Best way to convert documents from .doc to .odt ? (and vice versa)

[Tyco72]

Which is the best way? Especially for documents with complex formatting, or tables, etc…

There are 2 methods to convert documents:

1. The quick way:

• Open the .doc file
• “Save as” → .odt

2. Less quick way:

• Open the .doc file
• Select all the content (scrolling it with mouse or CTRL+A, etc…), then click on “copy”
• Paste the copied content into a new empty .odt document

I have the feeling that the method 1 may inherits also some parts of unnecessary code from the .doc file, making the converted file more slow to be opened, while the method 2 may produce a more “clean” document. Is it right?

Instead, when converting from .odt to .doc I suppose that the method 1 should be better, because I assume that LibreOffice knows well what is stored in a .odt file and how to manage it. But until now I had to convert only few documents from .odt to .doc (for people with old MS Office versions), so I can’t report much about it.

[vmiklos]

1. is better if you want as less side effects for the conversion as possible.

2. means that for example compatibility flags of the document will change, so the layout may differ a bit here & there. This is especially problematic for poor documents which use lots of empty paragraphs instead of page breaks and so on.

[imbroglioj]

The best way I’ve found is a round trip through Google Drive. You need a (free) account (gmail). To convert in either direction:

• turn on “convert to Google Docs on upload” in Google Drive (cog wheel:settings:Convert uploads)
  
• upload the source file (doc/docx/odt) to Google Drive
  
• open the Google Drive file
  
• from the Doc’s File menu choose “Download as” and choose the target format you want (odt/docx/rtf).
  
  This has solved problems like page-break incompatibility or calc cell addressing incompatibility very neatly for me, when I could find no other way.