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You are dumping problems related to MS (well known) monopolistic behaviour. Office format has been notoriously hard to replicate (on purpose). That is not a failing in Open Source, it is a failing of Microsoft.

I realize that businesses must run daily operations and that requires them to bite the bullet and pay the "Microsoft tax". A municipality should think a bit about if some operational problems have a price tag of 90 million euros annually.

Yes, you are right, and it is good that they though about that and tried the alternative. But I still think the issue of LO not able to read MS documents is a real problem.

Like for example my sister. Her husband works for Redhat so he enthusiastically installed Linux on her notebook, LO and everything. She worked as a professional writer, and it was a real struggle... some documents she received wasn't readable, then they couldn't read some document she sent them... then spell-checker wasn't as good as in MS Word (non-English language), etc. The cost of this solution was quite high, and she eventually gave up and installed Windows.

I am not trying to trash Linux or LO, it would be great to have open-source alternatives to everything, but in certain areas (Office, Adobe products, etc), such alternative doesn't exists and fighting against reality doesn't make it.

> some documents she received wasn't readable, then they couldn't read some document she sent them...

I like that! I send you a document you can't open: your fault. You send me a document I can't open: your fault too.

That's inevitable when you're going against standard practice in the industry, and refusing to fit in with everybody else.

Try the same thing in any other industry and you'll get the same result. "You created the problem: you deal with it."

> some documents she received wasn't readable, then they couldn't read some document she sent them

Which is survivable if your time has no value. If you're paying people serious wages to do this stuff, the costs are dramatically higher than just buying Windows and Office.

When I was in the full-time editing business, sending me unreadable documents more than once would not be a good way to get further commissions.

Specifically, someone on $50,000 a year is earning roughly $25 per hour. Putting them through the painful time-wasting problems of dangerously semi-compatible software is a huge waste of money.

Office 365 easily pays for itself in saving a few minutes per day.

> (on purpose)

Any evidence for this? I specifically remember one article talking about Excel's file format that was engineered in a way as to run on extremely resource-limited computers - those available when office was first released. Any complexities had to be built on top of that legacy base, and be backwards compatible.

That seems to more than explain the file-format complexity, without unsubstantiated allegations of deliberate obfuscation.

So you're suggesting that a city government should continue to support and basically aid and abet the monopoly that Microsoft has in wordprocessing and spreadsheets? That sounds like you don't like the free market.

> mayor secretary receives a document from some government agency, in docx format, and LO can't correctly open it.

Yeah that never happens when upgrading Microsoft Office..

> For example - mayor secretary receives a document from some government agency, in docx format, and LO can't correctly open it. Now what is the fallback solution?

Yeah, what do you think could be the fallback solution if one government agency sends a document to another government agency in a secret language, telling them that they have to pay the only company that knows that secret language (and that they paid to translate it into that language) to obtain a translation in a language they can read? Any ideas what possibly could be the solution in this scenario?

> LO is not compatible with it - it can't correctly open more complex MS Office documents. I should know, since I periodically evaluate it.

When was the last time? Got much better with the last release.

I tried to fill out a job application form last month. Got the latest OO and Libreoffice, the document was completely messed up - repeated sections, some parts out of order.

Filed a bug, then bought a 365 subscription.

It was a .doc, but this is still used in real life.

The LO team would love to get a copy of that document, if possible.

> Filed a bug

They do.

>MS Office is a de facto standard, and LO is not compatible with it

Neither is a different installation of MS Office.

Oddly enough, I regularly use three versions of Office -- 2007, 2010 and 2016 -- with zero problems.