Do OpenOffice Users Save In Microsoft Format?

superglaze writes "Looking through an article on the smartphone office suite Quickoffice, I noted a claim by a company executive that OpenOffice users usually save their documents in a Microsoft format, e.g. .doc. Hence the company has no plans to support .odf. I guess I can see the rationale for this — it helps if you're sending a document to an MS-using company — but what's this community's general experience of saving in .odf vs. .doc format?"

Comments

Re:Don't give in!

[hanssprudel]

The obvious example is resumes that you send via a recruitment agency. They edit it to remove all your contact details and any URLs that link to your work before faxing it to the customer. Wow, that is great! Because there is just NO WAY I could do that myself!

Re:.DOC

[jvkjvk]

Geez, with how horrible you make MS Word sound, it's a wonder anyone uses it at all! The productivity of those that do must be pretty awful as well... I mean, with 99% of people not able to do anything but plain text it seems like businesses are SOL, what with the proprietary lockin and all.

Back in reality, most of the time MS Word is fine, as in good enough for most of the jobs typically thrown at it. If you want more control use LaTeX=>pdf. However, I wouldn't try and mandate everyone at a Co. learn and use LaTeX. Heh. Talk about flying chairs!

It's not that I think the MS formats are the cat's pajamas - they're not. But at the same time, exaggerating their shortcomings discredits your points.

Disclosure: I use OO.o saved as .odf(internal use) and additionally as .doc (iff I need to share && receive edits) or .pdf (read only) for all small stuff (more work than just saving and sending a version in .doc. I guess I'm not enough of a zealot (at least on this issue) to continuously make more work for myself if I can avoid it.