Office not working in Archlinux

After dropping of OpenOffice.org, Archlinux switched to LibreOffice from the Document foundation. As this was pushed through a regular update, I went on with it. However, after some time when I tried opening Office files, I was having trouble opening them at all.

I used to get stuck at this filter selection every time I opened a file. When I opened up LibreOffice, the various files options were grayed out.

I thought of checking the wiki for the procedure of installation. I reinstalled it using the following command:

pacman -S libreoffice-common libreoffice-{base,
calc,draw,impress,math,writer,kde4}

pacman -S libreoffice-extension-{pdfimport,presentation-minimizer,presenter-screen,report-builder,wiki-publisher,ct2n,hunart,numbertext,oooblogger,typo,watch-window,diagram}

After that, I was able to get things working again. However, interestingly, each time I had upgraded my system after the switch to LibreOffice, using

pacman -Syu

I had seen these packages were installed. Now there is only one issue, tooltips are just black rectangles.

Rtf file size comparision

Recently, I was experimenting with rtf files. I found something really interesting. An rtf file containing 14 unformatted character created in Microsoft Word turned out to be around 30 kb in size, while an rtf file containing 54 formatted chars created in OpenOffice was only 2kb in size.

I was doubting Microsoft when I read the following line in the rtf specification v1.0:
"All styles in the document's style sheet can be included, even if not all the styles are used." However, when I actually tested them, I found their software to be producing even larger files than I expected.