![]() Compatibility down to the square millimetre would only be required in publishing software, so that for instance a completely formatted manuscript (down to editor-checked hyphenation) will be printed exactly as seen by the editor. Finally, compatibility wouldn't have to go any further than preserving actual content, together with basic formatting information. There are also still many bugs and feature requests, fixing of which would be better for usability of OOo than a better compatibility with MSO. There are still features documented in the ODF definition that have not been implemented in OOo. Second, the developers of OOo have better things to do than hunt down every new quirk in MS software. If it had been intended as such, it wouldn't have had page styles, it wouldn't have had word completion and it wouldn't have had a lot more features that are or were absent in MSO. First, get the idea that OOo is a free clone of Microsoft out of your head. That's sad, and All of your points are mute. Part of the problem I think is attitude: Some OO people seem not to actually want to be able to do good conversions. It's just sloppy programming and could be easily fixed. This is not a proprietary technical problem. I see the same issue with Word tables in OO Writer-the tables show up but the sizes of the cells are wrong. The images and text were all there-embedded, not linked, but wrongly positioned. The positions and sizing of the letterhead text and images were all wrong. But just the other day I opened a DOCX document that had an image and letterhead in it, in OO 3.2. You can't force MS Office users to embed vs link objects, and you can't force everybody to have the same installed fonts. That will solve 99% of the problems right there. Measure the absolute position and size of every item in the DOCX document and ensure that OO reproduces those measurements exactly. You don't have to duplicate MS's code to get MS's effect. The problem with this thinking is that it's self-defeating. Preventing the interoperability of the file format is the only way for MS to avoid most of the users going to OOo." The problem is not with the application but with the file format. The "crazy" smiley icon illustrates the relationship between me (on the left) and MicroSoft (the brick wall - but I couldn't figure out how to post it on this page.Īnything else is called vendor lock-in policy. I'll check this thread to see if a workable solution is found. If that's impossible, is there another way to transmit the document to my daughter, which she can edit? Hypertext markup language, maybe? My text uses six character colors, all in one font (Calibri), in sizes ranging from 1 point to 12 points, but otherwise is simple - there are no complex word tables in it, for example. My problem now is to get my ODF document back into MS Office format. In the meantime, I had bought Word 2010 (which is backwards compatible to Word 2007). She tells me she wants it in Word format, so that she can edit it on her computer instead of making handwritten notes. I wrote a response to his file, which I wanted to transmit to my daughter. My brother converted his Word 2007 file into an ODF file and sent it to me. Also WordPerfect is good about backwards compatibility, while Word, as noted above in this thread, deliberately sabotages backwards compatibility. When he sent me a file in Word 2007, I could not open it because my trial version of Word had expired (I let it expire because I hate Microsoft Word - I had formerly used only WordPerfect, whose Reveal Codes feature has almost always enabled me to solve problems in highly complex WordPerfect tables). My brother has Word 2007 and Open Office. I believe I have the same problem as the person who opened this file. That's all you can expect on the technical level. OOo and a few other programs offer to convert these formats to something they can use and they offer a fairly good export according to the features that are implemented in the respective software. This is how proprietary file formats had been designed. If you need a maximum of MS compatibility then there is no alternative and possibly such a thing will never exist. Instead they would not hesitate to sue you. A perfect re-implementation of all their latest quirky file formats requires to write something close to a clone of their software. If only a 100% clone of MS Office would be a viable alternative then there is no alternative. If Open Office does not intend to be and does not profile itself as a viable business alternative to MS Office, then what you say is valid. If they weren't, we would not be having this discussion. All MS document formats are the de facto standard for business documents. Buddyboy wrote:To answer your question, because I hold OO in high regard.
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