Office open/closed formats compatibility still a thing in 2026?
Posted by danielsoft1@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 62 comments
hello, I sent a DOCX file from Libre Office (Cinnamon Wilma default deb package version, i.e. LTS) to a person over e-mail and he said he is not able to open the document, I had to send him proprietary .DOC, which is closed format, but paradoxically worked. On a forum I received an in-depth reply that Microsoft is rapidly upgrading their 365 Office suite and breaking compatibility.
I thought this "war" around formats was already "won" when DOCX and XLSX etc were standardized, but apparently it's only "half a standard" or something so people are still forced to Office because of formats.
Any thoughts?
umadevi1172@reddit
yes its a thing. until the open format is largely used. until then office format would be widely used by many and Onlyoffice has support and compatibility for both
malarvizhi0368@reddit
Honestly if you care about DOCX/XLSX compatibility specifically, you might want to try ONLYOFFICE. In my experience it sticks much closer to how MS Office actually renders OOXML files than LibreOffice does, especially for complex formatting.
LibreOffice is great FOSS software, but its import/export filters can still cause layout quirks.
DOCX is standardized, but Microsoft keeps extending it in practice, so “standard” doesn’t always mean perfectly interoperable.
creamcolouredDog@reddit
Last year, Open Document Foundation has publicly called out Microsoft's Office "Open" XML formats for their alleged obscure documentation of tags and complexity.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
For reference:
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/09/27/the-artificial-complexity-of-ooxml-files-the-xlsx-case/
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/10/03/the-docx-case/
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/10/10/the-pptx-case/
vali20@reddit
The Excel example, the “main” xml contains the indexes for the strings to look for in the “strings table” xml.
Binary formats (elf, pe32) do this as well, for a host of reasons, and complaining about that would look laughable.
I am not defending Microsoft, but you have to understand their perspective as well: maybe that is how Office was designed initially, storing the data not necessarily in an easier manner for the user to manually decipher, but in a way that is easier for their internal logic to parse. Separating a strings table is not unheard of, that’s what I am saying.
Cryptic tag names are not unheard of, they just minimize parsing (strcmp’s are shorter), so their variant is actually better in this regard, their format probably parses faster than the libre one. Again, optimizations like this are not unheard of, try deciphering the JavaScript of any web page, all of whom serve obruscated, minified versions, and only so for performance reasons, so that the JavaScript interpreter in the browser has an easier time since the browser already has so much to do. Are rhe same people mad there?
The other problem, that they are inventing all kinds of proprietary crap that doesn’t do much and call it “add-ins”, yeah, that’s shady. But it is also the people’s fault. Freezing a feature ser forever is also absurd - Microsoft has to implement some new crap every now and then for people to justify paying for new versions, and how can you do that without either making it part of the standard, which then implementers would then be forced to adopt and many may not want to anyway, but at least they’d have a clear spec, or just keeping it proprietary and letting implementers figure it out.
But as I said, it is also our fault. Like, we already have a baseline, a spec that does a lot of stuff and is well known and implemented already. It is in any Government’s interest, since we have laws on this, to achieve interoperability, so big players should just manadate that the documents they circulate only have Office 2010 features in them. Wasn’t that enough for 99% of documents out there? It probably was. Then, you can send that document and you are guaranteed it will work both with the latest Microsoft Office in Windows, and also with someone using LibreOffice. If big players agree on this, small ones will have to jump on as well. And you solve the problem that way. You have a frozen format there, no need to features, but is there really a need from an Office program?
Where I work, we have this rule, complex functionality is banned from Office, since we have some using Windows 11 with Office 365, but others using GNU/Linux with Office 2010 under Wine (since that is the latest version that works without glitching as hell, the more recent Windows 10-only versions are a no go).
Again, big players could do a lot more. There are so many businesses leeching on open source, but when it comes to stepping in, no one does anything. You’d imagine Wine would run the latest Microsoft Office by now, the most requested non-game application for it. Yet, the latest versions are utterly broken. If people are so interested in breaking away from Windows, then come implement patches that free you up. The discussion would be less heated if people could run Microsoft Office on GNU/Linux natively, so they could just install that and run it when necessary to work with some random received document. But no, you still have to take matters into your own hands, like that dude that got fed up with announcements about Wine version x that could all this great stuff but in practice still unable to progress on actual, real software, so he coded patches for Photoshop in a weekend. Imagine if someone like Antmorphic would pay $20k to a few devs to fix MS Office compatibility in Wine. But no, they thought that money is better invested in having a bunch of monkeys reinvent a gcc that’s crappier than what a CS student can come up with in its first year. But when it comes to benefiting from OSS, you can bet their Claude stack runs on what…?
It is not only Microsoft, that’s only those who interact with the most.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
Who do you expect to read this novel?
vali20@reddit
Apparently not you, you just want to be in an echo chamber.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
Well, if you need that many words to defend an absolutely horrible format, that's just a self own. The pure existence of ODF proves that none of the complexity of ODF is actually needed, but in fact just an extremely hostile move to make it impossible for literally everyone - including Microsoft themselves - to provide 100 % compatibility. And to come to that conclusion, I don't even have to read a single line of your comment, the sheer length already says it all.
Next time when you get paid by MS to defend utter corruption, do your job properly and don't make a fool of them.
vali20@reddit
Man, what does ODF have anything to do with it? Why can’t anyone make a format where it serializes data in a way that better suits the inner workings of the application? That ODF chose human readability over that it is their choice, but not everyone should be forced to do that. Forcing everyone to implement things a certain way is scary. GPLv3 scary. So long that format is described, what is the problem then? You just complain that ODF dumps everything in a file you expect, while Office dumps them into 2 files, one of which is in some folder you do not expect, and that one contains the actual strings and the other just pointers to that.
DNS has pointers as well. Let’s complain about DNS, because yeah, implementing DNS without taking pointers into account would have been easier. This whining it’s the kind of thing you’d expect from a 1st year CS undergrad that figures out midway their DNS parser assignment expects them to implement that as well, not from people with established background in a field. Been there, done that. I am past that. You should too.
The obtusity is high with you. Everyone that does not agree with you is paid by someone. You’re a lost cause, apparently.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
Everything. It has been an ISO standard before MS even started to work on OOXML. So by that fact already OOXML should have never been allowed to be standardized in the first place, simply because competing ISO standards that do the exact same thing in different ways aren't allowed, otherwise standardization becomes meaningless.
vali20@reddit
Dude, you have a problem. Besides, you’re clinging too much on the standardization idea: it could as well have not been standardized at all, would it make a difference? Office would still be the dominant application, and it would still default to some crap, and you’d still have the same problem. ODF is absolutely irrelevant. You do not need a standards body to tell you what the most used app for certain tasks on the planet is.
Stop taking things personal. Where is my lie? What I described with the 2 tables is exactly how it seems to work from the description there, it’s not my fault you picked a crappy example to make your point and now you’re crying and calling everyone a liar because they saw in 2 seconds what bs of an example you gave. No one is spreading any lies. You’re bitching because OOXML is too complex. So is the Web, and needlessly so as well, sites looked fine 10-20 years ago as well. Isn’t that making harder to implement a browser as well? Yes, it does, ask the Ladybird creators. But yeah, they’re doing it. It is how it is.
Anyway, does anyone stop people from switching to strict mode? Is any other Government prevented from doing so or mandating that all documents it works through are strict mode? Or switching to ODF…? Like, I fail to see why they can’t do that if they really wanted to. It is just that they do not want to, OOXML or not…
No one is spreading any lies.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
Says the notorious liar? That's rich...
Vastly. OOXML could have never been successful without the ISO standardization. MS new that, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered rushing OOXML out the door with massive corruption simply because ODF was standardized by the ISO. Because every time you have any public calls for bids, adhering to ISO standards wherever they exist is usually a requirement.
Nope, they would have already defaulted to ODF and maybe even abandoned their own formats simply because formats not standardized when there are standardized formats aren't of any relevance.
To you it is. But that's the only way to have compatibility. And as more and more companies and governments are getting rid of their dependence on a single vendor, that's the only format that can be used.
That's not what standardization means. In fact, the format the most used apps must support if they want to play any role in public bidding for contracts is being decided on by standardization, as standardization is typically a requirement by laws.
You are taking this personal, I'm just sticking to facts. And this is where this discussion is over. You keep repeating spreading lies that have been disproven decades ago and you refuse to stick to facts. I'm not wasting any more time on this. Educate yourself before you try to educate people with your pathetic world view.
nightblackdragon@reddit
It is complicated but it's not even the biggest issue. The biggest issue is the fact that MS Office doesn't even use it by default. You can have perfect implementation of OOXML "standard" and Word will still break formatting of your document.
dolphlaudanum@reddit
Word will break formatting if you adjust a photo or table a fraction of a millimeter.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
Exactly. OOXML is deeply proprietary. Not only do you have 5,500 pages of the strict mode for it, but also an additional, but guaranteed incomplete 1,000 pages for a "transitional" mode, which is the only one MS Office uses by default, which basically gives them permissions to adapt the file format any way they like to "work around bugs in Office", instead of simply fixing these bugs. Adding to that, at least in the early years, the "standard" was full of notes like "if option x is set, do things like Office 97", just that nobody knows how Office 97 handled these things. And the transitional mode is changing quickly. OOXML in Office 2007 differs a lot from the one used in Office 2011, which also differs from the ones used in Office 2013 and so on. And OOXML was only ever adopted as an ISO standard due to massive corruption and the ISO members refusing to do their job properly. So OOXML is only slightly less proprietary than the old binary office formats.
MarzipanEven7336@reddit
It amazes me that everyone is so overwhelmed by a little XML. It was created to be used as a serialization format. So it’s shouldn’t be that hard to generate all the needed types to handle the documents. However if you’re doing 1:1 mapping that gets a little more complex, but Microsoft is pretty consistent with their architecture patterns, especially in Microsoft Office. So if you were to grab the schemas, you should be able to generate damned near everything needed to deserialize a document, then mapping that’s the fun part, you need to follow a clean IOC architecture Inversion of Control paired with a Visitor pattern. That just means any class representing any element in the document likely can be constructed by handing it any other element and the implementation is where you do basic checks to see what you’re about to handle, so at this point is where if you had a registry of the known data-types from OpenOffice you would try to map Office <-> OpenOffice types to their matching types, and the. Handle any type casting where appropriate.
Source: I used to work at that place.
siodhe@reddit
XML is great. Microsoft's use of XML is an abomination.
stef_eda@reddit
XML si not that great. Difficult and bloated for humans to read, difficult for computers to parse, with as a bonus an orphaned libXML2 lib.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
Not really true through. ODF isn't really that difficult to read, and I very much doubt it's that difficult to parse, otherwise SVG wouldn't be used for literally everything on the web that doesn't require a raster graphic.
KalilPedro@reddit
Oh yeah I don't understand how there are so few browser engines, you just have to parse the html and make a visitor over it!
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
You really have no idea how wrong you are. Not only is the OOXML XML an absolute mess (just read the articles TDF published that I've collected here, it's insanity), but MS Office doesn't even stick to the standard itself. Unless you manually force it every time to use the strict mode of OOXML, it will use the transitional OOXML version, which technically is part of the ISO standard, but not only was that only granted as a limited time thing, but also they haven't updated the standard since 2011, but the XML they generate changes like every 5 min.
No, it was created because ODF was standardized by the ISO, making the old binary format irrelevant everywhere where there's a requirement to adhere to ISO standards. And while not only OOXML is deeply proprietary, the ISO rules prohibit the existence of two standards doing the same thing, otherwise you wouldn't need standards to begin with. So if the ISO did its job, it would have been impossible to standardize OOXML simply due to the fact that ODF was already standardized.
Yes, that's how it should be, but that's not how OOXML works.
They literally never have been. Just ask any dev that had to work around the constant stream of quirks MS adds to the produced files.
The fact that there's not a single program that's fully compatible with the proprietary garbage MS Office produces - including MS Office itself - should already be enough to prove you a liar.
I'm not suprised then that you are spreading so much misinformation. How much did they pay you to write those lies?
MarzipanEven7336@reddit
Misinformation? Just reading your comment is like having a fucking aneurism. XML was not created in response to OOXML. I need to no further.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
I never claimed it was.
You haven't even read my second sentence. You haven't read anything. And that's exactly why indeed you are spreading misinformation. Pathetic.
LousyMeatStew@reddit
Microsoft is also making things difficult on the application side as well.
More and more, Microsoft is pushing Add-ins as a way to extend the functionality of Office.
Even if you save an Office document in ODF, content created by an add-in basically gets stored as a text blob - a base64 (or equivalent) encoded representation of data that is only usable by the add-in. It's a way of maliciously complying with the letter of ODF but not with the spirit of interoperability.
This not only causes issues with LibreOffice, but add-ins are not supported in Office Web Apps (driving customers to higher Office 365 subscription tiers to get the desktop apps) and they typically are only supported on Office for Windows (because duh).
Expensive_Poop@reddit
This smells like old microsoft's strategy EEE like how microsoft trying to do with java
LousyMeatStew@reddit
No, I wouldn't call it EEE because this is explicitly allowed.
You have the same problem if you were using, say, Gnumeric and wanted to use one if its unique functions.
It's an intractable problem. You don't want ODF to be a limiting factor in what features an application is allowed to implement. And on the other hand, if you add every unique feature to ODF, that puts the burden on everyone else to support them as well lest they fall out of compliance.
Really, the fundamental issue is that the file format itself is not a good mechanism for enforcing interoperability.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
I'm sorry to hear. My experience with MS Office Add-Ins - especially when you compare them with how easy it is to add extensions to LO - has been abysmally bad. Especially when you have to deal with garbage like Citavi, where when its own installer messes things up, you're screwed. You don't have a file that you can just load with Office and call it a day.
Most likely not caused by MS, as obviously Add-in vendors want to make money with the garbage they produce, so obviously they want to do things proprietarily, but also MS doesn't prohibit it, as they most likely get a cut of the money made off Add-in sales. But I'm really not surprised.
The joke with that is that you don't even need any Add-ins to reach the limitations of Office Web. It's an absolute shitshow. If you don't display your documents in read-only mode, it's really difficult to guess how to edit a document there so the layout will not break.
stef_eda@reddit
Tell that person to use Libreoffice.
siodhe@reddit
Libre Office is generally more compatible with multiple versions Microsoft Office than the official package is with other versions of itself.
Microsoft profits from forcing users to "upgrade". Gratuitous change and incompatible with older versions is the point. This poison is a reliable feature.
When Microsoft submitted OOXML to standardization, it was rejected. Realized it would not pass based on technical merit, Microsoft fell back on corruption to force through garbage the standards participants would normally reject. Microsoft stuffed meeting rooms with their own crew so densely the opposition couldn't physically enter the room, opposing representatives were blocked from their rightful seats, bribes, background dealing, corrupted government officials who acted to just support a surface claim their MS documents met "open standards" without actually doing anything, and many other corrupt actions. They refused to actually produce complete documentation, and the stinking, 6000 page subset they finally produced later includes by reference various proprietary formats they object to exposing. (aside: their first definition was only \~2000 pages - they intended to hide most of the definition) Those 6000+ pages define a "strict" mode Microsoft doesn't use by default, but it's still so large almost no one else can implement it all. They pulled this crap when fighting the Open Document Format, and it got so bad the reputation of the standards body was stained.
By contrast, the Open Document Format (ODF) was standardized easily, on technical merit, without drama, with a dramatically more compact definition (well under 1000 pages) that has been implemented by multiple organizations.
Microsoft always sits in opposition to users, with the sole objective of extracting cash, and actively leverages changes to formats and protocols to be incompatible with both everyone else ("Embrace and Extend") and even its past self (document formats) if there's a way to profit from it. Companies relying on Microsoft not only pay for these "upgrades", but also pay a labor price internally for having to deal with these incompatibilities.
pencloud@reddit
This is the number one reason I can't get non-techs onto Linux.
speedyundeadhittite@reddit
Office cannot even handle Word documents displayed on its own web client and the Word app, and don't even get me started about the incompatibilities between the Mac and the Windows ports.
I hate it. LibreOffice always just worked for me.
FengLengshun@reddit
Yeah, I'd love to use LibreOffice, the Collabora Office fork, or OnlyOffice. But, aside for Collabora still being very new, they all breaks in different ways when dealing with MS Office formats.
The main thing I remember was formattings in Format as Table and Pivot Table. Some positioning of texts or free floating elements like pictures and text boxes.
I don't like it, but pretty much the optimal answer is to use WPS Office, as they do license the format, though via Flatpak and with internet access disabled. I don't like it, but I just don't want to worry or think about it - I just needed something that works well enough and the saved document/spreadsheet isn't going to be all weird when my boss opens it.
I used to pay for Crossover for MS Office 365 actually. It sucked because it just relied so much on other Windows components that even something like not having lib32-sane (which was often broken in AUR, and still annoying in other distro) can break the entire Page Layout & Printing menu. Using VM via virt-manager/gnome-boxes/winapps with host folder access was the better solution, but at that point might as well dualboot (which is what I did - I want that backups in case I need to do VBA stuff).
It's just a mess and I'm glad I no longer need to deal with as complex excel files as I did back then. An entire vendor document and tracking database UI in the form of a 30MB xlsm file... Brr.
phylter99@reddit
The docx,xlsx,etc. formats are open source and Microsoft maintains an MIT licensed library for creating and reading them. That doesn't mean that each piece of open source software will work 100% with the format. The format(s) are quite complicated.
https://github.com/dotnet/Open-XML-SDK
I work with data and we handle office documents all the time with our own internal software and with open source libraries designed to work with the documents and we rarely have any trouble with the base format itself.
Just as an FYI, Microsoft Office can open Libre Office documents too, so sending something as a Libre Office document shouldn't be a problem either.
__konrad@reddit
Sadly, docx is "de facto" standard and The Document Foundation (LO developer) is focused on ODF which causes a conflict of interest...
Landscape4737@reddit
Microsoft have not claimed to support OOXML as the Office default file format since Office 2010. They have said their default file format is Microsoft XML whatever that is.
Microsoft XML could be anything, but it will be just a bit incompatible with OOXML for vendor lock-in reasons.
terminalslayer@reddit
Try Onlyoffice
T8ert0t@reddit
I've always had the most success with Softmaker and docx, for whatever that is worth.
Fit_Smoke8080@reddit
In the world of spreadsheets, yeah, they are, Excel has a lot of niche features implemented as "extensions" of the spec, so it doesn't matter a lot if the standard is """open""".
sriharshachilakapati@reddit
There is another possibility that your recipient might be on older version of MS Office. There are still systems that use Office 2007 and even 2003 out there, because they are easily crackable.
undrwater@reddit
Actually libre office has better compatibility for older versions of MS Office than newer versions do.
sriharshachilakapati@reddit
Agreed, but OP mentioned that they sent a DOCX initially, but a DOC worked in the end. DOC is a very old format. If at all a compatibility issue, it should be the one not working.
KnowZeroX@reddit
Yeah, that happens. The whole irony is that I got people to switch to LibreOffice because they couldn't even open their old stuff made in MS Office in their latest MS Office. While LibreOffice while ha to play catchup at least keeps backwards compatibility.
skuterpikk@reddit
Even office itself can't allways reliably open documents made by a different office version.
That being said, Office (Word at least) does support the ODF format used by Libre/Open Office, asuming fonts are available. This isn't a problem when using Open Office on Windows, but on Linux you should embed fonts into the document itself, as the Linux fonts are usually not installed on most Windows computers, and thus Word will fall back to using a handfull of default fonts
nightblackdragon@reddit
OOXML (docx, xlsx etc.) is open standard in theory but even if you implement it properly that doesn't mean MS Office will open your saved files without issues. MS Office by default uses "transitional" version of the standard which basically means that Office relies on non standard features. It also doesn't help that OOXML is pretty complicated. In theory MS Office also supports ODF (native LibreOffice format) but since it's not native format there are still compatibility issues.
The best way to avoid compatibility issues is using PDF but that works only if you don't need to send editable document.
sublime_369@reddit
MS have a vested interest in not having them interop well.
ODF (Open Document Format) should work I would imagine.
Kevin_Kofler@reddit
LOL, that is what Micro$oft wants you to believe with their open-washing.
Actually, the format war was lost when those pseudo-open "standards" were accepted first by the industry-controlled ECMA, then, due to strong lobbying by ECMA, even by ISO/IEC.
Proponents of ODF tried to oppose the OOXML standardization at both ECMA and ISO, on the grounds that there is already an ISO standard (ODF) that should be used instead, which is much better documented and much less tied to a specific proprietary implementation, but Microsoft and ECMA lobbying got the objections rejected and the "standard" approved.
FungalSphere@reddit
You have to remember the way word documents set fonts is very bizzare
Honest_Ad1632@reddit
Classic Microsoft. Trying to make switching as difficult as possible. That's why I got onlyoffice. It handles a ton of formats like DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, plus ODT, CSV, PDF, and even older ones like DOC or XLS. So I am covered no matter the case.
srekkas@reddit
Microslop can open odf formats.
There is nothing open about OpenXML
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
It can, but barely. Anything more complex than some simple text and an image is also too much for it.
Especially not in the transitional mode, which to this day is the default in MS Office.
srekkas@reddit
How we can push EU to adapt ODF?
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
It's not about adopting ODF, but banning OOXML. The issue is, OOXML was created because ODF was an ISO standard. So to not be excluded from public calls for bids, they created OOXML to also become an ISO standard, which they managed to achieve due to massive corruption. So you'd first have to rewrite the rules around public calls for bids to explicitly exclude OOXML. And that would have to be done in a way that MS can't simply sue for anti-competitive regulations (I know, the bigotry) and win. The only thing even more effective would be if the ISO admitted that OOXML should never have become an ISO standard for way too many reasons, and to mark it as deprecated.
But in general, the current fear of the USA (both with and "after" Trump) just randomly banning MS and others to offer their services in the EU to put more pressure on them for trade wars, is the only thing that can effectively wake up governments and industries to abandon MS Office and other products as fast as possible.
DoubleOwl7777@reddit
yeah, i hope more people ditch us tech here. like my personal pc if the us pulled the plug its safe relatively (of course there is the amd psp thing but that has no network stack to my knowledge and i dont think theyd go this far but you of course never know).
srekkas@reddit
Ban anything is not a option. Just adapt ODF in EU government level, as file exchange format.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
That has been done years ago, with simply no real impact: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/06/14/odf-analysis-of-adoption/
srekkas@reddit
So no real adoption. Plenty of legislatives or how they are called, are fully enforced
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
At the level of the EC, for all I know, it's actively being used. Of course for publishing you switch to PDF. But that doesn't really help with anything. So all that is left are the slow and egocentric efforts of each country (and often each state of each country, like in France or Germany).
DoubleOwl7777@reddit
ms office doing ms office things. microslop vibe codes everything now so i am not surprised.
_AACO@reddit
This has been a problem way before vibe coding was a thing. It was intentionally designed to be this way from the start.
DoubleOwl7777@reddit
well yeah you are right, vibe coding is just something that comes on top of that garbage.
_AACO@reddit
MS Open XML (docx/xlsx/pptx) is a very bad joke.
The documentation is a mess and MS Office doesn't even respect the standard, for example, documents created with MSO 2007 might not render properly on later versions
githman@reddit
I use LibreOffice too and I export documents to PDF if I expect the recipient to just view them. For edit compatibility the oldest MS format applicable still wins.