Backward compatibility for old Microsoft Word for Mac files? (development team)

[haakonwilliams]

This is a question for LibreOffice developers (let me know if there’s somewhere better to post this question, I’m new here).

Are there plans for future versions of LibreOffice to not be backwards compatible with very old versions of Word for Mac files?

I have a lot of Word files from the early 90s that I still need to be able to access. These files do not even have a .doc extension. I am using a Mac. Currently, I am able to open these files using Word for Mac 2008, but not on any newer version of Word for Mac. However, I soon need to update to a newer Mac, on which Word for Mac 2008 will not work. I understand LibreOffice can open these very old Word files and save them as .docx. This is great, but I’m concerned that some future update of LibreOffice will lose this ability. Are there plans for the future development of LibreOffice to stop including this ability, or, better, an intention for future versions of LibreOffice to retain this ability?

Thanks.

[Wanderer]

Future is hard to predict…
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I’d recommend to use to convert-to capabilities of LibreOffice to convert all this old files to .odt (not .docx, as that would be a double conversion). It is quite unlikely for LibreOffice to drop support for .odt).
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For other systems than MacOS, I could also suggest to keep an older portable version in a backup (Windows) or to try to keep a parallel install.

[mikekaganski]

Indeed, using a convert-to is an option. But do not do that.
As always, there is a chance that in the future, we would improve the support for these files. There are always bugs in external file support; e.g., we currently have problems with mac-specific images in documents (tdf#154020). Converting in a batch is likely to set all such problems in stone; you are even likely to be unable to inspect all your (hundreds?) documents to see how good the conversion was. If you do the conversion only when you have a need in a specific document, one-by-one, you are more likely to see and address any specific conversion problem as soon as you convert; and also you would use the current version of LibreOffice then, with all the fixes that possibly appeared to that moment (you are updating software, don’t you).

If there will be a deprecation and drop of this functionality (it is not planned, but everything is possible), you could do that at any later time. Additionally, we have a full archive with every version of LibreOffice ever released - so even after the fact, you can always use any working version for the job.