt format is much more solid.
- hopw_roewur_ne 3y agoFormatting for docx files isn't the same between modern desktop Word, and the online version either, I've had trouble with tables for example.
- bee_rider 3y agoI stick to PDF for that sort of thing. No need for them to edit your resume, right?
- gizmo686 3y agoBack during the Windows 7 upgrade cycle, my company discovered that the old timecard software they were using no longer worked. Fortunately, the IT department came up with a solution: issue everyone in the commpany an Ubuntu VM, and have them run the software under Wine. That went on for years until the eventually switched over to a web based solution.
- taspeotis 3y agoWater under the bridge but Microsoft takes compatibility very seriously and provides tools for you to write your own compatibility patches: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ask-the-performance-team/demystifying-shims-or-using-the-app-compat-toolkit-to-make-your/ba-p/374947 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ask-the-performance-t...
- senkora 3y agoI bet that the timecard application was a 16 bit executable. 32 bit Windows was able to run 16 bit executables using the NT Virtual DOS Machine (NTVDM), but 64 bit Windows couldn't. Wine is however able to run 16 bit executables on 64 bit hosts using their version of NTVDM.
- lmm 3y agoThis is one of the rare use cases where Wine on Windows actually makes sense - you can build it under SFU/SUA, or at least you used to be able to. (I never managed to get FreeType working, so messages weren't sized properly for dialogue boxes, but it was enough to do what I needed).
- pbmonster 3y agoNot rare at all! If you work with older games, you often will struggle to get the correct version of direct3D to work on Windows 11. Most of those games start first try in Wine on Windows.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
- blibble 3y agowine is better at running everything prior to Windows 7 than current Windows
- lolinder 3y agoThis hasn't been my experience at all. WINE does fine for the top 10k or so most common apps. But whenever I've tried something in the long tail, I've been disappointed by cryptic error messages that don't turn up any useful answers in a search. Meanwhile, Windows's compatibility mode settings for Win XP have worked fine every time I've tried. The problem with Windows isn't a lack of backwards compatibility, the problem is that Windows 11 is Windows XP with lots of cruft added on top over the decades.
- o11c 3y agoThe reason WINE error messages often don't have google hits is because they're generally notes saying "new code needs to be written here".
- elzbardico 3y ago> The problem with Windows isn't backwards compatibility, the problem is that Windows 11 is Windows XP with lots of cruft added on top over the decades. It is not only cruft but also: 1 - Security. Lots of stuff that doesn't work it is because of features that couldn't be made secure and had to be removed from windows. 2 - Developers that used undocumented behavior that ended up being removed in modern windows versions, a lot of times because of the first item. Being undocumented behavior, it is a lot more probable that WINE doesn't implement it. And sometimes this was not a fault of the developer, but from a particular development environment and framework he used.
- ink_13 3y agoWindows XP was arguably Windows 2000 with a Fisher-Price UI bolted on, which in turn was "just" Windows NT with the Win98SE shell bolted on, so there's that, too. (My MS kernel developer friends might disagree with this assessment, though)
- techmeme-23 3y agoAbiword does OK with old .doc files, if anyone was wondering
- torstenvl 3y agoUnfortunately, AbiWord is effectively abandonware on Mac and Windows. I tried compiling it for Mac recently and there is code that was deprecated in 2016 with the release of macOS Sierra.
- ekianjo 3y agoit's better at reading UTF8 CSV files than Excel, too.
- recursive 3y agoThere is probably nothing that can read CSVs that does it worse than Excel.
- seanw444 3y agoAn internal tool I'm responsible for maintaining (that coworkers at my company use) consumes CSVs, and a lot of the time they're made by less-technical employees who use Excel to create/edit them. Very often Excel causes unexpected bugs that baffle me when the tool can't parse it. One time it surprised me when all the cells looked right in Excel itself, but when I popped it into Emacs, there were ~15 extra commas at the end of every row. Don't know what world that would be expected behaviour in, but alright.
- layer8 3y agoExtra commas mean extra cells. There are probably cells to the right of the data that are empty, but have formatting or something so that Excel thinks they are part of what needs to be saved.
- seanw444 3y agoProbably, but why would I want to keep formatted blank cells in my CSV data, when it doesn't even represent the style/formatting in any way? If there was any data I'd care about from those cells, it'd only maybe be the styling. But if it's not going to export the styling information, and the content is blank, then don't export those cells.
- hackideiomat 3y ago=cmd|' /C calc'!A0
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- dv_dt 3y ago[flagged]
- johnchristopher 3y agoYeah, well... Just don't assume the doc/docx file you are working on with multiple revisions and comments and you are dutifully saving every 5 minutes will open next time you try loading it... Libreoffice will eat your document sooner or later if you edit a word file [0]. Switch to Libreoffice file format then convert to doc/docx then send back that doc/docx file. [0] it's sneaky, basically Libreoffice will show you your edits and let you manipulate and modify the document as wish but what it saves into the file is corrupted and you will only notice it next time you open that file. Sometimes it's a mismatched tag in the internal xml representation (can be fixed), sometimes huge chunk of the doc will be missing (can't be fixed).
- vidmak 3y agoThis. LibreOffice once erased all the footnotes in an article I was editing as a .docx. Never had such problems with .odt.
- marcosdumay 3y ago> Libreoffice will eat your document sooner or later if you edit a word file To be fair, Word will won't eat it, but it will eventually shred it quite well to the point where there is no practical difference. The Word's format is just something to avoid.
- snvzz 3y agoPlease do not work on docx. Import docx if necessary, but work on the OASIS OpenDocument format. >Switch to Libreoffice file format then convert to doc/docx then send back that doc/docx file. If you need to send work to a msoffice user, just send OpenDocument. Office can open them. Should there issues, it's more likely to be their bug, not libreoffice's. MS Office users need to get used to working with the standard document format, which is what OpenDocument is.
- aaronbrethorst 3y agoUbuntu Bug #1 has been closed for over 10 years. Time to let it go.
- empyrrhicist 3y agoThese days it seems at least faster at opening even new Word documents, or maybe that's the network delay of the OneDriveification at work? Don't even get me started on Adobe Creative Cloud.
- fluxem 3y agoIt’s great for all the people still living in 1992. The rest want good collaboration tools with a grammar checker
- p-e-w 3y agoLibreOffice supports grammar checking with LanguageTool, which blows Word's grammar checker out of the water.
- happymellon 3y agoFragmented sentence. Please rewrite your comment. [Edit] I guess someone doesn't get the joke about how bad Words grammar checker is. It used to flag so much stuff as "fragmented" and didn't suggest improvements.
- g-w1 3y agoYep! I got some old word files off a floppy disk from 1996 and LibreOffice was the only thing I could find that could read them.
- jakearmitage 3y agoTo the Microsoft apologizers: Can't you be happy that open source software provides solutions to problems users face?
- neelc 3y agoI WORK at Microsoft 365 (not on Word), and it's actually good LibreOffice can read old Word files even if Word can't. I wasn't even born until 1997, tho when I was young I played a lot with MS-DOS and Win9x, since my toys were old PCs. The reality is, both MS Office and LibreOffice are legacy messes. In the 90s MS aggressively broke compatibility to get users to upgrade, which is why LO can read it. Now MS is excellent at compatibility, because the focus is subscription software your employer pays for.
- Dalewyn 3y ago[flagged]
- bugglebeetle 3y agoI use LibreOffice to open all my CSV files because somehow, in the year 2024, Excel can’t do that without messing them up. And yes, I know about the import wizard that still manages to mess them up at least some of the time.
- KronisLV 3y ago> I use LibreOffice to open all my CSV files I really love the preview, where you can choose what delimiters and character encoding you want to work with, which row to start from and so on. It's so very user friendly and nice to use.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoIt’s the best! I have no clue how Excel continues to be so awful at this, by contrast.
- BeefWellington 3y agoThe Excel team treats the CSV format like Voldemort. They put no effort into it because it's an open file format they can't seize control of.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Foobar8568 3y agoYou should use Power Query for this usage, something like Get Data, From File, yada yada
- bugglebeetle 3y agoI should double click on the file and it open correctly, like LibreOffice does when I set it as the default for this file type.
- 3y ago
- noufalibrahim 3y agoA Linux user friend of mine once told me that he saves his files as .doc. His argument was that if he saved as .odt, only libreoffice would be able to read it but with .doc, both platforms (LO and word) would "work fine".
- raincole 3y agoOne of my "culture shock" from game dev industry was the number of professional artists who paint with Clip Studio Paint but use .psd as exchangeable format[1]. [1]: Of course .psd isn't an exchangeable format. It's proprietary. But just like your friend's case, CSP can kinda read/write .psd, while Photoshop can't read .clip at all.
- subtra3t 3y agoCould you share some other "culture shocks" from game dev?
- raincole 3y agoIn regards of proprietary format, the prevalence of FBX is another one. Especially when there is an open format specifically designed for this purpose (glTF) by an important organization (Khronos). Generally speaking I think game dev industry relies on closed-source stuff much more than web dev. It's not that surprising tho; after all the most targeted platforms (Windows, iOS, consoles), except Android, are all closed OS. Another one is salary (again compared to web dev). But I heard web devs had a hard time lately too.
- Snow_Falls 3y agoThe salary issue (along with the working conditions) are because game dev is an "art" field which meant, like other creative jobs, companies can life in young, naive people and exploit their passion to get them to accept terrible conditions because "wow I get to make a game". I suspect this is why triple A games are so terrible nowadays, most of the talented people realised that corporate game devs suck and going indie is the best path. Web design is also creative obviously but mostly going to consist of making corporate pages, not something most people can be passionate about.
- professoretc 3y agoIt's rather ironic that the one old file format I've tried to open in LibreOffice, namely, old StarOffice 5 files, do not open. (LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice, which was the open-sourcing of StarOffice.) The converters were removed to simplify the codebase.
- jonhohle 3y agoIf they are converters, I wonder how difficult it would be to make them standalone utilities that did the format conversion and nothing more (assuming there doesn’t need to be manual intervention). I’m sure there is complexity but it seems like StarOffice is a fixed format at this point, and OpenDocument has some previous fixed version that could be targeted. Not that anyone should expect different, but Apple has not preserved backwards compatibility with their iWork formats and I have several legacy documents that I need to find old versions to open.
- davidgerard 3y agoLO now has libstaroffice, which should read them. What happens with recent LO?
- theandrewbailey 3y agoTry opening with Libreoffice 3.x. A lot of support for Staroffice was dropped in LO 4. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0#Feature_removal_/_deprecation https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0#Feature...
- 29athrowaway 3y agoAnd Wine is better at running some older Windows software than Windows. We have a full circle. "The job ain't done until Word won't run".
- nogajun 3y agoNever open old Japanese Word files in LibreOffice. It will destroy the file. This is because old Japanese Word files are saved in Shift JIS, but LibreOffice opens them in UTF-8.
- xvilka 3y agoDo you know if there is an issue for that particular problem in their Bugzilla[1]? If not, have you tried opening a new one? Could you share a sample to reproduce? Because I tried to search for "Shift JIS" on Bugzilla and found nothing. [1] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/ https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/
- d3w4s9 3y agoSimilar story: I managed to run a Windows XP-era game to run on Ubuntu but not Windows 11. The issue is that the game uses some sort of Direct3D which doesn't work on Windows 10 or later. I don't want to install Windows XP/7/8 on the a machine, and virtual machines have bad support for graphics acceleration. But somehow it can run in Wine on a "real" Ubuntu installation after a bit of poking around and getting the correct files. And what's even funnier? I installed Wine in Ubuntu running in WSL on a Windows 11 machine, and the game runs in that environment! Never thought I would run an old game in such a convoluted way.
- tiptup300 3y agoI've been wanting to run old Photoshop in this way. Was the process straightforward?
- lolinder 3y agoHow old is the Photoshop? I was recently able to run Macromedia Flash 2004 in Windows XP compatibility mode without any hiccups.
- squarefoot 3y agoThis does not surprise me at all. WINE under Linux through Yabridge runs perfectly some very old (20+ years) but still excellent audio plugins from the Win98/XP era that have problems or don't work at all on newer Windows versions. Gaming also benefits from this incredibly faithful level of emulation (WINE Is Not an Emulator), and as of today many Windows games, including newer ones, can be installed in a transparent way under Linux using WINE. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg1NiXtrJ6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg1NiXtrJ6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b50Stm8gu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b50Stm8gu4
- phone8675309 3y agoThe Steam Deck runs Linux, and I can get many games that shit the bed on Windows 7, 8, or 10 but run perfectly fine under 98 and XP to run under Proton.
- BeefWellington 3y agoI've recounted a similar story to this in the past: Basically some custom DOS app being used at a small chain of quick oil change places wouldn't run on Windows 7+ anymore, regardless of compatibility settings but worked fine on Linux under wine. This was done as a stopgap until they could redevelop the application. Because of the experience they had with their console app, they kept it a console app and just had its replacement modernized and written to run in a linux shell (saved all their licensing costs too). They seemed pretty happy in the end. Microsoft moved away from the core tenet of backwards compatibility at all costs more than a decade ago seemingly across the entire company all at once.
- analog31 3y agoSincere question: Did that core tenet become incompatible with security against malware? Were the attack surfaces too big when supporting the old stuff?
- Kwpolska 3y agoIt is infeasible and unmaintainable for them to be compatible with everything they have ever released since the 1980s. 16-bit DOS and Windows applications don't run on 64-bit versions of Windows.
- hartator 3y agoCan’t it just be emulated?
- bbanyc 3y agoA while back I read a piece by, I think, Joel Spolsky on the "design" of the XLS format. It was mostly a dump of Excel's internal memory structures to disk, with some optimizations to speed up saving and loading on the slow disks of the time. He seemed quite satisfied with how well the software performed but all I was thinking is "any other program trying to deal with those files is screwed." And "any other program" includes later versions of Excel. It'd be nice to have some documentation of the internals of old DOC and XLS formats, just for the sake of recovering old files for archival purposes, but it's likely that Microsoft never bothered documenting them, even internally.
- happymellon 3y agoThis is also true of DOC. It was just a dump of the internal representation of Word. Hence why they had to completely overhaul it with DOCX/XLSX when we had the open standards requirements come in. There was no possible way for Microsoft to document it. Although it doesn't help that DOCX/XLSX have tags for "Internal binary dump of Word/Excel" so they also fall into the same trap.
- mjburgess 3y agoThey would, presumably, just need to release the header files? All file formats are, in the end, just memory structures written in binary.
- anticensor 3y agoThen their dark history would have been obvious.
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoYES, it's an excellent read! https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
- davidgerard 3y agoMicrosoft has in fact documented these old formats, because they were forced to in antitrust actions! Per Spolsky, they're an absolute shower. But they are, technically, documented!
- melagonster 3y agoThis help me at least once. office365 don't support a old doc format, use Libre office save it as new version...
- m-i-l 3y agoBack in the mid-late 1990s I worked for a software company producing anti-virus software, and scanning Word files for macro viruses was one of those things they had to do. However, they weren't able open Word 1.0 files, so they brought over some actual Microsoft employees from the US to help. For a relatively small (at the time) UK company that was actually quite a big thing and the only time I'm aware they did something like that. It was all a bit hush-hush, but the story I heard was that Microsoft had lost the original source code to read and write Word 1.0 format files (although they still had compiled binaries), so new code had to be reverse-engineered.
- submeta 3y agoI have word documents from 1997-1999 that are useless. The recent Word version does not open them. I open the documents in Nisus Writer on my Mac, but the formatting is basically useless. I‘ll give it a try in LibreOffice.
- blackoil 3y agoYou can find Word 2003-2007 and use that to convert it.
- japanman185 3y agoThis LibreX for open source products really needs to stop. Also the loose-attribution of panasian or ancient greek/latin…
- whalesalad 3y agoLibreOffice - in my experience - is also much better about dealing with huge CVS files.
- dusted 3y agoWINE is better at running old Windows software than Windows, so there seems to be some consistency at least.
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoPity that the same can't be said of modern Word files. My father asked me for help in converting a book he had written in Word to an EPUB. I opened it up in LibreOffice so that I could try to fix a few things like insert a proper ToC (he generated his by hand, and is constantly fiddling with the page numbers whenever he changes something). LO renders it well enough that I can see the intent, but there are formatting artifacts galore, and as soon as I start fiddling with anything, it seems like I've consigned it to a limbo state where it looks like crap in both LO and Word. Regrettably, my personal devices are all Linux or Android only at this point, so, I lack a proper copy of Word to fix it for him.
- yesco 3y agoIf this is still an issue for you I believe you can convert/import docx files into ebooks via calibre, from there you can just use calibre's ebook editor to fix things up
- extraduder_ire 3y agoIs the difference between the macos version of word and the windows version of word significant here? I have to assume microsoft didn't ship a whole COM compatibility layer office for mac, like apple did with objective-c when they put safari on windows.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoGoogle Docs is now also a roach motel for DOCX files. It is apparently no longer possible to export as DOCX. I am rather disappointed, but not surprised. I have become quite skilled and experienced with Google Docs and Sheets, but frankly I'd prefer, for reasons of compatibility and interoperability, to author stuff in Microsoft Word instead.