Question: why was I warned that I might lose “header dimensions”, but these more significant issues – no paragraph styles, messed up spacing – went unmentioned? Not professional quality Let’s just say that the ODF converter will mess up your paragraph spacing. Is that my spacing problem? It could be related but this is not what I would call a model of clarity.
In Open Document Format real spacing is sum. For example first paragraph style has spacing after 10pt and second has spacing before 20pt the real spacing is 20pt. In Open XML in real spacing between two consecutive paragraphs is the biger. Casting my eye down the page I came across this item: Still, it prompted me to look at the list of unsupported features. This is a deal-breaker for me, as I depend on paragraph styles but I am probably in a minority. The converter lost all my paragraph styles – not the formatting, but the style tagging. After round-tripping, these paragraphs had 10pt space after applied. In Word, I have my Normal style set with no space before or after. That said, I noticed something else about my round-tripped document. However, it could still be useful for importing and exporting documents interchanged with others using, say, Open Office. It will cause immense and unnecessary hassle. So the message is: don’t even think about using this converter as a means of standardising on Open Document while still using Word. My file is now called Using DigiKam_tmp_tmp.docx. Next session, I go to ODF – Open and guess what. So I save it to My Documents, then I go to ODF – Save As. If I try to save it directly, I get a “this file is read-only” error. So I click save, and get a view of all my temporary documents, because the converter puts the imported document in my temp folder.
I get, you guessed it, the “Please save before exporting” message. I make some changes, and want to export it as ODF. Then I open the ODF document, which now has _tmp appended. My opened document has been renamed to Using DigiKam_tmp.docx. Of course you would be mad to use a document converter like this in such circumstances – but let’s not forget the implications of potential inflexible government legislation that might mandate such a thing. Fair enough, nothing drastic – unless perhaps I am laying out a booklet for publication. If I go into details, it tells me that the header dimensions and document creation and modification dates might have been lost. Another 30 seconds later I get this message about lost elements: Next, I closed the document, went to ODF – Open, and chose the document I just saved. I don’t like to think what would happen to a 10,000 word report full of charts and tables. A wait message appeared: it took the converter about 30 seconds to save the document. OK, so I decided to save my current document as ODF. So instead of just clicking Save, users have to save twice, first as. Please save your document before exporting to ODF. If you have a new document, and choose ODF – Save As, you get the following error: As far as I can tell, this is not possible with this version 1.0 release. What you want to do is to fiddle with Group Policy and have Word default to opening and saving ODT (Open Document Text). Imagine you are an organization that has decided to mandate ODF for your documents, but to continue using Microsoft Office. Not ideal in terms of integration, but never mind. A separate top-level entry for ODF with Open and Save As menu items. Puzzled, I looked again at the Home menu in Word 2007. I went to Home – Save As, and looked for Open Document in the list of document types. This is just under 800 words long and contains no graphics. Then I opened Word, and opened the document I was working on, which happens to be called Using DigiKam.docx. I downloaded the Word 2007 add-in and ran the setup. I like to try things out before writing about them, so here’s what I did. Great news for interoperability – or is it? The first full release of the Open XML to Open Document Format translator is available for download.