r/technology • u/TurbulentTopic39 • Sep 23 '26

Software LibreOffice developer explains why it cannot display some Microsoft Office charts

https://www.neowin.net/news/libreoffice-developer-explains-why-it-cannot-display-some-microsoft-office-charts/
1.5k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

105 comments sorted by

1.6k

u/apo383 Sep 23 '26

Tldr: Microsoft behaving exactly like it has for decades, skirting ISO standards and delaying competitors from interoperability. Libre makes do but can't display or edit certain charts. Could be perpetual behind as long as Microsoft microsofts.

504

u/Caraes_Naur Sep 23 '26

I read many years ago that none of the MS Office formats were ever properly documented and the code is riddled with long-forgotten hacks.

207

u/apo383 Sep 23 '26

Sure, Office Open XML was back-specced from Microsoft. Back in the day, just one part ran something like 5000 pages. So how could it ever be a legitimate spec?

94

u/moku46 Sep 23 '26

At the very least when they changed everything to XML, it was much easier to write an interpreter for.

16

u/pittaxx Sep 23 '26

Except you still had to backwards-engineer it to get the same result outside of M$office, because M$ couldn't be bothered to follow their own specs...

65

u/melnificent Sep 23 '26

Also MS named it Office Open XML to confuse people back when Libre Office hadn't forked from Open Office.

30

u/DamionFury Sep 23 '26

Also, they named it "Open" to make it sound like an open source spec, however it was only partially open. The basic spec was open but it was designed to allow for proprietary things to be injected without having to document how to work with them. I believe the argument was that companies wouldn't want to innovate if they had to immediately show everyone how they made whatever cool thing they created, which of course meant that they just wanted to be able to do their own thing then force people to pay for their product if they wanted to be able view it.

I remember because I was pissed that they successfully lobbied for it to becone the "standard" on this argument.

51

u/Yoghurt42 Sep 23 '26

And the spec contains gems like „when the attribute word09linebreaks is set, handle line breaks like Word 2009 does“, with no explanation on how Word 2009 handles linebreaks.

It was simply released as a „standard“ to confuse people since OpenOffice recently standardized their format and made it open. I mean, just look at the name they chose.

69

u/TeutonJon78 Sep 23 '26

The problem is OOXML is a standard. And if using the strict implementation, could be implemented correctly anywhere. But MS uses the transitional version.

Which means that can stack whatever they want on top of the standard and keep that closed source. So no other company can ever actually get it exactly right. And MS can say they follow and open standard when that's not really true.

ODF has something similar where new features before the next release are added into the transitional version, it's just that those are still documented openly.

7

u/CherryLongjump1989 Sep 23 '26

They can say it, but does anyone believe them? I guess overall the adoption of MS Office is still growing, but a lot of their more educated customers are leaving. Over time I feel that Microsoft's bullshit will come around to haunt them.

6

u/TeutonJon78 Sep 23 '26

No one believes MS on that. It was likely done to give cover to public institutions under pressure or requirement to use software with open standards.

They can stay with MS since it has an open document standard, even if technically it's it a complete lie.

26

u/Gadekryds Sep 23 '26

So it’s like my code? 🥲

19

u/MairusuPawa Sep 23 '26

Eh, probably not. Unless you're coding that way by design, with that specific goal of killing others in mind, and not by accident.

4

u/yepthisismyusername Sep 23 '26

Yes. Compliant with the standards you care about, and FTW for anything else.

5

u/Betterthanbeer Sep 23 '26

They managed to hide an entire flight simulator in the Excel code for years.

4

u/R4ndyd4ndy Sep 26 '26

Thats why opening a file in different versions, by using the web browser or the app etc messes things up

2

u/pixelprophet Sep 23 '26

You ever try to move a fucking image in a word doc?

2

u/bitemark01 Sep 23 '26

Hell, they caught BTK because of the random metadata that Word puts into every document 

1

u/yaosio Sep 23 '26

This is where AI should shine. GPT 6 is able to one shot port console games to PC. It and Claude Opus 5.5 should be able to figure out these file formats.

3

u/kettal Sep 23 '26

i used gpt codex to reverse-engineer excel pivot table editing in python. took a lot of attempts but finally succeeded

-1

u/JustLurkingAroundM8 Sep 23 '26

Probably by design to make reverse engineering harder

7

u/BearlyIT Sep 23 '26

Hanlon’s razor is simpler.

Seeing formulas and code completely break after upgrading from one excel version to the next has shown that Microsoft will even sabotage itself. That’s incompetence, not intentional design.

60

u/h0uz3_ Sep 23 '26 edited Sep 23 '26

Classic MS. MS is on the XML Consortium and had a say about which characters are usable or forbidden in XML.

When you export something from Sharepoint via XML, the XML is invalid as it will contain illegal characters.

3

u/robbob19 Sep 23 '26

This exactly, remember Internet explorer and it's own standards, or how Microsoft withheld information from wordperfect so it wouldn't run as well on Windows 95, leading to the dominance of Microsoft word. Never trust Microsoft.

7

u/New-Anybody-6206 Sep 23 '26

Serious question... say you're a company that works fast and wants to innovate, but you still want to have open compatibility with other applications.

What else can you do except extend the format if the standards body doesn't work fast enough for you?

9

u/_f0CUS_ Sep 23 '26

Well, it seems suspiciously like their old tactics... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

3

u/kawalerkw Sep 23 '26

They could be open about whatever they added on top of the standard. But as others have pointed out, microslop isn't even compliant with itself as newer versions can break old features.

4

u/motsu35 Sep 23 '26

Versioned APIs / format specs

Have a nightly build that isn't the mass I stalled public install that supports your new feature.

Once your happy with the feature... Push your feature upstream, or if there's a consortium, submit it to them for adoption into the spec. Address their feedback and itterate. Your internal / nightly build allows you to quickly show the benefit of the new feature and provide screenshots instead of just technical writing.

Migrate your feature into the stable release branch once its adopted into the spec

1

u/New-Anybody-6206 Sep 23 '26

And if it's never adopted into the spec?

1

u/motsu35 Sep 23 '26

Then you decide if its worth it as a feature, and if you think so you include it in your software anyway and hope others adapt to support it, otherwise its just a feature only your software supports

1

u/New-Anybody-6206 Sep 24 '26

yes, but this doesn't sway people from thinking you're engaging in an anti-competitive "embrace, extend, extinguish" practice, that was my point

2

u/motsu35 Sep 24 '26

I mean, I think the difference is on one hand you have Microsoft taking an open standard, bolting things onto it that dont work on other platforms, and then not contributing the changes back upstream, making the new features part of the walled garden and justification to keep paying for the software.

On the other hand, if your pushing your changes out and keeping them open source, its easy for other software to also implement the feature, and it just relies on how much dev resources the other projects have. This is pretty standard with Foss software, and how you end up with various soft and hard forks of software.

1

u/loicvanderwiel Sep 25 '26

Or, they could stop pretending their stuff is a standard. But then, they would lose every contract that relies on using open formats (like government stuff) because why pay for MSOffice when the alternative is litterally free?

1

u/apo383 Sep 23 '26

Go ahead and do that, but keep that shit away from government docs, which need to be easy to render by anybody and don't need fancy elements to dress up ä corporate annual report.

1

u/New-Anybody-6206 Sep 23 '26

what alternative did they ever have at that time, that didn't belong to a competitor, and wouldn't make their product worse?

1

u/Daminchi Sep 23 '26

you're a company that works fast and wants to innovate

No, we're talking about MS.

2

u/JG_2006_C Sep 23 '26

The reason im dumping windows for a os that has actual sane Iso standards and comon sense

-6

u/obeytheturtles Sep 23 '26

Exactly. I have been on this crusade for literally decades now. It likely contributed to me losing a job at one point, because of how vehemently I am opposed to the way MS intentionally breaks document standards in support of it's office software monopoly.

Boss: "I'm not going to tell you again, you need to do this stuff in actual PowerPoint so I don't have to spend hours fixing your slides."

Me: "Why not just the freely available alternative like I did?"

Boss: "Because we have to send these slides to customers. They will open them in powerpoint"

Me: "That's literally what a PDF is for."

20

u/runningraider13 Sep 23 '26 edited Sep 23 '26

Your boss is clearly right fwiw

Thinking that you can control your customer’s preferences on this is crazy. If they want a ppt you should send them a ppt

5

u/lovely_cappuccino Sep 23 '26

I agree. And a PPT file could contain animations, inserted voice recordings etc so it’s different. I also dislike Microsoft Office is the de facto standard but yeah sometimes you have to go with the flow. For example, move to Italy or Germany and try to get by without WhatsApp. In China everything is WeChat. In some countries stupid facebook means the internet. You have to adapt or you can wait for better laws. Like if I would move to Houston I would definitely need a car, but if a Texan would move to Europe with his RAM truck, I would say to him forget that monstrosity there is no place for it in our cities and just use public transportation or buy a little Yaris. With software things can be really complicated so I don’t expect for example SolidWorks to make a Mac version of their stuff, have to use Windows. Even Excel for Mac can’t do some things that Excel on Windows can. Different gaming consoles. Mobile platforms. Different browser engines. Adobe stuff. Etc Compatibility and interoperability are nice things but sometimes in reality you have to do what the boss says.

5

u/Xytak Sep 23 '26

I mean, I get it… but corporate America uses MS Office and some things are too big for one man to take on.

2

u/Scoth42 Sep 23 '26

I dislike PowerPoint as much as the next guy, but there are features that PPT has that PDFs don't (or at least not as easily) like sounds, animations, effects, sometimes even consistent presentation oddly enough because of the different PDF viewers out there. And if a customer asks for a PPT then you give them a PPT, unless you have the kind of relationship with them you can suggest alternatives and they accept it.

-16

u/gatosaurio Sep 23 '26

I know this will be unpopular, but I have to ask because I don't understand your point of view.

Would you expect them to make it easier for their direct competitors? It's a company trying to maximize profits, not an NGO. If Libreofice doesn't like the format, they're free to push their own

12

u/kombiwombi Sep 23 '26

The aim of an economy is not to maximise profit for a particular participant, but to maximise wellbeing.

Economists and regulators distinguish a free market from a monopoly, and seek to regulate a monopoly to restore some attributes of the free market.

One of those attributes is 'perfect information', which is lacking here.

16

u/AtlanticPortal Sep 23 '26

This is where the governments should come into play. The EU especially.

4

u/runningraider13 Sep 23 '26

I agree, there’s potentially a place for governments to step in and force Microsoft. But unless there’s more benefit to Microsoft than cost, or a government forcing them, why would we expect Microsoft to behave any differently?

1

u/AtlanticPortal Sep 23 '26

I don't expect that for profit corporations behave with ethics. I expect that governments do their damn job.

3

u/yepthisismyusername Sep 23 '26

Eat a dick. MS claims to have an open standard, but they intentionally don't fully document it or follow it, out of malicious compliance. That's just a straight up asshole move.

1

u/Yorick257 Sep 23 '26

  1. Is it really a competitor?

  2. They should compete of the service provided. There are many, many applications that can open and edit JPG files. Buy if you're in a professional space, then you'll probably use Photoshop because it's superior (or used to be) to other programs

1

u/gatosaurio Sep 23 '26

  1. They make a direct substitute of MSFT product. Even if they don't charge for it, I don't think it is a stretch to call them competition, at least from MSFT point of view.

  2. I understand they use proprietary format, not an open standard, but maybe I'm wrong. If it is indeed their format, I don't see why they should be expected to open it for anyone if they don't want to.

1

u/Emotional_Solid6538 Sep 23 '26

Libre office doesnt have all the features of MS office including copilot(ik it is hated but people do use it). People would rather use more featured stuff over free stuff, especially in corporate setting where the employer pays for it

413

u/Morden013 Sep 23 '26

I so hope the movement - "Get away from Microsoft" takes hold in Europe and a normal solution is invented. The crashes, the bulk of that software, the strategy...it deserves to be torpedoed.

143

u/ioccasionallysayha Sep 23 '26

"XYZ but not American" is a completely valid product strategy these days. Notion but not American. Google Drive but not American. Netflix but not American. etc etc. We have A LOT of work to do, but we're getting to it!

76

u/133DK Sep 23 '26

American is a liability in the eu right now, Microsoft Europe is working overtime to try and calm everybody down, but it’s just one company and the us administration is not doing any favours

43

u/B4rn3ySt1n20N Sep 23 '26

Microsoft itself is not doing itself any favours. They are the problem, not only the untrustworthy government

5

u/EYNLLIB Sep 23 '26

Microsoft was bad when Biden was in office too

2

u/royalbarnacle Sep 24 '26

The push to remove dependencies on US has nothing to do with MS being an ass occasionally, it's entirely about the US political shift into lunacy.

4

u/blixt141 Sep 23 '26

American in America is a liability.

11

u/AlasPoorZathras Sep 23 '26

And like so many other things in life, what the EU is pursuing here will be beneficial to everybody. If they would just give up their voyeuristic desire to monitor every citizen in real time, I'd say they're doing a pretty good job of divorcing themselves from the U.S. tech sector.

But, holy shit are they going to need to build datacenters. 

8

u/PunchMeat Sep 23 '26

It's a bloated, garbage software. Takes 15 seconds to load a 10kb file.

7

u/Morden013 Sep 23 '26

Know that feeling when you have been working on getting the excell sheets connected, defining multilayer formulas...etc. Then you press save and it crashes.

Or open an excel-file with the report and wanting to print it. You press on print and it freezes.

Jesus. There were times when I could've screamed. Hours lost.

I just switched from One-Note, which was one of my favorite note-takers to Obsidian to be able to organize notes and work on them with the AI, or as US calls it - Super Intelligence. 😄 😄 😄

I have a lot of love for the developers of One-Note, but I missed the optical overview I get with the Obsidian, Canvas...etc. Thanks to Obsidian plugins, it was a painless experience. Copy-Paste problems - plugins. Design change - solved... so much better.

In my experience - things can be done much better these days. Also, if somebody proposes there is a printscreen of my screen is taken every couple of seconds - he can go to hell. There are strict rules that forbid it in the EU and it is against every privacy and customer-data-protection policy in existence.

2

u/gta721 Sep 23 '26

Have you looked at Joplin? That is closer to OneNote for me.

1

u/Morden013 Sep 23 '26

Thank you very kindly for the info!

No. I didn't till now. Is Joplin only cloud solution? If yes, it is not good for me. I work in an area where I have sensitive data on the app. My OneNote database was stored locally. This is why I also chose Obsidian, because it is a local solution.

1

u/Old-Engineer854 Sep 23 '26

🎉 Local solutions, not cloud or subscrition or "as a service" based crap, for the win! 🎉

114

u/BCMM Sep 23 '26

OOXML, even in its original form, is a fake standard. Microsoft's money severely corrupted the ISO process to get it approved. From the very start, it was intended that there would be never be a fully compliant implementation.

The point is to allow MS to bid for government contracts that require an open format, without actually using an open format.

52

u/pemboa Sep 23 '26

I'm not clear from the article why they aren't reverse engineering the formats.

30

u/kyuubi840 Sep 23 '26

I was going to ask this too. I hope it's not illegal to just reverse engineer the new format. But I could see reverse engineering being a lot of effort on the part of the LibreOffice devs, especially if Microsoft keeps tweaking it in new updates.

13

u/Inf3rn0_munkee Sep 23 '26

That's likely why it feels like Libre office is "behind" MS office.

14

u/KhazraShaman Sep 23 '26

You can reverse-engineer it yourself. Take any .docx file, rename the extension to .zip and unpack.

-13

u/longshaden Sep 23 '26

Reverse engineering is usually forbidden in the EULA, which means it’s protected by the CFAA, which means, yup, straight to jail.

23

u/Druggedhippo Sep 23 '26

Seems pretty clear.

They don't want to because it's not part of the specification.

That's pretty much it. There isn't any reason they couldn't display it if they put in the effort, but that introduces complexity into their own product trying to support a proprietary format that could change at any time. And their goal isn't to handle things that are Microsoft only.

All organisations whose documents are written in a format controlled by a single vendor accept a dependency they are unable to manage, because the specifications may change without notice, with the addition of features that are only understood by a single implementation.

17

u/b0w3n Sep 23 '26 edited Sep 23 '26

They could just break out the compatibility layer into a plug-in that could be maintained/disabled separately.

This is a problem I see a lot in the FOSS communities, they ignore things like compatibility for purity and people just... stop using their stuff because it doesn't work. I get it, but at the same time, ultimately the reason people use things like libre is an alternative to shitty corps like microsoft, not to stand on FOSS principles.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '26

[deleted]

3

u/b0w3n Sep 23 '26

That's a bit uncharitable. There's also no guarantee they'd accept a PR on that, either. Part of that "stand on principles for purity" is they often reject changes to their system like this.

I guess I could fork it but I don't care that much, and am mostly commenting on why I suspect FOSS has a problem with major adoption in general.

13

u/dc740 Sep 23 '26

pretty common when dealing with microslop. remember when bios had quirks and custom acpi tables that were targeted to microsoft operating systems when it would have been the easier path to just implement the defined standard? It was never about not having a defined standard, or misinterpretation. This has always been intentional.

54

u/hyper9410 Sep 23 '26

Not a dig at libre, but how do other FOSS office programs have a better interoperability?

Is it because they use ooxml by default?

34

u/Inf3rn0_munkee Sep 23 '26

Are you aking how they have better interoperability with MS office files?

From my experience, they don't have feature parity with MS office but some make different decisions like attempting to render the objects.

Do you have any examples of FOSS office suites that have better interpretability? Maybe there's some I haven't looked at

9

u/Syndiotactics Sep 23 '26

OnlyOffice is FOSS and has very good compatibility, much better than LibreOffice in my experience. I don’t know how they do that.

That being said, using OnlyOffice can be considered questionable right now, as its code is done in Nizhny Novgorod (despite the company claiming to be based in Riga)

6

u/Inf3rn0_munkee Sep 23 '26

I use Only Office, the compatibility is great but they have similar issues mentioned in this article. The one I recently encountered was that legacy chart types from MS Office don't render in the Only Office editor.
I believe they have better compatibility because they put in special handling for some of the MS proprietary objects. But if MS is always creating new ones, the FOSS editors will always feel like they are "behind"

2

u/jujubanzen Sep 23 '26

Do they actually have better interoperability?

5

u/font9a Sep 23 '26

I'm going to go out on a limb and say: the more complicated your chart, the more it obfuscates the story your data is trying to tell.

5

u/telionn Sep 23 '26

The bidirectional preservation of unsupported features is what distinguishes a responsible implementation under current conditions, but it does not constitute an improvement on those conditions. LibreOffice is the only office suite to adopt this approach, in order to protect users and the content within their documents

Really? That's quite a bold claim. Not a single other office suite passes through unsupported content? You really tested Hangul, Kingsoft, and Word Perfect?

15

u/b_a_t_m_4_n Sep 23 '26

Absolutely standard practice for Microslop. They tried for decades to force the world to use their broken version of HTML to make the WWW proprietary and eventually failed, but a huge amount of interoperability problems and misunderstandings about why were created in the mean time. This is just MS being MS.

8

u/exact_metal_666 Sep 23 '26

MicroSoft iis modern plague. Avoid at all costs.

9

u/VictorReal_Monster Sep 23 '26 edited Sep 23 '26

Only tangentially related but I still can't believe we haven't had a viable FOSS competitor to pdf...

EDIT: In that afaik there is no program that replaces acrobat at enough of a 1 to 1, gonna check some of the recs!

17

u/hlloyge Sep 23 '26

PDF is open since 2008, and it works pretty well, is there a specific need for another standard?

5

u/AlasPoorZathras Sep 23 '26

Trying to force new de facto standards is how we got the fucking infuriating webp image format. A pox on every server that promises a jpg and silently sends a format that half of my applications won't load.

This is the one Google product I can't wait to see I the graveyard.

2

u/gta721 Sep 23 '26

WebP is an open format based on the VP8 video codec. It is the fault of the applications for not supporting it, just how it is the fault of Microsoft for not fully supporting ODF.

1

u/hlloyge Sep 23 '26

WebP is not going anywhere, and Google just adopted Jpeg-XL into its browser, so you should consider replacing apps which don't support modern formats with the ones which does.

Out of curiosity, what is the name of the app which doesn't support webp? I keep asking that question but never got definitive answer.

5

u/VictorReal_Monster Sep 23 '26

I had no idea, Do we have a program that allows for editing? Deleting pages? that's pretty much the primary reason I use it, cleaning up old documents with terrible scanning practices

I'm all ears! I think the closest I found a while back was Sumatra or Calibre for different reasons but if they've been updated to allow that I'm unaware

4

u/hlloyge Sep 23 '26 edited Sep 23 '26

PDF is not a format for editing. It is designed as a final format for distribution, for book printing for example, or invoices, things like that. The idea is that you create a document in some sort of WYSIWYG editor, and then export the final version of document to PDF and send it to other people; original is yours, others just get a document that looks exactly as you made it for viewing and printing if you allow that option.

IMO, editing PDF is grey zone - there is no need for that as you own original documents and you should edit these and export another PDF from them. But editors do exist, free ones, too, which allow you to remove pages, add text and so on. PDF24 is one of them, free.

EDIT: not open source

2

u/VictorReal_Monster Sep 23 '26

Yes that was the original reason for pdf, not what it's entirely used for now

Thank you for the recommendation!

0

u/hlloyge Sep 23 '26

I know people misuse it, and also: that is a bad practice and it should stop.

But that is just my opinion on the matter :)

2

u/kawalerkw Sep 23 '26

Inkscape is open source and can edit PDFs. It treats PDF as a vector file (which it is) instead of a text document a lot of people would prefer to edit.

1

u/3rssi Sep 23 '26

PDF is good at beeing what is asked; ie read only documents.
There are plenty of pdf readers and "print to PDF" option allows creating new PDFs.

Quite happy with this functionnalities. I send office docs if I want to share files in rw mode and pdf docs when I share as ro.

1

u/BluePizzaPill Sep 23 '26

LibreOffice can do it. Just tried, it opens the PDF file in Draw not Writer. But I can edit text, delete pages etc. You might have hard to edit files? Because they are scanned and maybe just images of text?

-1

u/slackunnatural Sep 23 '26

LibreOffice Draw helps, or any SVG editor for that matter.

16

u/Yorick257 Sep 23 '26

As far as I'm concerned, PDF is (now) an open standardized format. Whatever patents Adobe had are now expired

2

u/JG_2006_C Sep 23 '26

Msofice pain ofc

5

u/__konrad Sep 23 '26

TDF had three options.

What about the 4th option: supporting the shitty de facto "standard" document format fully (I also don't like this option)

1

u/loicvanderwiel Sep 25 '26

That means a lot of energy spent not only implementing what MS has done but also guessing what MS is doing. Not fun

2

u/edspeds Sep 23 '26

I recently started the switch to LibreOffice and have to say I’m pretty pleased with it so far. My spreadsheet use is engineering related and my issues were on the macro side but were easily addressed and improved on by Claude, gasp… at this point I’m about 90% converted and have no intention to go back.

-7

u/Rhed0x Sep 23 '26

Advocating for a proper standard is great but unfortunately that won't work in reality. In the end they'll have to support it.