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I installed ubuntu but all my documents are in MS office formats. Now, if I open MS word file in Libre Office Writer. It opens the file but makes a lot of changings in settings, fonts and other indentations. Any solution?

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  • You could try using OpenOffice to open them and then transfer to LibreOffice. If you still have Office somewhere around, use it to export this documents as OpenOffice documents (odg I think). Oct 4, 2015 at 16:32
  • LibreOffice is just a fork of OpenOffice, because OpenOffice is not really supported now, IIRC. But the OpenOffice format is the same for both, ie, Libre Office uses Open Office format natively. Most Open Office developers moved to Libre when Oracle took it over, and it is not maintained as well now. Oct 4, 2015 at 16:45

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The only application that is guaranteed to correctly open MS Office documents is MS Office.

You knew that (or you should) when you used it in the first time: you have been storing your data using a closed, proprietary format, managed by a closed, proprietary set of applications.

LibreOffice tries to read MS Office documents the best it can. It uses a mix of reverse-engineering the files and using the published OOXML "standard" to do this, but the conversion is not perfect (and probably it never will be). This is due to complexity of the files, closeness and sometimes different philosophies in the program design (just as an example, background color and highlight are treated in fundamentally different ways in LO and MS Word, and similar things happen to some of the conditional formatting in spreadsheets). Most documents that use VBA (Visual Basic Macros) will not work.

Now, you can try to minimize damage (having the exactly same fonts installed helps a lot, although some of the standard fonts in MS Office are non-free), and LO 5 is reportedly better at it, but in the end, you will not have the exact same document unless you buy and use MS Office.

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Do you have the same fonts on Ubuntu as you had for Windows? Even a one pixel difference in a font metric can cause the entire document to reformat, and the results can be significant, although if you really know what you're doing, it can be much less so. Lines will rewrap, but if you don't do layout that depends on font size, it shouldn't be a major change. So the first thing to do is to make sure you install all the fonts that are used in the document, and see how it looks then.

Other changes are due to different defaults. If you don't specify things like padding in tables, around images, etc, you might find a big change due to different defaults. If you always set everything, it should come out more or less the same. But again, anything that depends on font size might change.

If you were to give a word file to another word user who has customized a lot of defaults, your document might look different there, too.

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  • The font suggestion is sound. The other one, no; defaults that matter to the document format and function are stored with the document, and override your local default.
    – Rmano
    Oct 4, 2015 at 21:25
  • @Rmano: Are you quite sure that all the default values are stored in the document, and not just the ones that were explicitly changed? I can't say for sure, but it seemed to me, just from my own casual observations in the past, that settings were changed from Windows to Linux for such things as table margins, etc. I didn't really have time or the will to investigate further, though, so if you know for sure, I'd be interested. Oct 4, 2015 at 21:30
  • I'm quite sure. You can open a word document everywhere, even with installation with different languages, and have the same document if the MS Office version is the same (or newer). Would be a bug otherwise. Now, you must have the fonts (you'll have a warning otherwise) and further changes can depend on your defaults... But all the relevant formatting data is saved. You have warnings if not, as when you save a document in "compatibility mode". Now, not all the MS formatting options are understood by LO --- see my comment to the question.
    – Rmano
    Oct 4, 2015 at 21:36
  • But that's not really proving the data is saved, since Microsoft Office probably has the same defaults no matter what version it is. If those defaults can all be changed on one system, then it would be a better test. Also, if every setting could be explicitly saved before opening with OO, so it's not relying on any defaults at all, that would also be a good test. Of course, we know MS Office has no bugs, so that's not the issue. ;-) Oct 4, 2015 at 22:39

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