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This page (may) contain content that is old and/or out of date. If you have experience in this area, please review this page for accuracy. Reason: LibreOffice is able to open many more formats! This page should be updated.

Is LibreOffice compatible with the file formats of MS-Office, OpenOffice.org and StarOffice?

LibreOffice is capable of saving documents in various formats compatible with other office suites such as Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony, and StarOffice. Some formatting and features are not fully supported between LibreOffice and other application suites. Caveats are noted below, under the appropriate section.

Microsoft Office compatibility

Non-compound documents from Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint that are properly formatted using style sheets and proper paragraph and page breaks, rather than using spaces and carriage returns and lots of manual formatting, will generally look and work well under LibreOffice. LibreOffice does not support simultaneous collaborative editing with Microsoft Office users, nor does it support compound documents, which are documents where one document is embedded in within another, such as an Excel table embedded within a Word document. That being said, the following Office file formats are supported for reading, editing and writing:

Word processing formats

• Office Open XML Documents and Templates (*.docx, dotx) format (strict OpenXML).
• Microsoft Word 2007/2010 Documents and Templates (*.docx, *.dotx) format (transitional OpenXML).
• Microsoft Word 2003/2007 XML (*.xml) format.
• Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP/2003 Documents and Templates (*.doc, *.dot) format
• Microsoft Word 6.0-95 Document (*.doc) format.
• Microsoft WinWord 5 Document (*.doc) format.
• Microsoft Rich Text Format (*.rtf).

Spreadsheet formats

• Office Open XML Spreadsheets and Templates (*.xlsx, *.xlsm, *.xlst) format (strict OpenXML).
• Microsoft Excel 2007/2010 Spreadsheets and Templates (*.xlsx, *.xlsm, *.xlst) format (transitional OpenXML).
• Microsoft Excel 97/2000/XP/2003 Document (*.xls, *.xlw, *.xlc, *.xlt) format.
• Microsoft Excel 4.x-5/95 Spreadsheets and Templates (*.xls, *.xlw, *.xlc, *.xlt) format.

Presentation formats

• Office Open XML Presentations and Templates (*.pptx, *.ppsx, *.ppmx, *.potx, *.pomx) format (strict OpenXML).
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2007/2010 Presentations and Templates (*.pptx, *.ppsx, *.ppmx, *.potx, *.pomx) format (transitional OpenXML).
• Microsoft PowerPoint 97/2000/XP/2003 Document (*.ppt, *.pps, *.ppm, *.pot, *.pom) format

In addition, some recent versions of Microsoft (2007, 2010 and 2013), support reading, editing and writing of LibreOffice's native Open Document Format files. More information on this can be found in article New file format options in the new Office on Microsoft's Office Blog.

StarOffice/OpenOffice.org/IBM Lotus Symphony

These office suites are compatible with Open Document Format 1.1 and 1.2 specifications that comprise the native file formats of LibreOffice. Additionally, LibreOffice supports StarOffice 5 and 6 files.