On 16 Oct 2009 08:53:43 GMT, Adrian wrote:

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.

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

Oh yes (lack of) complete backwards compatibilty between Word
versions is a "marketing feature" IMHO.

All I'm saying is that telling people to switch to OO and you won't
have any problems with Word documents is not very accurate. Those
problems may well stem from MS but as a user that isn't overly
relevant. OO either works as advertised (read/write/interchange Word
docs)or it doesn't. In my experience it made a bigger mess than any
experienced inter Word fup ups.

All of this is why you should NEVER use .doc to interchange documents
between organisations... PDF if the formatting's important,

Or print it and mail/fax it. B-)

plain text if it's not.

Ha, I think most people have forgotten what plain text is. The number
of marketing emails I get that tell me my mailer can't display HTML
and if I want to see their communication follow this link. FOAD, if
they want to tell it's up to them to tell me a language I can
understand. It's not difficult to generate plain text from HTML. If
"the message" needs fancy fonts, colours, images then there is
something wrong with "the message".

--
Cheers
Dave.