Can LibreOffice Writer read Microsoft Documents?

Question

I'm just wondering.Because I don't know if there are some things you can do in LireOffice Writer but you cannot do in Microsoft Word.Because my son does a lot of computer projects and I installed Ubuntu on VirtualBox so he can use it and install Dropbox on it to transfer a document on to my Windows 7 computer (The computer that I used to install it Ubuntu on a virtual machine) and keep working on both machines.

Answer 1

I would invite you to look at Does Microsoft Office 2010 still have incompatibility issues with LibreOffice

But since there is also Office 2013 and several issues when saving Office 2007+ files, I will answer your question first:

• Can LibreOffice Writer read Microsoft Documents?

  Yes it can. It will read them. The problem is that, depending on what is inside the document and what version of Office it is, you may find a problem or two related to how the document is viewed or set up.

• Will LibreOffice Writer read all type of Microsoft Documents correctly?

  Not yet. At least, to give you an idea, since LibreOffice 4.0 there has been a lot of improvements over how the Microsoft documents and read, written to and saved/loaded. I would even go so far as to say that 4.x is dedicated to provide the best compatibility between both. Each gradual new version (eg: 4.1, 4.2, 4.3....) has made many improvements regarding this. I had a question (can't find it right now but you can look for it in Ask Ubuntu) where I mentioned that most if not all 2010 documents were read correctly. This was alse when a user sent me one of his documents and after testing his problem it was found that indeed, not all documents, at least to the point of 4.2.0 could not read the document 100% correctly. Problems like footers, headers, some tables and image positions had issues.

• Where can I get the latest PPA of LibreOffice to test if it fixes an incompatibility problem?

  You can look at Is there a PPA with the latest version of LibreOffice? for more information

• Where can I see what updates regarding Microsoft compatibility are found for LibreOffice versions:

  you can go to the Release Notes at LibreOffice for the latest stable one or go to the Development Version to see what changes will come. In this case it is the 4.2.3. You can even jump to the newer (future) version of 4.3 where you will find a lot of changes towards compatibility. From footer and header issues, to importing nested comments, to better load/save speed for DOCX files to even improved OOXML support. So, with that you can see how the development is going, what issues are still on the table and what else is needed to fix them. To give you an idea on how many fixes are typically found, we can look at 4.2.3 where we see the following Microsoft DOCX/OOXML fixes:

  • Microsoft Office and OOXML filter improvements
  • Numerous improvements to interoperability with Microsoft Word's DOCX format:
    • Writer now preserves the 'Track Changes ON' when present in a DOCX (track changes data itself is partially preserved) fdo#64826 (Adam Co)
  • Solid page background color now roundtripped in DOCX. fdo#65257 (Adam Co)
  • Fix for page border margins in DOCX. fdo#64350 (Adam Co)
  • Fix for different Odd & Even page flag ignored. fdo#65655 (Adam Co)
  • Fix for hidden footer being imported to Writer as normal footer. fdo#64238 (Adam Co)
  • Writer now preserves underline color. fdo#65710 (Adam Co)
  • Writer now preserves character shading. fdo#65400 (Adam Co)
  • Writer now preserves page numbers that don't start at '1'. fdo#66543 fdo#44689 (Adam Co)
  • Fix for export of text-box inset property to DOCX. fdo#66929 (Adam Co)
  • Fix for DOCX export of page border - (interoperability export case #2) http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Writer/MSInteroperability/PageBorder
  • Fix for preservation of bullets with level 0 (should not be shown) fdo#66781 (Adam Co)
  • Fix for page border shadows in DOCX. fdo#64350 (Adam Co)
  • Borders in headers\footer now not being lost. fdo#67013 (Adam Co)
  • Text-Box background gradient color now preserved correctly. fdo#65295 (Adam Co)
  • Preserve rotation information on bitmaps. fdo#70457 (Jacobo Aragunde)
  • Fix wrong position and size values on exported shapes. fdo#70838 (Jacobo Aragunde)
  • Preserve Smart-Art information. (Jacobo Aragunde, Andrés Gómez, Miguel Gómez)
  • Fix wrong alignment and directionality when open DOCX file. fdo#43093 (Faisal M. Al-Otaibi)
  • Fix wrong directionality after save file created by MS. fdo#71646 (Faisal M. Al-Otaibi)
  • OOXML floating table improvements. For more details, see this blog entry. (Miklos Vajna)
  • Ampersand in document title causes corrupt docx fdo#63053 (Abdulmajeed ahmed)
  • Significant speedups of all OOXML parsing - by splitting parsing / tokenisation into a separate thread, and many other related optimisations to the FastParser (Matus Kukan, Michael Meeks)
  • Support for the default Microsoft Office 2010 and 2013 Agile decryption mechanism (Tomaž Vajngerl)
  • Support for OOXML encryption fdo#59524 (Tomaž Vajngerl)
  • Numerous other improvements have been made to the Microsoft OOXML Import and Export filters as well as for the Microsoft Office binary file formats and the RTF format. Details:
    • OOXML Filters→ OOXML, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, VML
    • Microsoft Office binary file filters→ DOC, XLS, PPT, "ww8"
    • RTF Filters→ RTF

• How will LibreOffice work with Pre-Office 2007 version (97, XP, 2003)

  With this particular version it will work most likely 100%. With over 50K documents in 2003, I have not gotten a single problem in the past 4 years of testing. If you do find a bug, please send it to the LibreOffice team, but in my tests I have not found a bug related to 97, XP or even 2003. All or most compatibility bugs started to appear with the arrival of 2007 and the OOXML/DOCX zipped files. So much so that Office 2003 was offered a compatibility upgrade to fix 2003 <--> 2007 DOC problems. Even 2007 received a Service Pack that tried to solve many issues related to DOCX with previous versions.