[PLUG] Best File Format for OOo Writer <=> MS Word Collaboration?

[Rogan Creswick]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 9:03 AM,  <jgw at sdf.org> wrote:
> Greetings PLUGers,
> I'm trying to help out a first-time author using OOo Writer 3.2.0 on Ubuntu
> 10.4 who needs to collaborate with a book editor using MS Word, probably
> the 2007 version on Windows 7.  Ideally, the book editor would be using
> the "Record Changes" feature in Word, then forwarding it back for the author
> to run "Edit>Accept or Reject Changes" on. Probably several rounds of this
> sort of thing on an approx. 400 page book.  Alternately, it appears both
> programs can also merge differences via the "Compare Files" feature which
> avoids having to deal with externally-generated "diffs" as with "Record
> Changes".

I can't caution /against/ this enough.

OO has a long and distinguished history or corrupting documents in
many ugly ways.  Often, this corruption only appears once the document
is loaded in Word.  eg: Everything will look peachy to the
linux/OO.org user, then the client (or in this case, publisher) will
see something that looks like it went through a blender.

This might work if you don't have any formatting or images (eg: if
you're essentially sending a text document), but given that Word is
even in the picture, I suspect that that is not the case.

The publisher may offer other formats that are acceptable, such as
LaTeX or DocBook.  Those technologies have strong support on a number
of platforms, and offer a better solution.  If Word is a requirement,
then I strongly recommend setting up a VM with Word installed, and
accessing it via VirtualBox.  It will cost $200-300 in licensing, but
you'll save days of frustration.

Anyhow, be very cautious with converting from OO -> Word; in my
experience, what you see in OO has little relation to what shows up in
Word.  If you must do it this way, then find a copy of word to at
least preview the deliverables before sending them off.

--Rogan

> Anyways, my simple single page tests using the .rtf format were a mixed
> bag, sometimes resulting in file corruption.  The .doc format seems to be
> more robust over several rounds of changes.  However, there are several
> Word versions available under "File>Save As>File Type" and I'm wondering
> which is most likely to be best for this project?
>
> OOo "Save As>File Type" choices:
>
> MS Word 6.0 (.doc)
> MS Word 95 (.doc)
> MS Word 97/2000/XP (.doc)
> MS Word 2003 (.xml)
> MS Word 2007 (.docx)  ## I think this is read-only so a non-starter
>
> I've not tested OpenDocument Text (.fodt) or DocBook (.xml).
>
> I am aware of the ODF Converter module for MS Office however it didn't
> perform well in my tests which featured frequent MS Word (earlier 2000
> version) crashes whenever an .odt file was opened.
>
> My guess is MS Word 97/2000/XP is the best candidate but I'd like to get
> some real-world feedback before committing.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jeff W
>
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