Recently I switched from MS Office to LiberOffice. Everything was fine, including the way LO Writer shows formatting of my old .docx files, but when I make any new .docx file in LO Writer, there are issues with the way it appears in MS Word and other applications.
For example, I started a .docx file in MS Word and then I continued editing it in LO Writer. Everything was fine, only after I finished it, I noticed the file shows up normally only in LO Writer, but when opened again in MS Word or any other document editing software but LO Writer, spaces between many words are lacking, so that what shows up as two words in LO Writer appears as a single word in MS Word, lines are justified differently (not the same number of characters fits in a line), and some formatting such as italic or bold is missing in MS Word, but shows up in LO Writer, including the text that was originally typed in in MS Word.
I understand compatibility between LO Writer and MS Word formats is not perfect, but this happens not when I open my old .docx files in LO Writer, that are previously made with MS Word, they’re perfectly fine, but only when I open any new .docx files made with LO Writer in other applications. Is this normal, and is there a way to prevent it from happening (other than using a PDF)?
Also, I noticed character counting is different in LO Writer and MS Word for the same files. When I open a larger document file in LO Writer and select all, it always says there are less characters (with or without spaces) than in MS Word. This happens regularly with different files. Is it so because of those missing spaces between words and other formatting issues with LO Writer? If so, why does LO Writer show the spaces and everything I type in it normally anyway, if it actually doesn’t count them as characters and they don’t appear in MS Word and other applications?
Thanks in advance, and sorry for a longer post, I’m not a native speaker so I have a little trouble explaining myself. 