I had this problem reading a document that my friend wrote in Microsoft Word. I tried opening it in both AbiWord and OpenOffice.org Writer, and both screwed up.

The only funny thing about this document is that it contains one single huge table. This table is stretched out over 50 pages. This does not look at all strange, because the table is only used to align large paragraphs with their corresponding headings, and so there are only two columns, with large cells full of text.

What gives both AbiWord and OpenOffice.org trouble is that there are some large cells that span two or more pages. OpenOffice.org simply cuts the large cell at the end of its first page, so that I have no way to read the text that would normally span to the following page. (In truth, I can move the cursor down to that text, although the cursor disappears from view. Theoretically, then, I should be able to hold Shift while moving the cursor to the hidden text, thus selecting the text, which I should then be able to copy to the clipboard and paste, bit by bit, into a blank document. But that's a real, real, pain just to read a document.)

AbiWord reacts in, in my opinion, a worse way: once you scroll to the page containing the really large cell, you simply can't scroll past it. There is just no way to see any of the rest of the document.

So, I thought, why don't I try to upgrade to the new OpenOffice.org 2.0. I only have OpenOffice.org 1.1, and 2.0 is supposed to be much better.

Here's where I found out what Debian means when it says "stable".