Why do documents edited in LibreOffice look different in Microsoft Office?

I see that when you edit or create a file in either Libre Office or Microsoft Office, the file opened in either of them will look different like for example paragraphs, columns, spaces,and so on is not where they are supposed be in the first place when the document were created. You have to edited it again to correct the changes when opened in either of the mentioned office programs. Why is this happening. Can this be corrected? What can be done?

There will never be 100% compatibility between this two software products. It can also depend on several things:

  1. What version of LibreOffice and Microsoft Office you use. Try to use the latest if possible. In every version of LibreOffice a lot of compatibility bugs are solved. So if you are not using the latest stable, then I suggest to migrate to newer version: http://www.libreoffice.org/download
  2. What kind of file format you are using. Try using Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP/2003 doc for text documents which are better supported in LibreOffice then later *.docx files.
  3. It depends what kind of functionality you use. There are just some features that are not supported in one of the products. See comparison: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:LibreOffice-_Microsoft_Office

Hi.docx and .odt documents both use xml format. The proprietary ‘.doc’ format was predominent till the late 90’s. Then came OpenOffice who introduced '.odt’ format and entered in competition with Microsoft. Then Microsoft reacted by introducining its ‘own’ open document format ‘.docx’ since Office 2007. At the date of today .docx and .odt documents are far closer than .docx and .doc.