When I tried to open large Microsoft office files (in my case 15 MB+, probably smaller also) with LibreOffice 3.5.7.2 (Build ID: 3215f89-f603614-ab984f2-7348103-1225a5b, OS Ubuntu linux), ASCII filter options to import text file appears. And, of course, no file opens. It happens even if I save that file in microsoft format using Libreoffice. I'm sure this error appeared some time ago, in one of previous versions, and then it was solved in 3.5.5 or 3.5.6, but it is back again, but unfortunately I couldn't find it in bugzilla. This is quite terrible bug and I'm sure that the solution should be easy as it was done already once few months ago.
I just checked that this bug appeared already in 3.5.6.
The problem is not appearing in 3.6.3.1
Here are the release notes for 3.5.5 and 3.5.6 http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.5/RC1 http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.5/RC2 http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.5/RC3 http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.6/RC1 http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.6/RC2 could the original bug be listed there? This bug is not present in 3.6 and 3.5 is reaching end of life so I doubt this bug will get high priority with developers. Also, you have to provide the file if this is goig to be fixed.
Originally this peoblem is reported here https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53883 and here https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54082 However it seems the problem has never been solved in 3.5. branch. Libreoffice 3.6 has it's own problems, like irregular crashes on complex spreadsheet documents, so I would like to wait until it will become more stable. It seems that 3.6.3.1 is rather stable.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 53883 ***
Andis: You say: "However it seems the problem has never been solved in 3.5. branch." Ok, so this is not a regression. When I asked for the original bug report I was looking for the bug report where the problem was fixed. The reports you quote mention that the file can be opened in 3.5.5 or 3.5.4. You could try to use those versions instead of the latest 3.5.
> You could try to use those versions instead of the latest 3.5. Thank you for response! I'm just curious, why new versions are released, if such a serious bugs remains unsolved. I have on my desktop about 10 years old Microsoft office 2003, which now works fine through Wine and for which I had to pay only once and I have LibreOffice, which I like very much and which I used to use since StarOffice 5.2 and will use in future. I paid in donations to Lidreoffice much more than for that copy of the Microsoft Office, but the general quality of the product becomes worser in spite of nice new features. There are many "surprises" like this one in every minor and much more in major releases. Every time I have to spent some time to test every new release to find when it becomes useful. I don't remember such situations, at least not so serious, 3-6 years ago, except switching to Openoffice 3.0, which introduced terrible errors in exporting tables to doc files, which are not solved up to now.