How to import tables from MS Word into LibreOffice?

Hi,

Anyone knows how to import tables from MS Word into Writer or Calc? WHen I try to copy/paste from MS Word into LibreOffice I get abolute garbage. In Calc, it gives an image of the table. In Writer, it gives me a set of non-table formatted number. This is a big problem, as I have a word document I want to convert to an open format that has many tables in it.

One comment:

I understand that the guys at MS work very hard alongside freedom open-source technologies in order to ensure incompatibility between the softwares is maximized as much as possible.

What I find really incredible is that people can say they have never came across any feature that has been put in deliberately (presumably in a non-free open-source oftware) to make it hard to reverse engineer (Linux Voice - September 2016). Any thoughts on this? Am I missing the point?

Version of LibreOffice: 5.2 Version MS office:201x

Have you tested the different options in paste special. [Ctrl+Shift+V] Meny/Edit/Paste special.?

Can we quit the accusations? Years ago I could get a file describing the file structure of Word 6 documents. A similar document circulated describing the file structure of WordPerfect documents. The only difference was length: the WP documentation was some 40 pages A4, the MS Word documentation, starting with a lengthy introduction on terminology, was about ten times that long. So you need an insane amount of time to figure it all out.

Maybe you do copying wrong? Did you tried what m.a.riosv suggested?

If you have access to MSW, try saving files with table as .doc or .rtf. These formats have better support. Maybe saving in HTML would help.

Try to strip down and simplify tables in MSW before copying them to LibreOffice. You could also try to save files to .odt from MSW. Another option is to use Google Docs for importing these complicated tables and saving them in .odt.

You can get tables across in one way or another as long as tables are not used to layout the document (at that point it would be easier to redo the whole thing).

RTF support in OpenOffice (and LibreOffice?) is terrible. Pasting HTML from the Web introduces lots of redundant sections, pasting as HTML from Word would do the same, I suppose, so I wouldn’t use that either. The only times that I found tables aren’t properly converted is when they’re loaded with nested tables.

Well, I know there were problems with RTF but there are some improvements with recent releases. I guess that redundant HTML sections can be deleted. I don’t think there is another way if classic copy/paste functionality is not working…

I got it working today but don’t know how. I did not even restart the computer, it was on all night. Unlike yesterday, I can now copy/paste tables directly from MS Word 2010/2013 into LibreWriter but not directly into Calc, so the issue is apparently solved.

Thanks guys