Open Office vs. ms word

[Thomas A. Lowery]

Yesterday I was writing documentation for a project and decided to put 
Open Office (1.1.2) to the test on a ms word document template.  The 
results where a disaster.

Initially I blamed OOo for skewing the format and miss numbering the 
outline, but I found when I  opened the template in word some of the 
problems where still present.  It appeared that OOo enhanced the 
formatting problems.

Aside from formatting issues, OOo reported no spelling errors when I ran 
the spell checker, even with misspelled words present in the document.  
Spell checker looked like it ran but just popped up a dialog stating 
"spell check complete".

In the end I abandoned the OOo version and recreated the document using 
word.

I remember discussion from the meeting that members have used OOo with 
word documents without problems.  How did you verify format and 
presentation?

Tom