[KLUG Members] OO.o's handling of Word documents

[Eric Beversluis]

On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 15:35 -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > Things have gotten curiouser and curiouser. 
> 
> You were withholding evidence!  (Or did you mention the Mac before?)
Had no idea it might be relevant.
> 
> > To prepare the John-suggested bug report, I tried to make a sample
> > document (in Word) with the problem: a couple of lines of text and a
> > small Word drawing/flowchart.
> > When I sent it directly to my Linux machine from the Windows machine, it
> > opened fine in OO.  I thought maybe the problem was from the drawing
> > being on a separate page. But this too worked fine from the Wintel
> > machine to the Linux machine. 
> > So I sent the document to my wife's iBook, had her open it in Word and
> > then send it on to me--lo-and-behold! The mini-flowchart was not to be
> > seen when it got to me. That very same document (passport stamped at the
> > iBook Word) I then forwarded to my Wintel machine and, lo-and-behold,
> > the miniflowchart reappeared. 
> 
> Yep.  (Mac M$-Office != Win32 M$-Office).  I've seen a fair number of
> files that won't even move between Win32 M$-Office and Mac M$-Office, or
> when they do they are totally devastated.
WOW!!
Whatever the Mac MS Word is doing, it's not DELETING the flowchart, only
hiding it so OOo can't see it (it's the same doc that works fine when
forwarded to a Wintel machine with Word). 

Bottom line = the OOo Word filters are working right for Wintel Word but
not for Mac Word?
> 
> So if you have OOo on the Mac and send it the file from the Win32 box,
> does the flowchart appear?
No OOo on the Mac. 
> 

> This is a small example of why people jump up and down screaming: "M
> $-Office files are *NOT* a standard!"  And most people just roll their
> eyes and wonder what is wrong with those crazy fanatics.  Now most
> fanatics are indeed just maladjusted morons, but in this case the
> fanatics are on the money.  I've lost count of the times I've *REPAIRED*
> an M$-Office file that M$-Office thinks is corrupt or is the wrong
> format but opening it in OOo, saving it, and shipping it back to M
> $-Office.  Scary stuff.
> 
> So I'm always impressed that OOo works as well as it does (and really,
> that M$-Office works at all).
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