[conspire] (forw) Re: [Sclug] Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Goodbye to Open Office (maybe?)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ross Bernheim (rossbernheim at gmail.com):

> This is not a hypothetical. A number of years ago when OO was
> maintained, I used to follow on the support board. A user in France
> asked about OO opening an older version of MS Word files. Answer was
> not know, but since OO was free, it was suggested that the user
> download and try it. OO did indeed open the older file that the
> current and previous version of MS Word would not open. 
> 
> Next question was could a script be written to batch convert the older
> MS Word files to the current OO file format? Answer was yes. When
> queried about how many files, the user admitted that she worked for a
> French government agency and had bout 4 million public documents
> written in the older version of MS Word that Microsoft Word would no
> longer would read.

Hmm, not quite.  Hold that thought for a moment.  

Wikipedia's article on MS-Word claims there have been five format
revisions:

1.  Word for DOS's .doc
2.  WinWord 1.x/2.x, MacWord 4.x/5.x's .doc
3.  WinWord 5.x/7.x, MacWord 6.x's .doc
4.  WinWord 93's .doc
5.  WinWord 97 & later, MacWord98 and later's OOXML/.docx

(I'm correcting some of what they say, from my own recollection.)

What you say is a known problem with Word 2016 -- but read on.
Customers have been most often working aroudn the problem by
reinstalling old versions of MS-Word for that task and then resaving as
.docx or something else -- or of course you can instead use OO.o /
LibreOffice.

And yes, LibreOffice / OO.o are full scriptable for operations including
import/export of files.

It turns out, there is a back-story to this, though.  For ages, the
various .doc formats were a menace to system security on account of some
overfeaturing.  Fairly recently, Microsoft Corp. decided that the best
way to deal with this is to disable support legacy .doc formats _by
default_ to improve MS-Word security generally.  This had the unhappy
consequence that you would get a 'Cannot open' dialogue.  MS-Word's
defaults can, however, be easily changed to allow that open operation
to view (but not edit) the .doc file.  
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3016278/software/print-preview-and-open-old-office-files.html


> Effectively MS held their documents hostage.
> 
> So much for trusting your documents to MS.

Well, not _really_.

ODF aka OpenDocument format (the standard, well-defined format preferred
by LibreOffice and OpenOffice[.org]) is a _much_ better format generally
than _either_ any version of .doc or OOXML aka .docx -- to the degree
that MSFT has dragged its feet on ODF compatibility (and spent a lot of
money opposing its wide adoption as an international standard), but it's
nonetheless gradually been worked in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

OpenDocument 1.2 was published as an ISO/IEC standard on 17 June 2015.

ODF is one of the many things we can thank the old Sun Microsystems for, 
as they developed it for OpenOffice.org / Sun Star Office, with the
specific intention of providing a richly featured yet completely open,
fully documented standard.