Saving an ODT into Word preserving tracking changes

[Connetts]

I work in a South African human rights NGO as a volunteer (I am a retired Law academic doing my bit to save the world). I edit text written for publication by colleagues whose first language is not English. They all use Word. I use Open Office with changes recorded and displayed on my screen.

Word is not available to me for financial reasons.

To be as helpful as possible I want my tracked changes to be visible when I return their work which they open In Word. I want them to understand the reasons for what I have done.

I open the DOC files they send me as ODT. Is this correct? How must I save what I do to ensure that, when I return their files which they will re-open in Word, my colleagues will see my changes recorded?

It seems that comments and highlights are preserved, but not editing changes involving punctuation and text.

Many thanks in advance!

[RoryOF]

Tracking changes does not transfer well between OpenOffice and MS Word, and contrariwise. One is at risk of file damage or even loss. Even Comments can often not transfer from one to other in their correct locations.

You should all work using the same suite of programs. Sorry, but there it is!

[Connetts]

Thanks, RoryOf. I feared that this might be the case. This is clearly authoritative and does not fill my heart with glee. Is there any prospect of better in the future?

[RoryOF]

LibreOffice has reportedly better support for MS Word formats; however, we see many reports on Forum of damaged .doc/.docx files from LibreOffice and other problems with the transfer. So I hold out no great hope.

[John_Ha]

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

[esperantisto]

I use LibreOffice to process documents from Word users with tracked changes (Apache OpenOffice is not an option in such a case due to lack of DOCX export, if it is DOC, AOO should be fine). No problem so far. However, the first thing to do is to resave documents to ODT and save back to DOCX only after completing the task.

[RoryOF]

It is important to emphasise that one should always retain an .odt file of the finished work, in case any damage occurs in the export to, or later processing of, a foreign file format.