Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I just switched from Libre Office to OO and, to my surprise, I find that I cannot save documents in .docx format as I could in Libre Office. Is there a timeframe for adding DOCX support? Thanks.

Save in .doc format for widest shareability. I am not aware that .docx offers any extra facilities in the saved documents than .doc.

Hi and welcome to the forum!

There are many discussions already about that here. The code was included in the OOo project but it was decided not to implement it. My personal opinion is that this is the right decision.
So if you need to work with OOXML, then either switch back to LibO or use MS Office.
Remember that the OOXML format was not designed to be compatible with anything else than MS Office (the version that is an ISO standard is not the one implemented by default in MS Office).
Welcome to the vendor lock-in policy...

Thanks for the information. I understand your point but the reality is that in the world of office suites Microsoft is the standard by virtue of market share. If OO is not going to be MS Office compatible it is a conscious decision to limit OO to those users who do not have to exchange documents with MS Office users. At the moment that is not a serious problem since OO can open .DOCX files and you can create documents in .DOC format. However, it will be more limiting in the future.

IAC, LibreOffice has its own problems, not the least of which is that you can't print a #10 business envelop. Thanks again for your answer.

Any version of MS Word which can read or write .docx files can also read and write .odt files. Send them .odt files and if MS Word messes them up, then complain to Microsoft about its implementation of .odt files. Microsoft has billions of dollars - Writer is written by volunteers.

Always work in, and save all work in .odt format and only save in another format such as .doc as a last resort just before sending a different format copy of the file. Be aware that if you work in and save in .doc format, you may lose formatting if you use function which is not supported in .doc. If you save in .doc, and you have a crash, you cannot recover files Using RECUVA to un-delete Writer temporary files which are now deleted as this method only works for.odt files.

See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for why you should always work in and save files as .odt.

Thanks. I did not know that Word can read ODT format. I'll follow your advice from now on.

Bazsl1 wrote:Thanks. I did not know that Word can read ODT format. I'll follow your advice from now on.

Excellent - spread the word that people should bed sending .odt files not .doc or .docx!

See Use Word to open or save a document in the OpenDocument Text (.odt) format which says:

After you install 2007 Microsoft Office system Service Pack 2 (SP2), you can open and save files in the OpenDocument Text (.odt) file format used by some word processing applications, such as OpenOffice.org Writer and Google Docs.

If this solves the problem, please edit your original post title to [Solved].