Can LibreOffice edit MS Office files non-destructively now? I'm impressed with the improvements lately, but I'm still too scared edit shared .docx files at work based on bad experiences with OpenOffice in the past.
I wrote a paper recently with some colleagues who use MS Word (common in some fields), mailing around .docx files in the usual manner, and it seemed to work ok. Obviously not a detailed test, but we exercised a reasonable number of features without breakage: a two-column document with stylesheet, a number of figures, several equations, and a reference section with auto-updated numerical references.
More pertinently, it does work better than using google docs. Assuming, of course, you can't get folks to agree to lose features and just move completely to google docs.
Yeah, in my experience Google Docs is mainly useful if you treat it as an editor for lightly formatted (RTF-style) documents, not as a Word-compatible editor. If I really needed Word-on-the-cloud I'd probably use Microsoft's "Word Online", which is a lot more compatible than Google Docs (and also free).
Pretty much. Preserving stuff LO doesn't understand, for roundtripping, is also a thing as of the last couple of years (the Interop GrabBag). If you have a failure and a reproducible test case, file a bug - there's significant improvements in OOXML support every release, and LO really does dive on these bugs and kill them.