Hi there, I’ve recently been working on my manuscript for my book that is being released shortly. It has been saved as a Microsoft Office 2007-2013 .docx file since I exported it from Scrivener in January this year. Since then it has been through ten different revisions but has always remained an Office file. The Friday before last I received an edit back from my copyeditor and went through accepting the majority of her changes using Libre Office. When it was done I saved it under a new file name .docx and resent it to her for the final proofread.
After she received the document, she noticed that a number of the changes she had made during the edit hadn’t been changed (for example there were a number of timestamps that I had changed in Libre Office and saved but on her computer in Office 2007 they were showing up the same as they were in the original document I sent her. While other changes appear to have made it across). She finished her next round of proofreading and resent the document to me, now I am finding a number of issues with the document that were addressed and corrected in the original copyedit. The only thing that makes any sense to me is that there must be a compatibility issue or bug somewhere here because I have been meticulous in trying to get everything perfect, and she’s been very careful too.
This is frustrating as it is costing me time and money… What can I do? I can’t post my manuscript files up here for everyone to see due to copyright reasons, but I would be willing to send them to an individual to examine as long as they agree to keeping them private.
Update LO. 5.0.1.2 is old and every new version improves format supports among others.
Rule number 1 for working with any brand of office software: always save in the native format. Rule number 2: as long as you don’t have to share your work with somebody who doesn’t have your office software, save it in the native format of your office software. Only convert to a foreign format when you absolutely have to.
Office file formats aren’t 100 % compatible for very ugly reasons: it’s not in the interest of commercial developers that their file format is 100 % compatible with the file formats of their competitors (vendor lock-in). For that reason MS is always updating its file formats. And for that reason you will always have compatibility issues with complex features of a word processor or spreadsheet. If you use LibreOffice as a clone of MS Office for business, think again: you will spend more time and money on compatibility issues than you save by not buying MS Office.