Word and Writer document formats?
Q I’m going to ditch Office 2010 when Microsoft stops support for it later this year. I’ve therefore been experimenting with Libreoffice, which you’ve praised many times in the magazine. I mainly use Word, so I’m primarily interested in Writer. It seems to do everything I need, but one confusion is that when I go to save new documents, the file format is set to ‘ODF Text Document’ (whatever that is), with a .odt file extension. I learned quickly that I can click next to ‘Save as type’ to change this to the .docx file format I’ve used with Word for years, and all is well. Could you tell me what the difference is between these two?
A First, a bit of background. ODF stands for Opendocument Format, while the .odt file extension means an Opendocument Format file that’s primarily for text (word-processed) documents. The ‘Open’ part is key: it means that any person, organisation or software application is free to use it.
The DOCX (.docx) format is also ‘open’, so the same free-for-all fundamentals apply. However, it derives from the DOC (.doc) format, which was previously a proprietary Microsoft technology. As such, DOCX is very closely associated with Microsoft, and specifically Word.
So, while both standards are open, historical distinctions die hard. The upshot is that DOCX is the default for Word, while non-microsoft programs tend to use ODT.
For many people, and for many documents, there’s little practical difference between the two. However, the individual formats do not support 100 per cent of each other’s features. For a full list of DOCX features that are supported (or not) by ODT, see the list published by Microsoft at www.snipca. com/34629 (see screenshot).
As a long-term Word user it makes sense for you to stick with DOCX. To help with this, you can change Writer’s default save format.
To do this, in Writer, open the Tools menu and then click Options. Next, in the left-hand pane, click to expand the Load/save category and then, in the right-hand pane, next to ‘Document type’, open the dropdown menu and then choose ‘Word 2007-2019 (*.docx)’. Click OK to apply.