In other words if I send a LO doc to someone can they open it without having the program?
In my experience, the answer is ‘it depends.’ The document certainly will be readable by them. However, styles and formatting often are not converted precisely. What was bold in your document might not be when they open it on their system,etc. The .odt format is great, but one major software vendor in particular does not support it very well, in my experience. That major vendor’s software also had a tendency to declare LO documents to be ‘corupted’ and in need of ‘repair,’ especially if coming from a Linux distro.
For professional-quality interoperatibilty, .PDF format is required, and in fact works very well.
Where interactive features are necessary, for maximum interoperability, I found (as of a few years ago) that the .doc format was best, as it tended to generate the fewest warnings from non-LO software and to retain most of the same formatting. To use this format, select Save As and pick from the list in the dialog box. Beware of inconsistencies in margins and minimize reliance on special functions for best results.
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Hardly. M$O doesn’t support ODF fully even in latest version and other programs are scarse, but I read that Kingsoft Office, Gnumeric and AbiWord support ODF fully. Do others exist, I don’t know.
You also can convince your partner to used LibO. Its free!