"Dave Liquorice" gurgled happily,
sounding much like they were saying:

I tried Open Office on Word Document produced by Word 2007 (I think, but
not saved in the .docx just .doc) and it fupped up the formating summat
rotten. Simple two page document with two columns a few images and a
table. Open Office had the table in the wrong place formated with
different column widths and text in some cells in a differnt style and
could I change those and make it stick could I F...

You've not tried between different versions of Word itself, then?

'erself had a job application form a while back. DOC format, tables with
protected fields. On her laptop, with Word 2k7, it was completely
unintelligible and unusable. As soon as you tried to fill a field in, the
pagination went ape-****.

On OpenOffice, it wasn't quite _perfect_, but it was utterly usable.

A customer of ours uses Office 2000 still. They've recently had
complaints from a customer of theirs that documents they send through
still have some editing comments visible - but not in 2000. It's where
somebody's added the comments in a more recent version of Word, but the
older version doesn't show them...

All of this is why you should NEVER use .doc to interchange documents
between organisations... PDF if the formatting's important, plain text if
it's not.