this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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However, in direct comparison with SoftMaker Office (which, admittedly, is not free software), LibreOffice is inconsistent, sluggish, unstable and less compatible with Microsoft formats.
Wrong info, the Microsoft format is less compatible with everything else.
Formats aren't compatible. Parsers are.
?
There is Office software that can handle Microsoft formats better than other Office software. Still, Microsoft's file formats are open.
That's a sham. Only basic stuff is open standard, the rest is proprietary extensions. Such a format can't usually be standardized; there's an entire Wikipedia article about MS' shenanigans to make it happen. But MS doesn't even keep to that ambiguous 600-pages standard anymore. Here's fsfe' stance to it, calling it a pseudo-standard.
Which results in basic formatting having to be reverse-engineered. Better use Open Document Format.
To be fair, LibreOffice had (don't know if it still has!) problems rendering OpenOffice .odt files in the past.
For me MS Office aren't compatible with LibreOffice is because MS fault not LibreOffice
I'm all for LibreOffice and Open Source, but I do not agree on this point. Microsoft created the format and application and LibreOffice is a third party that tries to be conform.
Fuck Microsoft. We tried to get a open standard and so they created a competing name and standard to confuse and obfuscate (and wasn't really a standard anyone could create).
So they can go get bent.
I usually work with MS formats on LO (only because they need smaller space for small files, in larger files, MS formats are objectively bulkier). My observation is that MS messes with formatting of files made on LO, no matter which format you pick... even with whitespace of otherwise plain unfomatted text at times.
It is definitely a MS issue, and it is not about formats they have made public.
How is it Microsoft's fault that the LibreOffice team fails to properly support its formats? Others can do it.
It's MS make their format to not compatible with other office software (because monopoly)
Then why can SoftMaker support it well and LibreOffice can't?
I don't use SM but probably because MS document format is their priority while LO's priority is open document format
The formats are "quasi-open". There's still a lot of proprietary stuff in them. Or undocumented or poorly documented things. MS didn't really want it to be an open standard.
Being compatible with them requires a lot of work to reverse engineer the formats. Some companies make licensing deals with ms to get access to better docs but must keep their code closed. Something libreoffice can't do.
MS supplied LO translator in MS Office is not very good. That is their issue. MS is not even that compatible betwen versions of their own software.
Except for MS format compatiblity, not my experience, Not sure where MS format compatibility stands now, but that has histically been the biggest issue.
Keep on mind that MS supplied LibreOffice translator is not great either so they have issues too. MS really does not plan on being compatible even between versions of their own software.
There are still a few issues left to fix in my experience.
Huh, I've never heard of SoftMaker Office before, good to know it exists. I might check it out.
To add to some of the other comments, I have heard that the issue for LibreOffice is that Microsoft's own parser isn't compliant with the OOXML standard that they created. Yet the most important thing is compatibility with Microsoft Office, so you can't simply build a parser according to the open standard and expect it to work with Microsoft Office. Instead, you need a parser to work the same way as Microsoft's, which is proprietary. However, admittedly I have never read the OOXML standard or checked MS Office documents for compliance myself.
Therefore, if what I have heard is correct, I would assume that SoftMaker Office has either struck a deal with Microsoft before to improve compatibility, or has simply been better at reverse engineering. Alternatively, what I have heard could be wrong.