Banana is right about if the format was in DOCX because LibreOffice can open
and save in ODT and Office 2007 and above can open/save in either DOCX and
ODT file formats. DOCX is even an ISO standard even if it is not 100% open
which is really a bum deal.
Stuff like this does piss me off when something so important as medical
records are stored in a proprietary format when they should be stored in an
open format to preserve the data. If the format of the medical forms follow a
certain schema and we are using raw data for these programs to read, what is
wrong with XML?
I may be on the fence at times in non-free software, but I do not budge on
open formats. Most of the time I don't care if someone uses Word to type up a
document as long as the program supports ODT and they can open up the files I
send to them. If they save in ODT by default, then more the better. That is
wishful thinking though as companies like Microsoft save in their format by
default and throw up warnings if you save in ODT which encourages people to
use their formats instead.
Rumor has it that Office 2013 will use ODT 1.2 and the strict doctype for
their DOCX/XLSX/PPTX formats which they SHOULD have done from the start which
would have helped LibreOffice and other teams in opening them. Now we have
these files from Office 2007 onward that don't even fully support the
standard and require a copy of Office to get around the quirks. All because
they pushed a format that wasn't complete.
Do you know who is the worst? Apple with their iWork suite. The only way to
read a .pages file is to extract it with an extraction program like 7zip or
File Roller and hope there is a PDF preview inside the .pages file. Of course
iWork saves in the Office formats and the only thing that naively reads ODT
on Mac is TextEdit which is flaky at best.
