Since past about one year I had been using Kingsoft Office besides Libre Office and it has to be said that these remain minions before the might of word processing power of Microsoft Word. As far as smaller files are concerned Kingsoft Office is OK. But if file is large, say above 100 pages, it has problems. Limits of Libre office is slightly higher at 300 pages. However Kingsoft is a better previewer of .doc files. Libre Office distorts the preview of the files due to its lack of window fonts.
Both however have severe limitations about automated header, footer, indexes. And both ended up corrupting the files during manipulation of the fields/indexes.
What happened was that the program/app crashed and on restart it was unable to open/recover same file with the statement like ‘file error’ or ‘not the right file type’ leaving me with no option. While Kingsoft’s error was not rectified because the file was not so important and another copy was there, the Libre Office file sent me in frenzy. There were so many solutions but all too geek to try. For example trying to correct the index file. Attempting online converters failed except one but that one converted file in a doc format in which every para was in a box with links to foot-marks broken. There were about three thousand foot-marks in that book. What to do?
Android ODF viewer could open and preview the ‘corrupt’ file but that is only a viewer. It can not re-save the file.
Fortunately I use Calibre for ebooks management. While calibre supports many formats it does not support .doc format. But no worry. My file was .odt format. Calibre imported file like a charm but has no other internal viewer for odt. So I converted the file in epub. Which I had to do later on and thereafter edited it in Sigil, which also I had to do. Calibre saved many days. This was the book listed right below ‘Law of Joint property…‘.

Conclusion

We have to be careful while using indexing etc. in these programs. Better use Kingsoft Office as glorified text editor or viewer of doc files. Libre Office is slightly better for creating the files without to complex links. But both are no substitute for Word for large complex files. Not yet.

© Sandeep Bhalla