How’s it compatibility with other office suites?

By | October 14, 2021

The question which some potential users may have is, how compatible is it with other office suites? In general, quite compatible. First we start with Google Suites. Google Suites has the ability to export into Open Document Format, which as a result, increases the likelihood of formatting being more or less the same. Microsoft Office can also save in Open Document Format. However, regardless of this, LibreOffice can comfortably open Microsoft office document formats quite well. Formatting issues do arise, but these formatting issues are usually minor, such as extra spacing between different paragraphs in word/writer, or a slight misalignment of text.

Impress, however, holds the largest issue in terms of compatibility, where on some occasions, graphs and tables are misaligned, and in some rare instances editing is not possible or alignment becomes difficult. This happens more with PowerPoints exported from office and Apple keynotes than from Google Slides, where at worst, tables stick as tables, but graphs only show as images from Google Slides. Given this, Impress has small compatibility issues with pptx files around 15% of the time, and 5% of the time being large and severe.

Calc has the best compatibility as per my experience with other office suites, and to some extent, even better than Google Spreadsheets in terms of opening sheets with formulas. Very rarely do I run into issues where formulas and tabs do not load or not work. Graphs from Google Spreadsheet appear to work quite well on LibreOffice Calc, and should work well from Microsoft Office Excel as well.

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In order of preference, we can say that Calc has the best compatibility with it’s related Office suite competitors, followed by Writer, and impress last, where occasional compatibility issues appear, and in rare instances, major compatibility issues spring up.

A response to this is for everyone to use PDF as a standard way to send a final report or document towards end users. The reason for this is because, even on the rare occasion, documents and files made on Microsoft Office products may not even work on Microsoft Office products. PDFs essentially nearly guarantee that this issue does not happen. In nearly every instance, both professionally in the workforce, in university, and for private ventures such as Bahrain Research Group,I and others have always sent and exported files in PDF format, as this ensures that anyone can open, add comments, and send feedback with minimal issue.

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