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Word 2007 and Open Office

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 18 comments
LXer; By Sal Paradise 		Mail this story
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LXer Feature: 13-Jul-2006

Microsoft appear to be up their old tricks again. This time it's the "let's work with odt to show how much we care" farce. If you work in an office you probably need to pay attention to this.

I've posted a couple of comments on this but it seems to have slipped by unnoticed, so I thought I'd put a short story together.

I have a beta version of Office 2007 at home and this morning I was playing around with formatting. Here's what I found.
I created a .doc in Word 2007. I used a variety of fonts and sizes of fonts to create it. I saved it as .doc, .rtf and .docx.
I then opened, or tried to, the resultant files in OpenOffice Writer.
The .doc opened fine and displayed the document with the formatting as I had made it on Word. The .rtf file opened as expected and the .docx wouldn't open at all. I expected this to be the case.

I then saved the .doc as an .odt file in OOWriter and transferred it to the Windows machine and opened it via the Word2007 odt addon. After Word had converted it, it opened in Word and looked exactly the same as when I created it. I then saved it back to .doc (save as .odt is not working (at present?).
I then transferred the saved .doc back to the Linux box and opened it in OOWriter and all the formatting had gone.



This is a stupid dirty trick (as far as I can tell). It basically means that Word (as it stands now) is deliberately stripping away the formatting in .odt files when it saves them to .doc (currently the only format that OOWriter can work with from Word). It's not that Word can't render the formatting from an odt file, just that it strips it away when saving back to .doc. Bear in mind that this part of the process does not require the odt addon.

This makes Word2007 completely incompatible with OpenOffice and will, if this is not sorted out, make working on files between the two suites impossible. Imagine the scene. Your department uses OpenOffice, maybe because you are in the charity or voluntary sector or because you live in a poor country that can't afford MSOffice prices, and you spend ages creating a document that you send to someone with Office2007 (if it ever gets released). They open it, work on it and save it to .doc and send it back. All your formatting is gone.

This will further polarise the Office world. Rich countries and government departments will be using Office 2007 reasonably soon. This will impact the OpenSource world and force some to abandon the idea of using OpenOffice unless Microsoft can be made to make Word save to .doc from .odt properly.

Of course, all this is done using beta level software (on the Windows machine) and this may be known about and there may be plans to sort this out.
On the other hand it feels like MS is making it as HARD as possible for people to use .odt and if this is the case, and historically this is the way MS tend to behave, then start making a fuss.
As loud as you can.

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Comments (18)

freelsjd ·
The first response should be, since you have a beta version, to send in a beta comment back to the code developer (microsoft) that you have found a bug. perhaps we should not assume that Microsoft has done this on purpose and that they are really that dumb. who knows, perhaps the bug will get fixed.
NoDough ·
I have to agree with freelsjd. We can't hold this against them in a beta release. However, if you report the bug and they don't fix it in the production release, well.... you know.
dinotrac ·
I'll jump on the bandwagon and agree with f&N on this one.

I'm a guessing (hey! Did you notice the EU is starting to ramp up?) that Microsoft has ample incentive to interoperate will with odt files --- which includes round-trip transfers.

odt is an ISO standard, and there are lots of people around the world who care about such things. Failure to get it right is likely to result in the kind of message Microsoft understands: a lighter pocketbook.
Aninhumer ·
Never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity :)
jimf ·
> Never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity :)

Never fear... We know that MS has enough of both to go around.
3monkeys ·
Could you post your test documents? Specifically, I'd like to see an original .odt then that same .odt saved to .doc, read into Word and written back out. I do a lot of work with .odt see http://www.3monkeyweb.com/wiki/tiki-view_blog.php?blogId=2 for some observations.
dinotrac ·
>Never fear... We know that MS has enough of both to go around.

Twice.
sbergman27 ·
Well, it *is* a beta.

And this works both ways. IIRC one of the Fedora releases had a bug in the installer that meant that once it was installed once, if you tried to install Windows back again, Windows couldn't boot. In the usual fedora fashion, the "fix" was "Wait for the next release. We don't do respins." And that wasn't a beta. It was an actual release.

So at this early stage of the game, I'd just report it as a bug and see what happens.

grouch ·
I think you're all overlooking this part:

"It's not that Word can't render the formatting from an odt file, just that it strips it away when saving back to .doc. Bear in mind that this part of the process does not require the odt addon. "
sbergman27 ·
What happens if you take the doc and open it again in Word? This could as easily be an OO.o bug.
salparadise ·
If you open the saved .doc in Word the formatting is present and correct, it only disappears when opened in OOWRiter. So it may have been misleading of me to say "it strips the formatting away when saving it back to .doc."

I should have said, "it appears that Microsoft have done something so that a .doc that has been created from a .odt is hard/impossible for OO to read correctly".

mjjohansen ·
But the .odt implementation in OOo is not entirely OASIS compliant. Have you tried with KOffice?
salparadise ·
KOffice?

Doh. Honestly hadn't occurred to me. (Partly because my impression was that OO was the main contender for the Office suite crown).

Not a bad idea.

I'll get back to you...
salparadise ·
Hmm. OK, I have three files in .doc format, all saved from the same .odt file using Word2007. Two render in kword perfectly and one has no formatting at all.

I'll have to rerun the experiment when I get home.

I'll post the results here afterwards.
salparadise ·
Update.

I took the following piece of text and pasted it into OOWriter (2.0.2 running on SuSE 10.1).

Kernel release status

The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.17.3, released on June 30. It was a single-fix release for a denial of service vulnerability in the netfilter SCTP connection tracking code. One day earlier, 2.6.17.2 had been released with a relatively large set of important fixes. The SCTP fix can also be found in 2.6.16.23.

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.18-rc1, released by Linus on July 5. A summary of changes can be found in a separate article below. Also available are the short-form changelog (too bulky to be included with Linus's announcement) and the long-form changelog.



I put the heading into 16pt Impact, the first paragraph into 12pt Thorndale and the second paragraph into 18pt Nimbus Roman. The first section (up to the first comma) of each of the first sentence in each paragraph is in bold.

I then opened the .odt in Word 2007, apart from Word replacing Thorndale with Calibri, the pt size and bold sections were as they were in the original. I then saved the document as Word97-2003 Document in Word 2007.

I then transferred the resultant .doc back the SuSE machine and opened it in kword. The title is no longer in 16pt impact but is now in 18pt Nimbus Roman. The first paragraph is no longer in 12pt Thorndale but is also in 18pt Nimbus Roman and the second paragraph is in 11pt Albany. All the bold sections have also gone and are in normal weight.

Out of interest I opened the original .odt in kword and it appeared exactly as it should.

In OOWriter the .doc is rendered with everything in 11pt Calibri and no bold.

I have spent the last few hours in a state of high anxiety thinking I had posted an erroneous load of rubbish and had accused Microsoft of underhandedness. I unposted the original article and was considering resigning from lxer in shame.

So I'm somewhat relieved. I may have accused wrongly and for that I offer unconditional apologies.

Sorry Microsoft!

Never-the-less there is something odd going on. I have to confess to not having much of an idea what though. If anyone wants a copy of the original .odt and the resultant .doc then I'll mail them to you.

Read the whole comment
sbergman27 ·
> Sorry Microsoft!

Where should one go to report offensive forum posts? ;-)
3monkeys ·
I'm still interested in this as I deal with the ODT XML directly. I have not seen style information being dropped durring transformations, however, I have seen style transforms, especially wrt fonts. I'd like a copy of the files.
dcparris ·
Sal & 3monkeys: I would like to suggest that you two work together and write up a new article detailing your experiences.

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