Opening a Microsoft Office document with LibreOffice usually works very well. But as soon as a file uses certain specific functions of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, things can get complicated quickly. And the most annoying thing is that at first everything may seem normal.
You open the file, make changes, save it and continue. Except that when you reopen it later with Microsoft Office, some items may have disappeared. This is one of those problems that LibreOffice 26.8 just fixed.
Excel charts that LibreOffice still can’t display
The problem comes from certain charts added by Microsoft starting with Office 2016. This is the case of waterfall, funnel, Pareto, compartmentalization, sunburst, and even box and whisker charts.
LibreOffice cannot yet display or modify these graphics. And that is precisely where it could pose a problem. You opened an Excel file with LibreOffice, changed some cells, saved the document… and certain graphics could disappear in the process.
With LibreOffice 26.8, this is no longer the case. Although you don’t know how to display them yet, the software can now save all the information needed for the chart in the XLSX file. This way you can edit the rest of the document and save it without touching it.
When you reopen the file in Excel, the chart is still there, as if nothing had happened. LibreOffice still doesn’t know what to do with it, but at least it doesn’t delete it anymore.
However, there is an exception with graphs based on geographic maps. LibreOffice knows how to preserve the chart type, but some of the map-related data is still lost when saving.
Why can’t LibreOffice display these graphs?
One might wonder why LibreOffice still cannot display the charts present in Excel from Office 2016. The answer lies partly in the format used by Microsoft.
XLSX, DOCX and PPTX files are based on OOXML, a format standardized by ISO. Except Microsoft didn’t stop there. Throughout the versions of Office, the company has added its own extensions to integrate new functions. The charts we are talking about here are one of them: they use an extension called “chartex”.
The problem is that “chartex” is not part of the OOXML standard published by ISO. Microsoft provides the necessary documentation, but LibreOffice and other office suites must do the work on their part to understand and manage these new elements.
Meanwhile, LibreOffice has chosen a fairly simple solution: if you don’t understand the graph, you leave it in the file. It’s still not perfect, but it’s better than disappearing after a recording.
The Document Foundation takes the opportunity to defend ODF
The Document Foundation is not limited to Excel charts. in his publicationThe organization also takes the opportunity to put the debate on the file formats used by office suites back on the table.
He mainly criticizes Microsoft for having added extensions to OOXML over time that are not part of the ISO standard. For other office suites, this means that you will need to follow these changes and adapt your code to try to remain compatible.
Obviously, The Document Foundation contrasts this way of doing things with ODF, the format used by default in LibreOffice. This evolves within OASIS, with public specifications that other publishers can consult and implement.
The organization also claims that LibreOffice would be the only office suite today capable of preserving functions in a document that it does not yet know how to interpret and then restoring them intact when it is reopened in the original software.
