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Comment by dhs | Hacker News Reader

Let me offer a counterpoint: I started out with Word 3.0 for DOS, in 1987. From there, I went through lots of office software for PC, Mac, and Atari. A good ten years ago, I installed OpenOffice, which I have been using ever since. I never had any .doc compatibility problems.

Today, I'm working for a small retail company in Madrid, Spain: Ten people, running Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. All of us are using OpenOffice. It already was that way when I came here a year ago. Until now, I heard nobody even mentioning our office software. And these people are not "computer geeks" by any measure; we sell clothes.

I guess it is the reliance on Excel macros, which are not compatible with OpenOffice Calc, that prevents lots of companies from switching. If you don't depend on any of those, I honestly see no advantages in using MS Office.

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I wish I had your good fortune. I do almost all my development on Linux, and clients would routinely send me Word documents. Most of the time OOo was good enough for reading the content, but formatting was always in some way wonky. I could have lived with that except there was always the occasional document with table formatting OOo could not handle. In these cases the file was essentially unreadable.

I would often fire up Windows, load the office docs I had been sent, and save them out as PDFs so that I could at least have reliably readable files on my development machine.

I had zero confidence that OOo could correctly generate any complex document that would render identically in Office so I either sent clients PDF files created in OOo or authored the documents in Office on Windows. In fact, I much prefer using Word for anything moderately complex simply because document manipulation is just so much easier. (E.g. resizing all text in a document.)

I've seen a number of testimonials from people saying OOo has worked out perfectly fine for them, and I've no doubt it's true for their circumstances. But it does not have the degree of Office interchangeability needed to make it a complete stand-in when you have to exchange Office docs that go beyond simple formatting.

I've not used MS Word for about 6 years but prior to that I always found that OOo (or sometimes KOffice or Abiword) was as good at opening MS Word documents as Word itself.

Even docs specifically created in the format of the target version didn't seem to do very well.

Presumably MS have solved this now and the current versions will produce pixel perfect renderings of all the past versions that LibreOffice can do (and a few more)?

How are MS now at supporting ODT format and importing PDFs?

I can only tell you that my mom regularly had issues with people sending her .doc files, which she edited in OpenOffice and they came back somewhat garbled.

All the more reason to avoid the problem altogether and not create unreadable documents in Office.

Seriously: it's not like someone won't be able to buy a copy of LibreOffice. OTOH, a government should avoid mandating the use of proprietary solutions because they exclude people who can't pay for them.

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