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Comment by AlexFromBelgium | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that's a Microsoft problem... I don't think office files are even compatible with their own standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML .

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A problem for Microsoft? or one by Microsoft? Yes, sure it's caused by Microsoft, but it has to be fixed on the LibreOffice side, since I am sure Microsoft won't do anything about it.

I've had compatibility problems between different versions of Microsoft Office.

This is also Microsoft's problem.

Not until they have competition able to break their lock-in, till then the craziness of their format acts as a barrier to entry. So again, it's a problem created by Microsoft, but it's a problem for their users and competitors. And that's why it's not going to be fixed.

It's not nearly as big a problem for Microsoft. First of all, the compatibility problems are much bigger between LibreOffice and MS Office than between different versions of MS Office. Secondly, if you tell your colleague, "Oh, the margins are screwed up because I upgraded to MS Office 2051", they'll just shrug it off. If you tell them, "Oh, I'm using this new software called LibreOffice because blah blah blah", they'll probably yell at you for being a moron and wasting their time.

If my colleagues ever said I'm a moron and that I'm waisting their time for using LibreOffice ... I would tell them to either buy a Windows+Office license for me, or otherwise go fuck themselves.

And if you're in a position to tell your colleagues to go fuck themselves, then you can do what you want. The rest of us aren't so lucky.

Also, the cost of a Windows+Office license is so small that pretty much any company will happily buy it for an employee.

> Yes, sure it's caused by Microsoft, but it has to be fixed on the LibreOffice side

You can't really fix something when the spec is incomplete, ambiguous, and refers to non-disclosed information, all the while multiple official implementations exist that contradict both themselves and the spec about the behavior to have.

Now what about Microsoft implementing ODT correctly?

One by Microsoft for everyone, including themselves. Not respecting standards is just retarded on too many levels.

EDIT: Unless, of course, they have a private internal standard...

It IS the user's problem as he will be forced to use MS Office for most documents where there are other people involved.

Note: Both google docs and iWorks handle this significantly better.

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