M$ Office and LO are not transparently compatible. You will always experience divergences.
You can hope for roughly 75% compatibility with common documents. Don’t expect full success with macros. These need careful examination to make sure the semantics is preseved.
In Calc, conditional formatting is one aspect where both suites chose different venues.
In Writer, be prepared for huge differences. You’ll need to fully review your document. I’d recommend to create from scratch a template containing all your preferred styles and base converted documents on it. M$ Word knows only of paragraph styles while LO Writer is much richer. The consequence is a Documented converted from Word will show an awful chaos of numerous character and page styles trying to translate Word formatting. Clean this mess and base the converted document on your template.
Also, Word and Writer have a different specificatio for pages. In Word, margins define the area allotted to text; header and footer are located inside the margins. In Writer, margins are absolutely no-print areas; therefore, header and footer are taken from the printing area, decreasing text estate. In principle, the import filter does the simple arithmetic to translate this difference but result is not always as accurate as you could hope for.
VERY IMPORTANT: once you have imported/converted your document in LO, store them in native format .ods (Calc) and .odt (Writer). Otherwise, every time you open a document, you’ll incur a new translation from Office format to LO’s and again from LO format to Office’s when saving. This will cause cumulative discrepancies with adverse effect on formatting persistence.
A frequently disregarded point is fonts. Installed fonts are not the same on all systems and even on all computers under the same OS. The metrics are different, resulting in change of formatting. If your case is only switching from Office to LO on the same computer, you can ignore this point.
If co-workers are still under Office, you have two options:
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send them LO documents; Office claims it can read them, so let them experience the nightmare of compatibility and realise that Office is not the navel of the world
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convert your LO document only just before sending it, keeping it in native format on your computer (for Writer, you can attach a PDF version to act as a formatting reference)
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