Lost entire doc beyond page 2

Twice I have faces a disaster that has made me switch back to MS Office. I have an 18 page WORD document that I edited extensively. I wanted to report the problem. I set Record Changes on and also included a number of inserted comments. I saved the file along the way and spent 4 hours editing the document. I was saving in the MS 2007 to 2010 format. When I was done I saved again, then closed the file and emailed it to my business associate. He received a version that only contained the first two pages of the 18 pages. Repeated the edits with the same result. … Now my typing here got lost too! I have a complete description if anyone wants one. I am switching back to MS Office.

emeger, I am sorry to hear about your bad experience.

Unfortunately you are not alone.

As veteran Linux reviewer Dedoimedo notes:

Anyhow, so I've encountered the following quirks:

Some of the special characters are not preserved, like three dots (...)
Tracking changes are not preserved
Comments are not always preserved
Page breaks, tabulation, spacing might change

[...]

In our world, with the market dominated by Microsoft Office, you must use Word
for your documents. You may like it or not, deny it or not, but at the end of the
day, people on the other end, the weakest link in your chain, will demand it, and
they don't care about GPL or portability or anything else. For casual use, any
word-processing software will work. But there will always be that one case where
you must use Microsoft Office. 

He is right. Now, it’s possible that some fanatics will come along to claim that Microsoft Word loses text, or that it crashes, much more often than LibO; or that different flavors of Microsoft Office are even less compatible with each other than LibO. These people are crazy. Do not listen to them.

To put things in perspective, Dedoimedo does NOT say that you should use ONLY Microsoft Office. However, you have to think carefully about when to use one and when the other. Many people say that LibO is far superior to M.O. in its handling of styles because it is more logical. So that would be one valid reason to consider using LibO Writer as your primary word processor.

However, you would be a fool not to have Microsoft Word also installed on your machine. At a minimum, download and install the free Microsoft Word Viewer.

If you have even a single important contact who will not accept anything other than 100 percent compatible Microsoft Office files then you must adjust accordingly. Do not rely on claims of perfect compatibility. LibO will never achieve 100 percent compatibility with M.O.'s file formats.

If nothing else, you will want Microsoft Office (or Viewer) installed on your machine for quality assurance. Use it to open any files saved by LibO in Microsoft Office formats and check for any problems before you mail them to your contact.

Hi @emeger,

It would be helpful to have more information about the problems you experienced so that we can fix any underlying bugs. We take data-loss bugs very seriously, and want to solve them quickly so that they do not affect our users’ data.

Please start by installing the latest release.

Please also file a bug and provide a list of steps that can reproduce your problem. The QA team will be happy to help you track down this issue!

Please post a link to any bugs you file in a comment below using the format “fdo#123456”.

Thanks!