Writer docx file meant problems to my Office files - how to clean?

[erkki896]

I installed three weeks ago for testing reasons LibreOffice into a just re-installed Vista PC, which had no MS Office installed. Then I brought several docx-documents from another computer where I have Office 2010 (Windows 8), worked with them and made also new documents, all saved to docx. Text, image snapshots, tables, internet text fragments via clipboard etc., quite normal working. Then I brought the documents back to the original computer and made some study. Most of the documents had difficulties, but not very serious.

After that I have had problems with Office Word files in my Windows 8 computer. When I have edited completely other documents and saved them, I occasionally find that Word cannot open them without fixing. This does not happen to all documents. And before my LibreOffice trial I had no problems with my Word files. To me it looks like the LibreOffice files brought something to my computer (Office software library?). I am now trying to examine the situation in more detail, but i am afraid I must uninstall Office totally and re-install it. - Of course, I have a very well protected and updated computer.

[ROSt53]

docx-formats are a moving target. I even read once that within MS Office versions there are sometimes problems occuring. Although our developers do their best to get a 100% compatibility for docx-files, there are always some problems remaining. According to many remarks here in this forum, MS is not fully complying to the ODF standard,although MS claims to do so. (If you are interested, search in the entries of this forum.)

I personally prefer doc-files to prepare a Writer file for MS Word, some other say that with the newer versions of LibO, 4.1 and 4.2, docx-format is better. When I observe in the future a problem in doc-format I will try to save as docx and see if is better. You could also try to save your Witer files in doc-format and see if you get better results.

As for LibO files making troubles to the MS Office installation I cannot imagine such cause. I used MS Office and LibO parallel for 6 month on the same PC to test LibO and never observed a conflict. During the 6 month test I upgraded LibO several times. I still have this PC as backup machine and use it once in while when a second PC is needed.

I am using LibO 4.1.5.

[olee22]

My experience is that very heavily customized documents, which rely on “deep” features of the Word processor, like a long document with lots of images, layout organization, many fields, cross-references, customized page numbers, background images, different page formats, etc. are a hit and miss, when opened in a different version of the same program, and/or different document editor.

If you have critical documents, which are “optimized”, like there is a narrow margin, and images would float to the next page if you insert a character, etc. these are best used if you open them with the same version of the same editor it was created with.

If you plan to open the documents with a different version, and/or make, it is best to think ahead, and design your document in a way that there is a high chance it stays compatible. Use some “buffer”.

What is more, there are many features/practices listed by experts that are available, but are not recommended to use. For example, in former versions of MS Word, the Document Map feature easily corrupted a complex document, the program crashed, and it was not possible to fully recover it.