suffered data loss from my .ods spreadsheet
current: onlyoffice-desktopeditors 7.1.0-1
sudo downgrade onlyoffice-desktopeditors
add onlyoffice-desktopeditors to IgnorePkg? [y/N] y
onlyoffice-desktopeditors 7.0.2-1
tested downgraded version and it appears to be working fine
Returning to libreoffice to prevent further issues
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Hello @carverj,
I too have just started looking for a good office suite for Linux.
LibreOffice is certainly good and can do a lot. But I just realize that the odt of LO are not so easily compatible with MS-Office. The ones from OnlyOffice are. But I also notice that when I test a huge text file, OnlyOffice crashes, LO remains totally stable.
Why did you want to get away from LO?
And, I would be totally interested to know why Manjaro XFCE includes OnlyOffice by default and not LO.
Afaik, Onlyoffice converts all files that you open with it to .docx format first thing. It’ll save it for you in the original format if you want that, but what you’re actually dealing with, as long as it’s opened in OO, is always files in MS formats. Thus it would be no wonder it has better compatibility with MS Office.
Hello @bennypr0fane
Which office do you use? In Linux, this is really a question. I used to do everything with MS Office, but for the last 23 months I’ve been doing all my work with Manjaro. And my texts and tables I do with LibreOffice in odt format. But I am wondering because I now realize that not all computers with MS-Office open this odt without problems.
How do you do that?
I used libreoffice and got into the habit of saving to .xls, .doc for a number of years. No issues, except when I had to help my family members to ‘save as’, and then scroll down so that they weren’t defaulting to .odt by accident. Then it took me a while to trust moving to .docx but it seems to be going well for me!
Yay!
When I have somewhat more complicated documents, with a directory at the beginning where all the headings are displayed, I have always had somewhat strange occurrences with the docx format. Since I switched to odt, everything was fine.
Now I save everything in the formats given by LO: odt and ods. I will stick to that as well. I was just confused for a while because I didn’t know how well these documents could be opened by Microsoft Office. Now I know better. See here:
Here is a summary of why I now have no qualms about using odt:
And why would that be a LibreOffice bug if MS-Office refuses to open it?
IIRC MS-Office implements proper ODF only since 2013 (or 2016? I don’t exactly remember), AFAIK 2007 does not support ODF at all and 2010 only partly for an old ODF version. Maybe Textmaker and OnlyOffice still write those old versions.
You could try to set (under Tools → Options → Load/Save → General) the ODF format version to 1.2 or even 1.0/1.1 for MS-Office 2010, but that would restrict the set of stored features to a minimum you’d probably not be satisfied with.
Rather use export to OOXML .docx if you want to pass on documents to old MS-Office versions, but keep storing your working copy in .odt ODF 1.3 extended for all features.
I normally save everything I do on my own computers in .odt, using Libreoffice.
You should really be fine as long as you stick to a Free format with Free software - OR if you always use the same software and always store everything in the same format, generally speaking.
If you try to save one document in a different format than before and/or edit it with different software, you’re not fine any longer. M$ will screw with you, there’s no way around it, they will mess with your documents at will until everyone on the planet goes back to using only their proprietary stuff.
I haven’t seen any MS Office versions from 2007 on refuse to open an .odf document. It just
a) displays a warning it might mess with your document and
b) messes with your document.
What I’ve never had the nerve to consistently test is this:
If you always stick to .odf, but edit it with both Libreoffice and MS Office, ignoring the warning, will your document keep looking the same or not?
I have the notion that MS Office does not implement the ODF standard correctly and hence changes an ODF document when editing it.
Is it correct?
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What exactly MS does with the reluctantly opened document, I’m not sure. Superficially it looks the same.
But fortunately I don’t edit my documents with LO and MS, only LO. Switched completely to Manjaro Linux almost 2 years ago, and it looks like I won’t be going back to Windows. That’s why I’m quite happy with the odt files. Besides, you can also use LO on Windows.
It was just that I had tested my odt with my old MS-Office 2007 and 2010 on my computers that have dual-boot and there I was shocked that there were problems. First I thought LO does crap - now I am convinced that LO does the odt correctly, but the old MS-Office can’t or won’t do it properly.
Now all is well: my odt, LO and my Linux.