Noway to find an acceptable MS Office equivalent with Ubuntu

Wael,

What is the problem?

Is it that you are not saving the files in a file format that MS Office can read?

Or is that that the file format can be read in MS Office but the document format or layout is wrong when viewed in MS Office?

Tony

In recent years open office seems to be have got a lot better at compatibility with office. For normal documents and spreadsheets I've found the compatibility to be excellent. Problems start to creep in if the level of formatting complexity increases. Text boxes and tables may be a difficult but the problems appear to mainly to do with fonts and font sizes - the actual locations are generally correct. Open Office is no longer in development, and Libre Office is the direct of fork of this project that is continuing the good work.

For most things I've been very happy with the compatibility. I've heard people express unhappiness with the compatibility of Libre Office which is the new defacto standard in 11.10. This was because the 3.3 beta of Libre office and Libre Office 3.4 still had some compatibility issues, but many of these were addressed in the 3.4.2 release. Try the latest release if you can, as you might be pleasantly surprised.

If Microsoft change the standards yet again, it's only an issue if everyone goes out and gives Microsoft more money for the latest and greatest(?) software. A lot of large businesses are still using older Office suites rather than upgrade.

Chris

Thank you for your interest in helping me, actually Chris described clearly what I am suffering from:
- Font sizes are different then the whole paragraph becomes larger and the format gets disturbed.
- Tables do not appear as in MS Office with different sizes of columns or raws
- If I correct them then send again to an MS Office user he finds it in the wrong shape

I am using LibreOffice 3.4.3
OOO340m1 (Build:302)

I was looking at other alternatives like Abword but document viewing is always different than MS Office even after I add the MS True type fonts into the system.

Something I've been meaning to do but still have to get around to, is try different fonts to see if there are a few that will give greater compatibility wrt to formatting. For a normal letter fonts aren't so critical, but for columns and text boxes it's vital that the fonts are the same, metrically.

Investigation that I've done so far suggests that the Liberation fonts that are available in LTS are designed to give this compatibility. For 11.10 the Liberation fonts are also available, however installing the restricted extras in 11.10 provides "Microsoft Fonts". Whether these are the actual Microsoft fonts or facsimiles of is unclear.

There's only two main types of font that it is essential to get working if possible, a serif font (aka Times New Roman) and a sans-serif font (like Arial, Helvetica etc) with possibly a monospaced font for some special purposes (Courier etc). You can do most things with these fonts, if you can find the ones that are most compatible with Microsoft Office.

Installing the Microsoft fonts with restricted extras would seems to off the most chance of success.

If it's found that the Liberation fonts render differently to the Microsoft fonts, perhaps we should investigate it as much as possible and provide feedback, Since these are the natively installed fonts that are supposed to provide the best formatting compatibility.

Chris

Unfortunately, If you want to be fully compatible with MS office you need MS Office. Microsoft want you to buy office and because they have most of the market they can force what they want.

It is possible to share files between MS office and Libre Office if you agree with the person you are sharing with which fonts you will both use and what format format to share files in etc. But Libre Office will never be fully compatible with Microsoft because if they get too close Microsoft will change it again.

Hello,

If you are not totally satisfied with LibreOffice then the solution is to install MS Office in Ubuntu.

You can find out how to do this by downloading the Full Circle Magazine (http://fullcirclemagazine.org/). It is free and you can download all the past 4 years worth of issues.

The MS Office install is explained in Issue 52 (August).

Regards,

Allan :)

you can always save a libreoffice files in an earlier version of office instead of the latest .docx, .xlsx, etc. I like to use the XP/2003 format. i haven't had any problem with that format. however, some of the useless new features they added won't be saved. miraculously, the developers at microshaft had an aneurism and decided to support earlier file formats in their latest versions, which they didn't before.