6 ms·

Yeah, 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

Yeah, 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 ago
This. 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 ago
Please 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 ago
  Ubuntu Bug #1 has been closed for over 10 years. Time to let it go.
  - snvzz 3y ago
    >Ubuntu Bug #1 has been closed for over 10 years. Time to let it go. Could you please elaborate?
    - MathMonkeyMan 3y ago
      I interpreted this as "LibreOffice is primarily used on Linux, while Office is almost exclusively used on Windows. Windows has much larger desktop market share than Linux, so it is not surprising that Office prefers the Office-specific format." For what it's worth, [docx][1] is technically standard. Not sure how that pans out in practice. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
      - mananaysiempre 3y ago
        > For what it's worth, docx is technically standard. Not sure how that pans out in practice. It doesn’t, basically,—the spec isn’t enough to render it, and Microsoft has stopped engaging with ISO in favour of publishing what is now nineteen major versions[1] of their own spec in step with Office updates. There also was a huge shitstorm[2] around the ratification of the original, unsurprisingly given how useless and patent-infested it was. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-docx/b839fe1f-e1ca-4fa6-8c26-5954d0abbccd https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards... [2] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2007011720521698 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2007011720521698
      - tialaramex 3y ago
        It's an "international standard" via both ECMA and the ISO/IEC JTC1. Although ISO in particular seems very pleased that JTC1 exists, this is a terrible way to do technical work, basically the idea is that countries get to agree the world's standards using a democratic process. But why would countries be the right entities to do this work? They aren't, but there are a conveniently small number of them internationally and there were already bodies to represent them. Specifically they send representatives from their own national standards bodies to the relevant JTC1 sub-sub-committees. Yes that means Taiwan isn't represented. For situations where there's just a matter of agreeing a few narrow specifics, such as the A-series paper standards, it doesn't really matter how it's done. For a huge problem like "Standardize Word processor application data" it's completely impractical and the results are all you'd expect. Microsoft basically leaned on national representatives from smaller countries to push their pointless vanity standard through both ECMA and subsequently JTC1. After all that, it's basically futile because of course Microsoft can't magically make their "Office" suite and particularly Word behave in a documented internationally standard way, they don't even know how to describe much of the behaviour except "You know, that's how Word does it". And so, the "Office Open XML" standard has long sections where there's a magic escape hatch for "legacy" documents, which Word uses extensively, and it will always do that. "Standard" except that yeah, all this non-standard stuff is critical and will be used forever. Futile.
- jbstack 3y ago
  > 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. In the real world, we can't all afford to be this idealistic. When I need to send someone a document for work purposes and they can't open my .odt file in MS Word (something that frequently happens to me), I'm not going to say "You need to get used to working with the standard document format. It isn't my problem that you can't open it - it's more likely to be your bug, not Libreoffce's". I'm going to send them a .docx so that we can both get on with our work.
  - graemep 3y ago
    MS Office has officially supported ODT for years. Are you sending files to people using decade old versions of MS word, or are you using too recent a version of ODT, or are is MS's ODT support incredibly buggy or what?
    - johnchristopher 3y ago
      MS Office should be able to open and display ODT correctly but MS Office will produce "rainbow" ODT, ODT with extensions that diverge. I can't find the reference/source at the moment, I will update ASAP.
    - jasode 3y ago
      >MS Office has officially supported ODT for years. [...], or are is MS's ODT support incredibly buggy or what? The bugs of programs trying to read others' file formats goes both ways. LibreOffice has problems reading some *.docx files -- and likewise -- Microsoft Word has problems reading some *.odt files. Example thread of trying to keep "tracked changes" preserved in .odt files when co-workers open it in MS Word: https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?t=99962 https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?t=99962 That type of interoperability issue also happen with *.xlsx and *.ods spreadsheets that have non-trivial formatting or advanced functionality. The advice of "just use the OpenDocument format" is not that simple because round-trip fidelity of the file may not be 100% preserved depending on what features of the software the collaborators use.
    - 3y ago
- fsloth 3y ago
  ”MS Office users need to get used to working with the standard document format, which is what OpenDocument is.” This is not how the world, in which most of Fortune 500 operate in, works. The software and format people use, is the one usually mandated by their working environment. If your org operates in Office, you operate in Office. The question 99.9% of all users are concerned with is ”I want to review/edit this document I got from Sarah/need to send to Jane”. Not ”does this conform to standard xyz”. Standars are just paper that software may support. The real question is phenomenological - is there a support, at what level, and is the software vendor incentivized to implement support. There is no ”this format must be followed” convention in userspace software (sadly) unlike in say, hardware drivers for a desktop os. Even if the standard would have an ISO label.
- trelane 3y ago
  > Office can open them. Maybe, but it's probably more reliable for them to just grab LibreOffice to open it. It's much easier to get LibreOffice than MS Office.
  - narcraft 3y ago
    Not on a work computer
    - trelane 3y ago
      Depends on your work
bsdpufferfish 3y ago
I can't imagine working on large document in WYSWIG opaque formats anymore. Plain text file formats with version control is the only scalable toolset that won't lose your work.
- charlieyu1 3y ago
  And there are no file formats that support it, unless you go to something like Markdown.
  - rpcope1 3y ago
    LaTeX seems like it fits the bill.
    - charlieyu1 3y ago
      I have used LaTeX for a lot of things and it is a pain to use. It is like everything is stuck in 70s, from the syntax to the toolchain to package management.
      - landr0id 3y ago
        I don't use LaTeX for anything these days but Typst popped up recently and seems like a decent alternative: https://github.com/typst/typst https://github.com/typst/typst
        pydry 3y ago
        I dont like the idea of embedding a scripting language in my documents at all.
        charlieyu1 3y ago
        I mean LaTeX is Turing complete as well. It is just that scripting is very clunky to use.
wolverine876 3y ago
It's true for any non-native format (of some complexity) in any application. Vendor A's development team spends all their time developing, testing, bug-squashing, updating, etc. Format A, and developing, etc. their application, and developing the two to work together. They also have all the bug data, data from users, etc. Vendor B can't possibly keep up. They have their own application and format to develop. They lack the institutional knowledge, the data, etc. There's no way their application will correctly handle complex data in Format A nearly as reliably as Vendor A (which will have bugs itself). And in this case, Microsoft's Office team probably has far greater resources overall than LibreOffice.
davidgerard 3y ago
Got bug numbers on any of those? It's not clear what you mean. How recent was the LO?
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  I won't bother with providing more than this: https://ask.libreoffice.org/search?q=SAXParseException%3A%20%E2%80%98%5Bword%2Fdocument.xml https://ask.libreoffice.org/search?q=SAXParseException%3A%20... Feel free to craft problematic docx that trigger conversion errors and report them as bug for the converter.
dfox 3y ago
Similar effect can happen the other way around and in fact I have seen that more often (albeit mostly 10 years ago): - create DOCX with change tracking in Word - edit that in LibreOffice and save multiple times - open it in Word modify something and save - Word cannot load that file. Loading and saving in LibreOffice fixes that. All cases I have seen involved change tracking, which is probably not that surprising as the internal representation of change tracking in DOCX is totally brain damaged (even more than the rest of that "dump RTF and random crap as XML" format).
6c696e7578 3y ago
> it's sneaky I don't know if I would call LibreOffice sneaky here, they're the good guys IMO enabling you to break the clutches of MS Office
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  I am speechless.

vidmak 3y ago

This. 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 ago

Please 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 ago
Ubuntu Bug #1 has been closed for over 10 years. Time to let it go.
- snvzz 3y ago
  >Ubuntu Bug #1 has been closed for over 10 years. Time to let it go. Could you please elaborate?
  - MathMonkeyMan 3y ago
    I interpreted this as "LibreOffice is primarily used on Linux, while Office is almost exclusively used on Windows. Windows has much larger desktop market share than Linux, so it is not surprising that Office prefers the Office-specific format." For what it's worth, [docx][1] is technically standard. Not sure how that pans out in practice. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
    - mananaysiempre 3y ago
      > For what it's worth, docx is technically standard. Not sure how that pans out in practice. It doesn’t, basically,—the spec isn’t enough to render it, and Microsoft has stopped engaging with ISO in favour of publishing what is now nineteen major versions[1] of their own spec in step with Office updates. There also was a huge shitstorm[2] around the ratification of the original, unsurprisingly given how useless and patent-infested it was. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-docx/b839fe1f-e1ca-4fa6-8c26-5954d0abbccd https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards... [2] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2007011720521698 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2007011720521698
    - tialaramex 3y ago
      It's an "international standard" via both ECMA and the ISO/IEC JTC1. Although ISO in particular seems very pleased that JTC1 exists, this is a terrible way to do technical work, basically the idea is that countries get to agree the world's standards using a democratic process. But why would countries be the right entities to do this work? They aren't, but there are a conveniently small number of them internationally and there were already bodies to represent them. Specifically they send representatives from their own national standards bodies to the relevant JTC1 sub-sub-committees. Yes that means Taiwan isn't represented. For situations where there's just a matter of agreeing a few narrow specifics, such as the A-series paper standards, it doesn't really matter how it's done. For a huge problem like "Standardize Word processor application data" it's completely impractical and the results are all you'd expect. Microsoft basically leaned on national representatives from smaller countries to push their pointless vanity standard through both ECMA and subsequently JTC1. After all that, it's basically futile because of course Microsoft can't magically make their "Office" suite and particularly Word behave in a documented internationally standard way, they don't even know how to describe much of the behaviour except "You know, that's how Word does it". And so, the "Office Open XML" standard has long sections where there's a magic escape hatch for "legacy" documents, which Word uses extensively, and it will always do that. "Standard" except that yeah, all this non-standard stuff is critical and will be used forever. Futile.
jbstack 3y ago
> 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. In the real world, we can't all afford to be this idealistic. When I need to send someone a document for work purposes and they can't open my .odt file in MS Word (something that frequently happens to me), I'm not going to say "You need to get used to working with the standard document format. It isn't my problem that you can't open it - it's more likely to be your bug, not Libreoffce's". I'm going to send them a .docx so that we can both get on with our work.
- graemep 3y ago
  MS Office has officially supported ODT for years. Are you sending files to people using decade old versions of MS word, or are you using too recent a version of ODT, or are is MS's ODT support incredibly buggy or what?
  - johnchristopher 3y ago
    MS Office should be able to open and display ODT correctly but MS Office will produce "rainbow" ODT, ODT with extensions that diverge. I can't find the reference/source at the moment, I will update ASAP.
  - jasode 3y ago
    >MS Office has officially supported ODT for years. [...], or are is MS's ODT support incredibly buggy or what? The bugs of programs trying to read others' file formats goes both ways. LibreOffice has problems reading some *.docx files -- and likewise -- Microsoft Word has problems reading some *.odt files. Example thread of trying to keep "tracked changes" preserved in .odt files when co-workers open it in MS Word: https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?t=99962 https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?t=99962 That type of interoperability issue also happen with *.xlsx and *.ods spreadsheets that have non-trivial formatting or advanced functionality. The advice of "just use the OpenDocument format" is not that simple because round-trip fidelity of the file may not be 100% preserved depending on what features of the software the collaborators use.
  - 3y ago
fsloth 3y ago
”MS Office users need to get used to working with the standard document format, which is what OpenDocument is.” This is not how the world, in which most of Fortune 500 operate in, works. The software and format people use, is the one usually mandated by their working environment. If your org operates in Office, you operate in Office. The question 99.9% of all users are concerned with is ”I want to review/edit this document I got from Sarah/need to send to Jane”. Not ”does this conform to standard xyz”. Standars are just paper that software may support. The real question is phenomenological - is there a support, at what level, and is the software vendor incentivized to implement support. There is no ”this format must be followed” convention in userspace software (sadly) unlike in say, hardware drivers for a desktop os. Even if the standard would have an ISO label.
trelane 3y ago
> Office can open them. Maybe, but it's probably more reliable for them to just grab LibreOffice to open it. It's much easier to get LibreOffice than MS Office.
- narcraft 3y ago
  Not on a work computer
  - trelane 3y ago
    Depends on your work

bsdpufferfish 3y ago

I can't imagine working on large document in WYSWIG opaque formats anymore. Plain text file formats with version control is the only scalable toolset that won't lose your work.

charlieyu1 3y ago
And there are no file formats that support it, unless you go to something like Markdown.
- rpcope1 3y ago
  LaTeX seems like it fits the bill.
  - charlieyu1 3y ago
    I have used LaTeX for a lot of things and it is a pain to use. It is like everything is stuck in 70s, from the syntax to the toolchain to package management.
    - landr0id 3y ago
      I don't use LaTeX for anything these days but Typst popped up recently and seems like a decent alternative: https://github.com/typst/typst https://github.com/typst/typst
      - pydry 3y ago
        I dont like the idea of embedding a scripting language in my documents at all.
        charlieyu1 3y ago
        I mean LaTeX is Turing complete as well. It is just that scripting is very clunky to use.

wolverine876 3y ago

It's true for any non-native format (of some complexity) in any application. Vendor A's development team spends all their time developing, testing, bug-squashing, updating, etc. Format A, and developing, etc. their application, and developing the two to work together. They also have all the bug data, data from users, etc. Vendor B can't possibly keep up. They have their own application and format to develop. They lack the institutional knowledge, the data, etc. There's no way their application will correctly handle complex data in Format A nearly as reliably as Vendor A (which will have bugs itself). And in this case, Microsoft's Office team probably has far greater resources overall than LibreOffice.

davidgerard 3y ago

Got bug numbers on any of those? It's not clear what you mean. How recent was the LO?

johnchristopher 3y ago
I won't bother with providing more than this: https://ask.libreoffice.org/search?q=SAXParseException%3A%20%E2%80%98%5Bword%2Fdocument.xml https://ask.libreoffice.org/search?q=SAXParseException%3A%20... Feel free to craft problematic docx that trigger conversion errors and report them as bug for the converter.

dfox 3y ago

Similar effect can happen the other way around and in fact I have seen that more often (albeit mostly 10 years ago): - create DOCX with change tracking in Word - edit that in LibreOffice and save multiple times - open it in Word modify something and save - Word cannot load that file. Loading and saving in LibreOffice fixes that. All cases I have seen involved change tracking, which is probably not that surprising as the internal representation of change tracking in DOCX is totally brain damaged (even more than the rest of that "dump RTF and random crap as XML" format).

6c696e7578 3y ago

> it's sneaky I don't know if I would call LibreOffice sneaky here, they're the good guys IMO enabling you to break the clutches of MS Office

johnchristopher 3y ago
I am speechless.