Compatibility with Microsoft Office

Issues with installing under all versions of MS Windows
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Johne D
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Joined: Mon Nov 30, 2015 4:34 pm

Compatibility with Microsoft Office

Post by Johne D »

My wife's laptop was broken recently. So I allowed her to have a user profile on my laptop. She used the free version of word and spreadsheet from MS. I have been using Open Office. I started by creating an MS account to include both of us. Then I changed my mind and decided to open local accounts. I got them set up however, I lost all my open Office sppreadsheets. I cannot find them. If there's some magic somebody can offer , I'm all ears.
Open Office 4.1.2
Windoows 8.1 64 bit
John Dougherty
Bill
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Re: Compatibility with Microsoft Office

Post by Bill »

Each user account has its own folder for documents. Each user account has its own user profile and list of recent documents for OpenOffice. If you saved the documents in "Account A", then they won't be in "Account B". You have to open "Account A" to access the documents.
AOO 4.1.14 on Ubuntu MATE 22.04
esperantisto
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Re: Compatibility with Microsoft Office

Post by esperantisto »

Bill wrote:You have to open "Account A" to access the documents.
…or grant admin privileges to Account B.
AOO 4.2.0 (of 2015) / LO 7.x / Win 7 / openSUSE Linux Leap 15.4 (64-bit)
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keme
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Re: Compatibility with Microsoft Office

Post by keme »

Johne D wrote:[...]I started by creating an MS account to include both of us. Then I changed my mind and decided to open local accounts. I got them set up however, I lost all my open Office sppreadsheets. I cannot find them. [...]
If the opening of a Microsoft account included activating their cloud storage, you may be the victim of that.

There is a bug in the OneDrive sync client which clears all ods and odp files (spreadsheets and presentations) after they have been opened in Microsoft context (Excel/Powerpoint, or the file explorer preview). The files are still there, but document (file content) is cleared (0 bytes). You can restore the file by logging into the cloud service on the web, open the folder and find revision history for the file. After restoring to the previous version, the file content seems to be persistent. This happens with every ods and odp file in any folder synced by OneDrive, except those explicitly saved by MS Excel and MS Powerpoint, respectively.

I reported it to a Norwegian support site. (Meant to use the English one, but it seems that I was redirected.) You may not understand most of the correspondence there, but the full picture, as it were, is in the last video which is annotated in English. (sharing is limited, will time out in September -21) That video only shows what happens by using MS software, but for the purpose of OneDrive "destructive sync", saving from Calc/Impress is akin to pasting a copy of the file.

Looks like that thread died when I didn't react in a timely fashion to the initial response. :(
John_Ha
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Re: Compatibility with Microsoft Office

Post by John_Ha »

See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for a description of differences and for why you should always work in, and save Writer files as .odt, Calc files as .ods, Impress files as .odp etc.
LO 6.4.4.2, Windows 10 Home 64 bit

See the Writer Guide, the Writer FAQ, the Writer Tutorials and Writer for students.

Remember: Always save your Writer files as .odt files. - see here for the many reasons why.
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Villeroy
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Re: Compatibility with Microsoft Office

Post by Villeroy »

Hell freezes over before I send anything of importance through Microsoft servers. I can share by mail attachment, chat attachment, private network access servers, anything but corp. cloud.

I don't have to translate keme's detailled report on the Norwegian support site. The English answer from the MS agent says it all. "Thank you for reaching out to us......May be you're just too stupid to update your system." They serve us with chat bots!
Please, edit this topic's initial post and add "[Solved]" to the subject line if your problem has been solved.
Ubuntu 18.04 with LibreOffice 6.0, latest OpenOffice and LibreOffice
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