Actually the ability to save data occasionally in ODF when you are ready to do a long term storage seems valid to me. I don't necessarily care if it keeps all the fancy formatting or not. What I do think is MS may be less likely to continue to support old formats than the Open Office people.
I don't know if this is just me or not but I write stories for fun. They start out small and then they grow over the years. There is a lot of editing. If I open them in Open Office and re-save them the file size shrinks and they may work better in Word. I'm forced to think that in some manner the software is saving the edits and in some manner this after enough crap builds up starts to make things not work right. Open Office removes it. On occasion I've changed formats saved it and translated it back which again seems to clean things up. The reason I'm now using Word at home rather than Open Office amounts to one feature in MS Office 2007 that so far as I know was absent in 2003 and Open Office. The first thing I do when I get a new monitor is dim the thing. I was highlighting the text in gray to save my eyes. MS Word has a option that allows me to put a dark background around/behind the text which is a much better solution if you use your monitor to watch video. I haven't found that option in Open Office and when I move a document to Open Office that has the feature turned on it doesn't show up if I recall correctly. I highly value that feature. It's an eye saver. I don't do a lot of ultra fancy formatting and I prefer the Open Office spell checker. I would still be using Open Office at home if it wasn't for that one feature. The bigger the monitor the bigger the issue this is and I'm about to go blind because of the white/bright background I'm looking at writing this email on my 30 inch monitor. You have fun now and God bless.
