How well does MS Word 2010 render ODT files saved in LibreOffice?

How well does MS Word 2010 render ODT files saved in LibreOffice? ODT seems great but can it be the default when you have to share files with MS Word 2010 users? Are there any tests that are done or any missing functionality I could expect when using LibreOffice Writer ODT files with Word 2010?

I just ran a couple tests. Here are the results. Note: Document created in LO 3.4.3 and opened in Office 2010.

  • Regular Text. Looks great.
  • Multiple fonts. Looks great.
  • Line spacing. Looks great.
  • Underlined/bold/italic text. Looks great.
  • Center-align/Right-align/justify. Looks great.
  • Text coloring, highlighting and backgrounding. Looks great.
  • Numbered list. The numbers and content are there, but there are no tabs to give the list hierarchy.
  • Bulleted list. Same as numbered list.
  • Tables. Looks great.
  • Pictures embedded into the document. Looks great.
  • Header and Footer. Looks great.
  • Page breaks. Looks great.
  • Margins and page formatting are the same on both documents.
  • Comments and bookmarks. Looks great.
  • Horizontal rule. Looks great.
  • Textbox. It came through, but its a different size.
  • Hyperlinks. Text is still there but the link itself is gone.

It should also be noted that Word threw up a fit when I opened the document. I had to open it in read-only mode. Overall, the document came out looking pretty good, with the exception of lists, hyperlinks, and textboxes. Here is the file I used, in case anyone wants to test it themselves.

There is one important thing to consider: Microsoft Office does not natively handle page styles, while LibreOffice does not natively handle table styles. In Word, tables and pages are treated very differently. The formatting and layout may end up being similar, but in general ODT files modified by Word get their styles all messed up. For example, The default ODT page style will be renamed MP0 regardless of its original name. In conclusion: while the appearance of an ODT document might be preserved in Word, usually the semantics of the documents are negatively affected. It’s as though Word doesn’t know what to do with the ODT pages and tables and the corresponding styles and templates.

I have opened a file created in Libra Office Impress in Power Point with basic shapes and text and it was surprisingly close to the original. I had to do very little tweaking. As for ODT things have also been fairly good. I have had bullets switch on me before or tabs jump around but overall it’s not bad.

Edit: Just remembered tables don’t transfer well typically.

Note: LO writer documents format differently in Lotus…OO looks pretty good
On Lotus…headers/footers format with different spacing, bit maps not quite right, etc.