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:ODF for me, DOC for thee

[Erioll]

I have my "editable" one in the native format, and just do a "save as" for .doc if I'm sending it to someone. Then unfortunately I need to go re-open my actual .odf file, which is a pain.

Honestly, what I'd like (and might be available, I haven't looked) is the option to automatically save in multiple formats whenever you push the save key. If it automatically "worked" in .odf, but was always exporting along the way to both .doc and .pdf, that'd be ideal for me.

Users are lazy

[Darth Muffin]

My users at least are lazy. They'll just save it in whatever format the software defaults to. They don't know or care about different document formats, they just know they "do this to open a document", "do that to save it", etc. Windows explorer defaults to hiding document extensions, so why should they even bother learning? Default it to save to MS office format and you'll save headaches since it will "just work" when they email it to someone.