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I've been using OpenOffice for years now then I switched to LibreOffice as soon as The Document Foundation released install binaries months ago. I must admit that I'm very satisfied because I can do whatever I want with LibreOffice when it comes to writing documents, creating slides, etc.

However when opening a .doc[x] file or saving to .doc things do not go well..

Anyone knows why LibreOffice support for .doc[x] is not that good? And do we have a chance to see a fix for that in the future? Is Microsoft trying to make .doc[x] hard for developers?

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The Office Format documentation is actually a bit vague. The docs are huge, hundreds of pages long, and hard to get right. There literally are sections that say 'do what Word 95 does', which makes it hard to get right. I'm sure you opened a doc from Word 95 and it looked different in Word 2003. If Microsoft can't even be consistent, it's hard for outsiders to be better.

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  • You would think more pages of documents would make a standard more precise.
    – surfasb
    Nov 28, 2011 at 2:02
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The Office File Formats have always been well documented. Even the old 2003 formats. It is just a lot of reading and I believe people just don't take the time to read documentation these days. On top of that, writing good software isn't easy. I'd give those guys a break man. They are working for free.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205(v=office.12).aspx#office2007WordFileFormat

In general, MSDN has been a high standard for documentation. You won't find that elsewhere.

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