Our online document control system at work recently added support for all the open office file and mime types. There was a discussion on an internal mailing list. I got this choice quote out of the thread.
“Personally, I keep a copy of open office around even though I read all MS Word docs in MS Word. It seems that a significant, but small, fraction of MS Word documents created by MS Word on MS Windows have defects in them such that MS Word crashes on load or fails to load. I have retrieved such docs from doc control. I find that if I open them in OpenOffice and then save them in MS Word format using OpenOffices SaveAs feature, MS Word on Windows can then open them without crashing. Hmm. Makes you wonder.”
So I guess maybe instead of “upgrading” to the latest version of office to get document compatibility, now you just need OO.
