Re: [libreoffice-users] Table presented totally wrong.

Stef Bon wrote:
> Hi Mark an others like Tom,
>
> first of all there seams to be a misunderstanding. I meant with
> template a guide given by the teacher
> to me, as a layout the teachers expect the results will have.
> So not the technical term for it, it's just a document in the docx format.

Yes, I realised that; apologies if I wasn't clear. I was trying to 
explain the background to the problem, and probably ended up rambling on 
a bit!

In summary: .doc is a more reliable format than .docx for transferring 
between MS Office and LibreOffice. If you can get whoever supplies the 
template to save it from MS Office into that format, it will probably 
work better for you.

> Nonetheless, I will do the following:
>
> a. whenever I can I will provide the results in PDF format. But that
> won't solve the problem when LibreOffice does not read the tables good
> in the first place.

That's a good idea, if they don't need to be able to modify the file.

> b. what should I ask the institute what format is best? I've
> understood that the ODF format is not supported by MS Office. What
> then?

Support for ODF is improving in newer versions of MS Office, so it might 
be possible to save from MS Office directly into ODF. If that doesn't 
work properly, the older MS Office formats (.doc for Word, .xls for 
Excel) generally work better than the newer .docx or .xlsx formats.

> c. I will provide a bug report. With stripped data. I really think
> that the importing and exporting "foreign" formats like docx, and
> especially the different versions of it, is very important. You speak
> about different versions. I know with Samba, the project leaders are
> provided the latest details from microsoft about the different
> versions SMB2, 2.1 and 3 to get maximal compatibility. Isn't that
> possible with their docx format?

I don't know much of the details. From my understanding, Office Open XML 
(OOXML - the format used in docx, xlsx, and related files) is a 
supposedly open standard. i.e. anyone can get the details of how to read 
and write files in that format. But that standard allows some data to be 
included in an application-specific format, which MS does to make it 
easier for themselves to port MS Office to using it. Unfortunately that 
means it's not so easy for anyone else to figure out how to read and 
write those parts of the file.

These compatibility problems are the reason that several governments and 
other organisations have started moving over to using ODF instead of 
Microsoft's formats for their files. That way they're not dependent on a 
single company continuing to support the format in order to read their 
files in future. I don't know about other countries, but there's some 
info about the UK's implementation at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-for-government

and, specifically relating to editable documents:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-for-government/sharing-or-collaborating-with-government-documents

From a quick search, it looks like the Dutch government are already 
doing something similar:
https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/english/

Mark.

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