>Of course, one reason that folks often stay with MS Office is for sake of compatibility. Compatibility -- what compatibility? Newer versions usually default to mode that creates formats unreadable in older versions. When you try to "downgrade" you often lose much of the formatting -- even if you happen to choose format (e.g. Word97) that has certain features but you lose some of the formatting anyway. In the cases where the formatting seems to come through OK -- the resulting document can't be edited without having "side effects" -- forcing you to go through the document and re-formatting everything so that it comes out OK. It's also annoying that often stylesheet formatting gets "in-lined" so now it's nearly impossible to maintain consistent formatting if you're switching between different versions of Office (one might "why is that ever a concern? Why even downgrade?" -- ever try collaborating with folks, and each person has different version?). And of course, there's the situation where certain "legacy" formats aren't supported anymore -- ever come across old Word documents that can't be opened by latest edition of Word? I have -- and it occurs with enough frequency to be annoying. So one might ask... why stick with MS Office?
>
>Although compatibility with LibreOffice isn't 100%, I've noticed that it's not any worse than with MS Office.

Exactly. Sometimes, when I need to include pieces of one document into another, the simplest way is to visit Fox, and do a little

_cliptext=_cliptext

and then paste... so the formatting is lost. Then apply some very simple formatting on the result - often looks better. And this crap about using Word as email editor, where it inserts a kilobyte of style just to format four lines of text... (that's outlook 14, outlook 12 used to cram about 5k)... rubbish.

As to whether Word documents imported into LibreOffice have lost any formatting, I wouldn't know. They look right, and the occasional glitches here and there may be attributed to the author and software equally. And I generally don't care. And I had cases where the users would edit each other's documents using both, and the result was still readable by both. If any important features were lost, well, I didn't notice.