There are many who, rightly and following my advice, prefer to use LibreOffice programs instead of Microsoft Office programs, since they are also free for professional use. The only problem that a new LibreOffice user can have is that after writing a document or a spreadsheet, going to save it he finds himself with a file with the ODF format.
If this file is sent or shared with someone who uses Microsoft Office instead, this person will not be able to open it and will appear to have done something wrong.
Even if it is a very simple modification, it is worth writing two lines to know how to save in Microsoft Office format from LibreOffice, and therefore how to save documents in Word format (DOC and DOCX), in Excel format (XLS and XLSX) and in Powerpoint format (PPT and PPTX) .
To start, open a LibreOffice Writer program (or Calc or Impress) and go immediately to the Tools> Options menu.
In the tree structure on the left side of the Options window, click on the plus sign to the left of " Load / Save ".
Then click on " General " and to change the default file format of LibreOffice Writer, make sure that under the " Document type " option, " text document " is selected and then, for the " Always save as " option, choose the format you want to use as default.
If you always want to save new documents in the latest Microsoft Word format, select " Microsoft Word 2007-2013 XML ", which is the DOCX extension.
If you want to save with DOC format instead, select " Microsoft Word 97-2003 " here.
Click on OK and you're done.
The same thing must also be done for the other two programs, Calc and Impress, in order to save the new files, respectively, in Excel and Powerpoint formats.
Now, when saving a new document, the specified file format is chosen automatically even by pressing only the Save button (under the File menu).
If you then want to check or change the format to save a specific file, you can click on Save As and under the Save as option, choose the format you prefer.
The DOCX or DOC file saved with LibreOffice Writer can always be opened in Microsoft Office, albeit with the warning of " compatibility mode ", which means that the display may be incorrect.
In reality, however, unless very particular formatting has been used, each document created with LibreOffice programs will be perfectly identical even if opened with Word, Excel or Powerpoint.
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