I’m talking compatibility of displaing documents more than anything else, since even different versions of Word display the same document differently sometimes.
But the closest worlflow would be nice. Preferably something like '03 MS Word Office. It was crude in many ways, but I just hate ribbon menus and love having anything at hand. Especially a style menu, customisable keybinds and batch-replace with regexps.
Is there’s something to get closer to that in FOSS, or just Linux-compatible apps?
LibreOffice is generally the office suite of choice on Linux systems
Especially since LibreOffice has the old 2003 Style interface, as well as the option for the newer Ribbon style, and opens basically every type of text file known to man. It also comes default with basically every Linux distro.
If your wife doesn’t like how LibreOffice looks, I hear good things about WPS Office.
I’m interested in having the same rendering of documents I write there to those they see in their Word 20-whatever. Is it ok in LO on big files?
My problem is that what I do there wouldn’t look like that if they would open it in some Word. Since I need to keep formatting and stuff, I need it to be uniform.
Depends on the formatting, but LO has better support for the old MS Office formats than Microsoft does.
I would recommend opening up one if your files in LibreOffice and seeing if the formatting is how you set it up. The file itself won’t change until you save, so if you close the programming without saving, your file won’t get messed up if there are glitches. If you’re really worried, make a backup of the otiginal test file just in case.
We can provide suggestions, but you won’t make progress until you actually try it out.
LibreOffice has the MS Office 2003 look and feel. I also like it because of this, I’m used to the old Office look.
Regarding doc/docx, you can still open/save them in doc/docx. It generally works just fine. I’ve had a few problems with some doc/docx files, but nothing serious, just formatting issues, and small ones.
What ones?
Small issues.
I already said some documents looked and printed different on different Windows. Can I edit an MS23 document and print, send it just the same as I formatted them?
Is there some new file format in Office 2023 (didn’t know it existed… thought 2021 LTSC was the latest) that I’m not aware of? Because docx was the last, don’t know about anything newer (though they do tend to mess things up with every new version of Office adding this or that to the x file formats).
My safe bet was save everything to doc. It’s an old standard, no new things are added, every officie version renders it the same, as well as LibreOffice. If no new things are added/removed, chances are it will be less prone to screwups than the newer standard that is getting new features all the time.
No, only docx.
It’s just an XML bastard not made for long documents, excessive tables, complexity, non-uniform formatting following retired rules used for docs printed on typewriters etc. Because of that, it sometimes breaks or shows a slightly different behavior in 2007, 2013, 2017 and newer editions of M$ Word. There’s consistency in most usecases, I can give them that, but when the format is abused to death, it shows some bugs unique to the edition you use.
I’d try doc conversion for consistency, thanks.
Honestly, the more I think and now talk about that, the more I wish for everything being in rich or even plain text format.
