Do OpenOffice users save in Microsoft format?

superglaze writes: "Looking through an article on the Series 60 office suite Quickoffice, I noted a claim by a company executive that OpenOffice users usually save their documents in a Microsoft (eg. .doc) format (hence no plans at Quickoffice to support .odf). I guess I can see the rationale for this — it helps if you're sending a document to an MS-using company — but what's the general /.-user's experience of this?"

Re:

[Potor]

For me, the interest in Ooo is having free (beer, speech) software that allows me to carry out my professional tasks. I use it when I can (if it supported Wordfast, I would use it exclusively), but always save in doc since the outside world demands it.

When something is just for me, I use odt, but only when I remember to save as odt, since my default is set to doc for the above-mentioned reason.

No.

[Tokimasa]

The OOo formats are smaller in size, and support all of the features of the software. But I do export to doc when sending to other people.

.doc all the way

[Warbringer87]

All it took was one document mistakenly sent as odt. If every single office app could open it, then sure, I guess I wouldn't bother changing the settings, the format really doesn't concern me as much as knowing that the recipient can open the file. Currently, .odt doesn't have that guarantee, in fact I can guarantee they won't be able to, whereas .doc does. In the same vein, carrying documents around on a thumb drive or other portable media, you want to be able to open them, and sometimes another person's

Re:

[CSMatt]

Since it is highly probable that any other computers that said removable media comes into contact with are Windows machines, you can always put Portable OpenOffice.org [portableapps.com] on your flash drive and use that to open your ODF files.

ODF

[JoshJ]

I always save as ODF since I'm using OO. If I'm going to send it to a teacher or something, I export it as PDF or save as Word .doc right before I send it.

Nope

[CSMatt]

I use ODF for all of my documents. If I ever need to export to someone else I save in PDF because I'm using OO.o on Ubuntu and thus don't have the Windows fonts and want to ensure a WYSIWYG interface for my receiver.

Use odf all the time

[nddlc]

The only time I don't use odf is when I have to export a file to people whose lame software can't automatically read .odf docs, and then I export it as pdf. I create all my word processor files in odf.