I have a file that was created using Microsoft Word. It had some images in it. When I tried to view/edit it in LibreOffice, the spaces where some of the images were has an empty space with the words “Quicktime and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.”
I am using a Mac and I already have Quicktime on my computer. What is a decompressor, and how do I get one? Or is there something else I can do to make the images appear?
No possibility to open it in LibreOffice for now - it is an old bug/feature request actually that was inherited from the OOo-Project:
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=25794
Neither OOo nor LO can open the quicktime image format that MS Office for Mac uses.
Not even Microsoft Office for Windows can handle it properly.
So you need to do as the workaround in the KB-Article says: Convert the image to a standard format on Mac.
Excellent answer. I was going to offer to convert the file in Powerpoint 2003 for Windows, but it wouldn’t work either. Some more possible solutions http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00534_QuickTime_and_a_TIFF_-or_JPEG-_decompressor_are_needed_to_see_this_picture.htm
Maybe it’s a video and not a still image? Videos do require codecs (coding and decoding libraries)
Can you share one page which includes one of those images?
It is most definitely an image, and not a video. How do I share a page?
Edit your document and delete all personal content, just keeping one page which contains one of those images. Save As something and then upload it to some file sharing site (e.g. sharesend.com). Then paste link in a comment 
Okay, here is a page that has an image with the problem I described:
Thanks. I hope someone is able to help.
This is really odd. The file actually contains a wmf (windows meta file) image with black frame and the message “Quicktime and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.” This means that something failed during the conversion from doc… Would you like to share the original file?
Here is a .doc version of the same page I shared previously:
I no longer have Word to edit it with, and the original document is hundreds of pages long, so I had to shorten it using LIbreOffice, which I hope did not remove any clue as to what went wrong. It’s still .doc.
I’m afraid that couldn’t work. Even if apparently LO is working in your unchanged doc what it does is convert it do odf when you load it and save it back as doc when finished. These two conversions are killing the images (which are in a Microsoft proprietary format foreign to your Mac system)
Probably your best option is to use Word to export to HTML (with some format loss) and then to ODF with LO. This should extract the images, convert them to a lossless universal format (e.g. PNG) and insert them back.
It’s a shame that a workaround is needed, but I’m glad that a workaround exists at all. Thank you very much for your help.
It’s a shame that a workaround is needed, but I’m glad that a workaround exists at all. Thank you very much for your help.
Hey, tell that to Microsoft According to the Microsoft report pointed by cloph, opening your Microsoft Word document created in a Mac in MS Word under Windows won’t solve your problem either. The “funny” part is that they aren’t even concerned about fixing it: they simply acknowledge the bug