Re: [libreoffice-users] ODT MSO to LO

Hi :)
Actually the Doc format works just fine in LibreOffice and almost all
other office suites and programs.  It's only the DocX that really has
problems.

Many people don't even have any idea of what format they are using.
Windows defaults hide the file-extensions so it's difficult to find
out.  Doc was around for so many years that people assume they are
still using that when they run into problems but we invariably find
that they were really on DocX and that when they do "Save As" into the
older format the problems evaporate.

> From the comments it looks like there might be some problem with
trying to open some ppt (Powerpoint presentations) in some versions of
LibreOffice.  I think we even had a couple of threads about that on
this mailing list.  However again it's not completely certain that
they really knew what they were talking about and there is a good
chance they were really using PptX.


Any editable document is likely to appear slightly differently on each
different machine it opens on due to settings, configurations, types
of printers attached, A4 vs US Letter page sizes and so on.  That is
why PDF exists as it is meant to look identical on all machines.
Sadly it's not always true now but that is the basic idea of PDF.
These slight variations are NOT really the main problem.  If people
really care about the precise layout then they should really be using
a proper DTP and apparently LibreOffice (and OpenOffice) make it
really easy to move documents into LaTeX and such but people are less
likely to have heard of those and more likely to think of the
expensive alternatives (that are probably not as good) where you have
to keep buying a new program every couple of years to keep up.

However the interoperability issue is much bigger than that it's just
that people are more likely to have noticed the fairly trivial issues
so it's easier to explain it using those as examples.

Regards from
Tom :)


On 27 February 2014 09:26, Tom Davies <tomcecf@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi :)
> From what i have read about other large scale migrations to OpenOffice
> or LibreOffice it's a good idea to get in contact with some of our BoD
> (Board of Directors) and through them maybe some on TDF's Advisory
> Board
> http://www.documentfoundation.org/contact/
> and / or people from the Free Software Foundation
> https://fsf.org/
>
> These can arrange to assign, for the long term, experts who have quite
> a bit of experience guiding organisations through the migration
> process.  There are other organisations such as Redhat, Canonical and
> so on along with other apparently distro-specific organisations who
> would be happy to help even if you do end up going with some other
> distro.  There are also many 3rd party organisations and even
> individuals who have expertise in helping with these sorts of things.
> OpenSuSE budded a new one called Collabora which includes many of the
> devs they had working on LibreOffice, including the famous Micheal
> Meeks (who i see as a sort-of lead dev as he is naturally charismatic
> and gives good interviews that kinda inspire people)
> http://www.collabora.com/
>
> The extremely few cases that don't manage to break away from MS have
> employed purely MS experts and ignored the advice of their FSF people
> (or other OpenSource experts).  Even so they have typically enjoyed
> savings during the initial phases of the migration.  Sadly, by then
> reverting to MS they have then had to buy into all the stuff they
> would have had to buy along the way but had to buy it all at once.
> Also since MS only has a slash&burn approach rather than any gradual
> migration routes they have had additional expenses such as retraining.
>  They could have used FSF support to gradually return to MS but chose
> not to accept that route.
>
> Regards from
> Tom :)
>
>
> On 27 February 2014 07:28, Tim Lloyd <tim.lloyd@gmx.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > we hear about people experiencing problems when opening documents in LO
> > after they were created by MS Office in the .DOC/.DOCX formats.
> >
> > How about documents created in MS Office in the .ODF format? Does anyone
> > have experience opening these documents in LO? Similarly LO documents
> > created as ODF and subsequently opened in MS Office. Any experiences?
> >
> > Not surprisingly I am thinking this way after the UK government proposals.
> > It would be interesting to know what challenges European governments have
> > faced since adopting ODF.
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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