Converting from LibreOffice

**paulh7436** · 2012-02-13 20:45

I received document in the odt format from Libre Office. They have two columns in landscape format and intended to be used in a booklet. I need to convert them to Word or Publisher 2010. I installed Libre Office and have exported them as docx but it is garbled. Is there a way to vertically divide a document so I can copy only one side and paste it into Word? The docx is attached but I could not attach the odt. Thanks! PaulH7436

**Gary Frieder** · 2012-02-13 21:33

Paul,

Just a note that you may be able to post the .odt file here if you put it a .zip container first.

Gary

**Andrew Lockton** · 2012-02-14 00:20

Try holding the Alt key as you click and drag. This allows you to select one side of the page for copying to another location.

**BATcher** · 2012-02-14 07:40

... and tell the person from whom you got the ODT file that they should save documents in Word format or as an RTF, for maximum compatibilty with what most other people have got! (I know I do!)

**paulh7436** · 2012-02-14 09:01

Thanks you all for the great suggestions. The holding the ALT key while copying worked fine. I too have strongly suggested that saving to Word is much preferred.
Sincerely,
Paul H

**bobprimak** · 2012-02-16 04:24

And last I saw, I though MS Office could directly import ODT files. Is this no longer true?

**Burnside** · 2012-02-17 06:17

And ;ast I saw, I though MS Office could directly import ODT files. Is this no longer true?

My experience has been that you can import MS Office files into Open/Libre Office, but not the other way. I prefer to work in .odt but save as .doc/.docx if the file is to be opened by anyone else.

The content in the posted file was garbled because MS Office can't reproduce tabs created in .odt, so they were replaced by spaces. Sometimes I've had success in doing a convert text to table, but it didn't work with the op's file.

Cheers, Burnside

**bobprimak** · 2012-02-19 02:43

Originally Posted by Burnside

My experience has been that you can import MS Office files into Open/Libre Office, but not the other way. I prefer to work in .odt but save as .doc/.docx if the file is to be opened by anyone else.

The content in the posted file was garbled because MS Office can't reproduce tabs created in .odt, so they were replaced by spaces. Sometimes I've had success in doing a convert text to table, but it didn't work with the op's file.

Cheers, Burnside

You are probably right in many cases. But I think the problem here is converting Tables to Text, isn't it?

Microsoft and Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle, and the originator of StarOffice, which fathered OpenOffice and LibreOffice) had many a feud over formats and compatibility plugins. ODT and ODF suffered in the fallout. So did Microsoft's XPS competitor to Adobe's PDF format. Not the same feud, but related. Highly formatted content, such as the Tables in the OP, are particularly vulnerable to "lost in translation" artifacts.

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