One major area of incompatibility with OOo Writer and MS Word is converting a Writer frame (usually enclosing a picture and a caption) to Word. What happens is that the caption’s formatting may have its indentation altered.

Such a OOo Writer frame with an enclosed caption appears as below:

After converted by OOo Writer to the MS Word 2003 DOC format, it appears in MS Word as the following:

Obviously, the figure caption’s formatting has been altered after the conversion.

A workaround for this would be to use a two-row table in OOO Writer–placing the graphic (picture, in OOo Writer terminology) in the first row and the figure caption in the second row. If a different number of graphics or a different arrangement is desired, then modify the table dimensions appropriately.

There are a number of incompatibilities between Writer and Word that show up after one is converted to the other. Most conversions to/from Writer and Word are seemingly flawless, whereas some conversions are horribly botched.

The “current” OOoAuthors Migration Guide was originally written for version 1 of OOo Writer and MS Word 2003 and, therefore, is now terribly out-of-date. Because no writer or other editor at OOo is apparently addressing this issue of incompatibilities, I will take upon myself the gathering of items of incompatibilities between Writer and Word.

As any inconsistencies between Writer and Word are noticed, they will be listed in this blog under the category–Migration Guide. These items will then be considered later when thoroughly rewriting the OOoAuthors Migration Guide.