Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I have a quick question about compatibility between Microsoft Word 2010 and OpenOffice 3.3 Writer.

I have some documents which were created in Microsoft Word which contain some plain text content controls. I need to open these documents using OpenOffice and see the text in the content controls however it is not showing up. Can anyone confirm whether or not content controls added in Microsoft Word are compatible with OpenOffice 3.3? If they are compatible as standard, are there any plugins available to provide compatibility?

I've attached a couple of screenshots to show the same document when opened in Word 2010 and OpenOffice 3.3

Content controls are a feature of Open XML. OOo Writer can open Open XML files but can't save in that format. You can try if LibreOffice is better for your purpose - it can read and write Open XML, but not everybody agrees on how well that's done.

edit: OOXML -> Open XML

As far as I can see, Content Controls are not an Office feature directly supported in OpenOffice
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/ ... 30750.aspx

I will take a look at LibreOffice and see if it will show the text however I don't know if it will be suitable. The placeholders get filled in as part of an automated process on a server and then a third party library is used to read the file and convert it to PDF. The document I have attached was not created through this process it was simply made in Word. I don't know if the third party library we are using supports LibreOffice - I do know that it supports OpenOffice and Word.

I've opened the .docx file and found the XML for my placeholder and the content which is placed into it and all of the elements and attributes seem to be using the schema "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordp ... /2006/main" which suggest that content controls are part of the Open XML specification.

jmitch18 wrote:I've opened the .docx file and found the XML for my placeholder and the content which is placed into it and all of the elements and attributes seem to be using the schema "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordp ... /2006/main" which suggest that content controls are part of the Open XML specification.

That's what Rory and I were saying. You should probably get a license for MSO and work from that. If you're doing this professionally, it'll save you a lot of headaches, and in the long run the time you don't have to spend sorting out conversion problems outweighs the cost.

Better avoid the OOXML format, have a look at: MS Office 2007 OOXML file format (docx, xslx, pptx, ppsx).

Standards like ODF (native format for OOo) have been designed for interoperability.

floris v wrote:

jmitch18 wrote:I've opened the .docx file and found the XML for my placeholder and the content which is placed into it and all of the elements and attributes seem to be using the schema "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordp ... /2006/main" which suggest that content controls are part of the Open XML specification.

That's what Rory and I were saying. You should probably get a license for MSO and work from that. If you're doing this professionally, it'll save you a lot of headaches, and in the long run the time you don't have to spend sorting out conversion problems outweighs the cost.

The process is being implemented in the backend of a website for a client. I would assume they have licenses for staff machines since the system needs to allow them to open the generated documents in Word and edit them but as far as I'm aware they don't have a license for the server.

It sounds like there could be a bit of a problem with compatibility with the documents here for the PDF conversion. Seems like the two solutions would be for them to get Office installed on the machine if possible or start and convert the existing document templates ( ) to another format which is fully compatible with OpenOffice.