Enhanced Compatibility: Microsoft Office Improves Synergy with LibreOffice

Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint already support the same OpenDocument format as LibreOffice and OpenOffice. Microsoft is now testing OpenDocument Format 1.4 support, further improving compatibility between Office apps and third-party alternatives.

Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint now support OpenDocument Format 1.4 in the Beta Channel for Microsoft 365 Insiders . ODF 1.4 in Word adds full support for tables in shapes, lists that start from zero, non-overlapping images and shapes, support for all number list formats available in Word, and odd and even page breaks. Excel can now save color filter settings to ODS files and has improved support for rotated text. ODP files in PowerPoint can now use slide numbering starting from zero and supports new text rotation options within table cells.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint also support a new accessibility attribute for ODF documents, allowing people to specific that an object is purely decorative. This is an important feature for screen readers and other assistive technologies.

OpenDocument Format is the default file format used by LibreOffice and its predecessor OpenOffice, so with this ODF 1.4 update, files created by LibreOffice should have fewer broken elements when opened in Microsoft Office. ODF is also supported by the KDE Calligra suite, AbiWord, and other Office alternatives.

ODF 1.4 is still a working draft and has not been fully standardized. LibreOffice doesn’t even officially support it yet, so Microsoft is actually ahead of the curve here.

Even though it’s great to see Microsoft adopting newer open-source formats, this might cause some headaches whenever it’s rolled out. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will still open ODF 1.3 files, but will only save files in the newer ODF 1.4 format. That might cause minor compatibility issues with LibreOffice until it is fully updated.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint support ODF 1.4 in version 2404 (build 17531.20078) or later on Windows, and version 16.84 (build 24041420) or later on Mac. It’s not clear when the feature will leave the Beta Channel, or when it will roll out to the Office web apps or mobile versions.

Source: Microsoft 365 Blog