Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Workaround Opening DOCX Files in LibreOffice Writer

Recently I was marking assignments for a class. I spent hours entering comments into each using the Libre Office "Write" word processor. But when checking my work I found most files contained just one line of text. Searching the web in desperation, I found Bruce Kirkpatrick's "Workaround for bug in LibreOffice Writer when text is lost after saving and reopening docx files" (Mar 03, 2014). Following the instructions I was able to unzip the DOCX file, open the word.xml file with a text editor and delete the hyperlink which caused the problem and re-zip the file. This then opened in Libre Office, whereupon I saved the document in DOC format to avoid further problems. Hopefully Bug 55143  "FILESAVE: LibreOffice corrupting complex documents involving html tags", will be fixed some time soon. But in the interim, I will be saving DOCX files in DOC format to avoid this problem.

1 comment:

Cosmo said...

Problem is, LibreOffice has still poor formatting compatibility with MS Office, especially with xml formats. It's still way short for being able to open a Word document, edit it, save it, then open it in Word without losing formatting in one way or another. Its open/save filters are still way behind.

I strongly recommend using SoftMaker FreeOffice instead. This free office suite is not only slim, very fast and stable, but it lets you open/save Microsoft Office formats faithfully without formatting losses.

www.freeoffice.com