Is LibreOffice Writer able to read properly Ms Office Word docx Files? [closed]
Yes it can... Most of the time without issues.
LibreOffice supports by default several formats including the ones used by Microsoft Office, including the Office Open XML specification from .docx, .pptx and .xlsx.
That does not mean that everything will look exactly the same when you open a file in MS Office 2007 and in LibreOffice. To tell the truth not all files created in MS Office 2007 will open the same even in Ms Office 2010, and the opposite is also true.
You should be aware that Office XML specifications were created by Microsoft and that nuances can be seen using different versions of the editor that you are using. That will also be true even with Microsoft software.
Just don't expect that everything will be the same all the time. Things like missing fonts and weird formatting in the original document will cause massive issues while trying to open it in LibreOffice. Open XML formats are bad. End of story.
As an option you can however run MS Office in Ubuntu easily. Nothing is impossible. Just buy a MS Office license, run the installer with Wine and you can do all the things you do in Windows using MS Office 2007 under Ubuntu.
I had this problem as well (it doesn't help that MS keeps changing their formats) :(
Hot Tip
One solution I found that seemed to work is to ask people I am working on documents with to simply save it in an older doc version. It seems to guarantee that I could see the document in the original format and the people I was collaborating with were able to properly open my documents properly (previously saving LibreOffice in docx was preventing them from doing that).
Hope that helps some folks :)
** Update: It appears as though the latest release of Open Office has better DocX support (only available in the latest version of Ubuntu 12 though)
Another factor that often is overlooked when compatibility is discussed is that documents created in MS Office in Windows often uses MS fonts that is not available in Linux. An exchanged font makes documents look different and the layout will get lost. This can partly be fixed by using exactly the same fonts in MS Office and LibreOffice.