Unsurprising this would be the case since LibreOffice strives for compatibility while MS would want clients to upgrade versions to newer, more lucrative editions
Back in the days, Microsoft took backwards compatibility very seriously, maybe more than anyone else besides mainframes. Going as far as making special cases so that applications that relied on some bugs or undocumented features continued working.
IIRC not for Word file formats. Usually only the previous version would definitely convert, any older and things started breaking. And it would always save in the newest version by default so everyone else has to update to edit your file (there were free readers, but they were separate programs and I don't know how popular they were).
Yeah I remember as a kid saving a file with Word 97, then opening it on a different computer with Word 95, and there was a box between every pair of characters. Looking back, it's clear that the internal representation had changed from an 8-bit encoding to UTF-16 but I learned to be careful to "save as Word 95" every time from then on.
Yup, exactly this. And there would usually be an official plugin you could optionally install to read files from ~2 versions ago, presumably because businesses demanded it, but still wouldn't go back farther.
I can't think of any other program that removed the ability to open older versions of its own files. Kinda crazy.
There are two file extensions, but with every new word version there was new features, and thus new stuff that had to be represented in the saved file. If you only went forwards and didn't skip to many versions, and remembered to save the file again in the newer version you'd be fine. but as the mastodon thread says, anything from before a certain date won't open at all, and more complex documents from the 90s and early 00s might have surprising issues in modern word.
Somebody more knowledgeable than me can correct me, but iirc some of the earlier versions of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 were incompatible with the latest version of Windows at the time that was unreleased at the time of the game's launch (because RCT2 used a memory management bug? I don't remember) so the Windows team coded up a special exception for RCT2 because they knew that users would blame Windows rather than the RCT2 team if the game failed to launch). This patched version of Windows ended up shipping.
I have no source to back me up. This is something I read about sometime back and it's probably lost in some deeply nested bookmark folder I'll never open.
Or you know, standard open formats if you prefer them. But then there is always that MS trolls in comments.
I converted, 100gb of xls/doc files to upload to SharePoint and netted something like 5x space savings just by resaving in an open format.
I am not surprised at all that Libre is better at opening old files, there are files that Microsoft wont let you open without going back into security settings and allowing them, we were converting a library that goes back nearly 30 years, lots of stuff dated 20+ years ago, why would you carry compat for this trash today?
Standard formats? I don't think so. The "standard format" they use for OOXML is not compliant with the strict version - so loose LibreOffice couldn't go to the standard to fix the compatibility issues.
Countries were refusing to use MS office because it didn't support open document standards. MS basically showed up to the spec committee with a bunch of MS Word documentation and said it was a new spec. It was flatly rejected, but then at the last second, a whole bunch of the committee changed their minds for no logical reason (I suspect they were simply paid off) and the "standard" was adopted.
Of course, it's impossible to write something compliant with their garbage and Office didn't comply with the "spec" in the slightest.
At the same time, MS refused to keep up with ODF standards in a massive case of malicious compliance.
In the end, it worked out for MS. They faked being open just enough for European governments to continue giving them huge piles of money for systems that are as locked down and proprietary as ever and consumers (like always) were the big losers.
Is it not a lot better on that front than .doc was, though? I realize a lot of stuff can read .doc today but it's due to a lot of reverse engineering that happened over like 20 years because it was entirely proprietary.
