Dear community,
Can anyone enlighten me what these different formats are and what the differences between them are?
I would also like to know which one of these are best to use when importing into MS Office 2013. Especially PowerPoint 2013.
ODF v 1.2 → older format
ODF v 1.2 Extended (compat mode) → should be used if you exchange documents with older versions of software
ODF v 1.2 Extended (recommended) → the latest and the greatest (recommended to use).
Office Open XML Text - Microsoft XML format Office Open XML - Wikipedia
Unified Office Format Text - Uniform Office Format - Wikipedia
OpenDocument Text (Flat XML) - one of variations of ODF whole document is stored in one XML flat file - this format should be avoided if not really needed, so special purpose file format (by default ODF is zip archive with many folders and many files).
General recommendation to exchange files with Microsoft Office is to use older ppt format “Microsoft PowerPoint 97/2000/XP/2003” because this format is known to LibreOffice for years. But according to my experiences non of format is perfect - all of them have some of the issues.
You can also try opening “ODF v 1.2 Extended (recommended)”= File | Save as = “ODF Presentation (.odp)” and open file with Microsoft PowerPoint 2013. According to documentation Office 2013 can now also open ODF files. But I have never used Office 2013, so can’t tell if this is really working fine.
Also general rule for LibreOffice save file in ODF format and then Save As to other format. Because the most features are supported in ODF format and you can lose some work if saving to some other format where one or more features are not supported.
You can also download Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer free to download tool: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13 - this is only for viewing presentations, if you would like to change the presentation you need to buy one of the Office edition.
Similar questions were already replied many times on this forum, see for example: http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/13054/which-is-the-best-file-format-to-exhange-with-microsoft-office/
Also a note, if users that you gonna send the files to ONLY need to VIEW the files and not EDIT them, then you can export file to PDF - File | Export as PDF.
this format should be avoided if not really needed,
Why?