first response

Story: Word 2007 and Open OfficeTotal Replies: 17
Author Content
freelsjd

Jul 13, 2006
7:25 AM EDT
The first response should be, since you have a beta version, to send in a beta comment back to the code developer (microsoft) that you have found a bug. perhaps we should not assume that Microsoft has done this on purpose and that they are really that dumb. who knows, perhaps the bug will get fixed.
NoDough

Jul 13, 2006
9:32 AM EDT
I have to agree with freelsjd. We can't hold this against them in a beta release. However, if you report the bug and they don't fix it in the production release, well.... you know.
dinotrac

Jul 13, 2006
9:38 AM EDT
I'll jump on the bandwagon and agree with f&N on this one.

I'm a guessing (hey! Did you notice the EU is starting to ramp up?) that Microsoft has ample incentive to interoperate will with odt files --- which includes round-trip transfers.

odt is an ISO standard, and there are lots of people around the world who care about such things. Failure to get it right is likely to result in the kind of message Microsoft understands: a lighter pocketbook.
Aninhumer

Jul 13, 2006
11:27 AM EDT
Never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity :)
jimf

Jul 13, 2006
11:29 AM EDT
> Never attribute to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity :)

Never fear... We know that MS has enough of both to go around.
3monkeys

Jul 13, 2006
3:14 PM EDT
Could you post your test documents? Specifically, I'd like to see an original .odt then that same .odt saved to .doc, read into Word and written back out. I do a lot of work with .odt see http://www.3monkeyweb.com/wiki/tiki-view_blog.php?blogId=2 for some observations.
dinotrac

Jul 13, 2006
3:16 PM EDT
>Never fear... We know that MS has enough of both to go around.

Twice.
sbergman27

Jul 13, 2006
3:26 PM EDT
Well, it *is* a beta.

And this works both ways. IIRC one of the Fedora releases had a bug in the installer that meant that once it was installed once, if you tried to install Windows back again, Windows couldn't boot. In the usual fedora fashion, the "fix" was "Wait for the next release. We don't do respins." And that wasn't a beta. It was an actual release.

So at this early stage of the game, I'd just report it as a bug and see what happens.

grouch

Jul 13, 2006
7:24 PM EDT
I think you're all overlooking this part:

"It's not that Word can't render the formatting from an odt file, just that it strips it away when saving back to .doc. Bear in mind that this part of the process does not require the odt addon. "
sbergman27

Jul 13, 2006
7:32 PM EDT
What happens if you take the doc and open it again in Word? This could as easily be an OO.o bug.
salparadise

Jul 13, 2006
9:36 PM EDT
If you open the saved .doc in Word the formatting is present and correct, it only disappears when opened in OOWRiter. So it may have been misleading of me to say "it strips the formatting away when saving it back to .doc."

I should have said, "it appears that Microsoft have done something so that a .doc that has been created from a .odt is hard/impossible for OO to read correctly".

mjjohansen

Jul 14, 2006
1:04 AM EDT
But the .odt implementation in OOo is not entirely OASIS compliant. Have you tried with KOffice?
salparadise

Jul 14, 2006
4:10 AM EDT
KOffice?

Doh. Honestly hadn't occurred to me. (Partly because my impression was that OO was the main contender for the Office suite crown).

Not a bad idea.

I'll get back to you...
salparadise

Jul 14, 2006
7:14 AM EDT
Hmm. OK, I have three files in .doc format, all saved from the same .odt file using Word2007. Two render in kword perfectly and one has no formatting at all.

I'll have to rerun the experiment when I get home.

I'll post the results here afterwards.
salparadise

Jul 14, 2006
11:02 AM EDT
Update.

I took the following piece of text and pasted it into OOWriter (2.0.2 running on SuSE 10.1).

Kernel release status

The current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.17.3, released on June 30. It was a single-fix release for a denial of service vulnerability in the netfilter SCTP connection tracking code. One day earlier, 2.6.17.2 had been released with a relatively large set of important fixes. The SCTP fix can also be found in 2.6.16.23.

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.18-rc1, released by Linus on July 5. A summary of changes can be found in a separate article below. Also available are the short-form changelog (too bulky to be included with Linus's announcement) and the long-form changelog.



I put the heading into 16pt Impact, the first paragraph into 12pt Thorndale and the second paragraph into 18pt Nimbus Roman. The first section (up to the first comma) of each of the first sentence in each paragraph is in bold.

I then opened the .odt in Word 2007, apart from Word replacing Thorndale with Calibri, the pt size and bold sections were as they were in the original. I then saved the document as Word97-2003 Document in Word 2007.

I then transferred the resultant .doc back the SuSE machine and opened it in kword. The title is no longer in 16pt impact but is now in 18pt Nimbus Roman. The first paragraph is no longer in 12pt Thorndale but is also in 18pt Nimbus Roman and the second paragraph is in 11pt Albany. All the bold sections have also gone and are in normal weight.

Out of interest I opened the original .odt in kword and it appeared exactly as it should.

In OOWriter the .doc is rendered with everything in 11pt Calibri and no bold.

I have spent the last few hours in a state of high anxiety thinking I had posted an erroneous load of rubbish and had accused Microsoft of underhandedness. I unposted the original article and was considering resigning from lxer in shame.

So I'm somewhat relieved. I may have accused wrongly and for that I offer unconditional apologies.

Sorry Microsoft!

Never-the-less there is something odd going on. I have to confess to not having much of an idea what though. If anyone wants a copy of the original .odt and the resultant .doc then I'll mail them to you.

sbergman27

Jul 14, 2006
11:16 AM EDT
> Sorry Microsoft!

Where should one go to report offensive forum posts? ;-)
3monkeys

Jul 16, 2006
7:47 PM EDT
I'm still interested in this as I deal with the ODT XML directly. I have not seen style information being dropped durring transformations, however, I have seen style transforms, especially wrt fonts. I'd like a copy of the files.
dcparris

Jul 17, 2006
7:01 AM EDT
Sal & 3monkeys: I would like to suggest that you two work together and write up a new article detailing your experiences.

Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]

Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!