Libreoffice -- office compatibility

Hi all!
I’m writing for and advice on how to improve office documents compatibility on my linux system. At work, obviously, everyone uses microsoft office and i am dealing with .docx every day. Now i am having problems of impagination with my images, that sometimes remain a white square and sometimes change position (or even page!).

Do you have any suggestion? Is calligra using a different engine?

Thank you and have a nice day =)

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Libreoffice is very good with .docx, I’ve never had problems with it. You have other probably better (and free) alternatives than Calligra (Calligra can open and edit .docx but in general is better for .odt files). I don’t know if those are better than LO:

  • WPS Office
  • Google Documents
  • MS 365

This might be an option. It is available as appimage, snap and flatpak if you don’t want to install it.

You can significantly boost office compatibility of libreoffice by installing and configuring carlito and caladea fonts.

In general, onlyoffice and freeoffice can be more compatible with ms office formats than libreoffice, but they don’t handle odt files quite as nicely.

4 Likes

Calligra is using a different engine … and is most likely not solving your problem (or if it does it will open up two other ones). Calligra is best used with its native file format.

On Linux I can recommend one other Office Suite, that really shines in *.docx support, but it is not OSS. It’s from SoftMaker and is called SoftMaker Office (they also have a FreeOffice package with some limited functionality). You can get SoftMaker Office from the official repository (will be a 30 days trial IIRC). A licence is not exactly cheap (50,- EUR; later updates are usually 50% off afterwards) but for an full Office Suite and compared with MS Office prices it’s a bargain. More info here.

I use them both, as the teachers in the school of my kids tend to come up with *.docx and *.pptx stuff and either LibreOffice does the job, or if it does not SMO does it and vice versa …