Considering Libre: Will people who I send Libre docs to be able to open them in Microsoft?
Yes, if you send people a doc or docx file created in LibO Writer they will be able to open it, edit it, save it and send it back to you. I do this very often. In rare cases I see smaller problems with special formats. Beside this it works just great. After I used MSO for almost 20 years I changed last year to LibO and after a few month of testing I don’t use MSO anymore. I did not even install it anymore on my PC.
As for pdf, you can even create editable pdf-files in LibO.
This is my experience - the decision is yours!
I agree with ROSt52. There are some minor problems when opening DOCX files - Office 2007 (mostly with vector drawings)… DOC (Office 97) works much better and, so far, it is better to save in DOC (Office 97) format because that way you will maintain compactability with Office in general. Another important point, Office 2007 SP 2 and newer can open LibreOffice files… didn’t test this, but official Microsoft page claims it can.
Hi @RichardSPFrost,
Regarding compatibility/interaction, modern versions of Microsoft Office products can read and write files in various ODF file formats (including ODT and ODS):
When sending files to MS-Office users who might have a much older version of the software, I often will use the older binary formats (.doc, .xls, etc…) as those seem to be well supported by MS-Office and by LibreOffice.