Microsoft Word documents
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Revision as of 02:54, 17 October 2007
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FAQ: Can AbiWord open Microsoft Word® documents?
Presently, can open most Microsoft Word documents well. For further information and a few "quid pro quos", please continue reading.
Contents
Caveat
However, if the document has complicated tables, text boxes, embedded spreadsheets, and so forth, then it might not work as expected. Developing good MS Word filters is a very difficult process, so please bear with us as we work on getting Word documents to open correctly. If you have a Word document which fails to load, please open a Bug and include the document so we can improve the importer.
Saving as .doc
can currently save in an MS Word compatible ".doc" format. This is done by saving as Rich Text Format (.rtf) but with a .doc extension. The file extension does not mean that the file is a binary Microsoft Word document and .doc may contain RTF, HTML or plain text. This is a feature — Microsoft themselves have used .doc to exploit a mis-feature of MS-Word.
Some developers and even a few users have suggested that this is dishonest and cheating. In fact this cheating is something Microsoft themselves have done in their own software! (Example: MS Wordpad on Windows 98 claims to save as Microsoft Word 6.0 (.doc) but if you look at the files in a text editor you can see that it is in fact Rich Text Format). There are no plans to support binary MS Word export. See Abiword Bug 2565 http://www.abisource.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2565
The "Save As" Problem
There is only one downside of this approach and many users have wondered why when they try to Save a Microsoft word document they get prompted to Save As instead. This is because of the small possibility of losing some of the information contained in the original file and the last thing we want is for users to lose data so we must make sure that users do not accidentally overwrite the original and they must choose do so deliberately. (please feel free to edit this or perhaps split the Save As Problem into another section).
_Editorial Note_
Darn, my changes wiped out Main.HorkanAs, much like happened some time ago with my changes wiping out Main.HubertFiguieres — over on twiki.org a problem like this was traced to one of the Sourceforge servers running out of "temp" space. Ill try to find a link and then send it to Main.HubertFiguiere (as, IIRC, he is the webmaster for AbiWord).
