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.
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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