Working with MS Office Word documents in Linux OS

Now let’s see what kind of compatibility you can get while choosing KOffice as an alternative to other applications. Before we go ahead with checking the results I would like to mention the fact that KOffice does not support .docx files at all. Hopefully in the upcoming releases developers will add such a feature in order to improve the compatibility of their package.

Here is the screenshot of the .doc file with formatted text opened in KOffice:

Quite a poor result, though there are just two issues:

• Huge space between paragraphs
• No list at all (even the test of the list disappeared)

Here is the screenshot of .doc file with table opened in KOffice:

No comments… It’s probably easier to start creating your table from the very beginning than to try to change something.

It’s obvious that at the moment a user may like this office suite just in case he/she doesn’t have to work with other applications and can use only the components which are included in KOffice, because there are really too many compatibility issues. Still it doesn’t mean that in some time this solution would be able to become better, because at the very beginning OpenOffice had quite a decent amount of similar problems as well.

Bottom Line?

No doubts there are very decent alternatives to choose from while thinking about migrating from MS Office to another tool. Out of question OpenOffice 3.1 is the best solution to choose if you are looking for great functionality and compatibility, however depending on your needs you may decide in favor of different application. Just remember that in any case you won’t lose because you get absolutely free software with a user-friendly interface and lots of functions you may need. The only thing you need to remember is so-called “font issue”, i.e. all the free apps have just free fonts, so you won’t be able to use the fonts you like, unless you install them.