This is a general replay to
Should LibreOffice even support Microsoft secret formats?
illustrating my personal situation, and why my answer is *yes*.I moved from Microsoft Office Professional to Word Perfect Office Professional probably 12 to 13 years ago. The reason for the professional versions is that I needed a database as well as an office suite. When Open Office first came out, I moved to it, starting with version .9 something. I needed to keep Paradox as my database at that time. Once Base became available with Open Office, I was able to move to Base and drop proprietary software for an office suite completely. Once I had everything in Open Office, I had one major step forward for someday moving to Linux instead of Windows. I made that transition 2 1/2 years ago. I get many attachments from co-workers and other organizations that are sent in Microsoft format. Most of these documents are relatively simple. I've not had anyone send me anything in docx format I couldn't read. Generally I will need to adjust margins, or something like that. I'm 97% Windows free. I only use it for video editing and for a forms program which will not work with Wine in Linux. Most of the people who send me these attachments are using what they are required to use, which is Microsoft. If I could not be somewhat compatible with them, Open Office or LibreOffice now, would be of no value to me at all.
If we could get back to the big push of several years for governments to adopt odf standards for all of their documents, we would all be a lot better off. But that push would never work if there wasn't some backward compatibility for the former Microsoft users to be able to open previous documents.
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