Hey guys, I am trying to be more efficient in LO. I am saving all my Doc’s in "Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP/2003 (.doc)"
Is this a good idea, or have you guys left this formatting behind for Newer? I don’t think, in general, anyone I am conversing is still using XP, but I guess that the Word Program is a different story. Would someone please explain the difference to me.
Thanks Convert22
.doc was a binary proprietary format of microsoft that is no longer used. .docx is an XML based proprietary format of Microsoft. While they did ram a form of docx through ISO, it is still a Microsoft format. It should be noted that modern MS Office supports ODT. It might work to just use ODT. If you are not using Microsoft, you really should just use ODT and not use .doc. ODT is an open international standard that is properly supported in LibreOffice.
Wrong. DOC may be old but still widely used, and LO supports it better than the DOCX and others. Secondly, Office barely supports ODF, much less well than LO supports theirs, so don’t even try to use ODF with Office. You should release misfunctioning files to the bug tracker so they can improve the compatibility even further.
If you need to share electronic versions of your documents with others, you need to consider what they are using. If they are predominantly Word users, then using doc or docx will make the sharing easier. Another factor to consider is how complicated your documents are and what features you are using. If they are complicated or are using a lot of less common features, the conversion to a Word format may lose some formatting or features.
You can set LO to default to the doc, or docx, or odf format, so that you don’t have to select it each time.
An option if you only share some documents sometimes, is to use odf as the default and save as doc or docx only when necessary. Alternatively, if the others do not need to be able to edit, you can use odf as your default and export as pdf to share.
As to @rautamiekka 's comment: I agree. I use MS Office 2003 which saves natively in doc, but can support docx through an MS supplied add on.
[EDIT]: Also see this post: Docx issues
Absolutely don’t save in non-native format without having native one, you’ll risk alot as long as the format isn’t completely reverse-engineered. Always use native format first, then if necessary save into another format.