I have found out that very, very few non-technical users (and even many technical users) ever use Word the way it is meant to be used; i.e., using styles. Most

I have found out that very, very few non-technical users (and even many technical users) ever use Word the way it is meant to be used; i.e., using styles. Most Word users are pretty much still manually manipulating Word documents like the very first WYSIWIG word processors, as glorified typewriters that happen to have some character- and line-oriented formatting features. So I export my LibreOffice Text documents to PDF, then use Acrobat Pro to export the PDF to Word format. What Acrobat Pro does is render a pretty literal representation of the PDF into Word. For someone used to using styles in Word, it is a generally horrid conversion. But I'm in the minority, and everyone I've sent Word documents rendered in this way is satisfied, which completely mystifies me. For documents that I'm frequently asked to share, like contracts, I deliberately keep them dead plain text simple as much as possible. I have a contract generation program that pulls customer and project data, and populates a LibreOffice template so I can focus on just the specifics of the proposal. The contract parts that a customer's legal team might want to mark up with track changes enabled is kept simple enough that LibreOffice can still faithfully export it to Word. I generate simple spreadsheets for myself, but keeping formatting consistent from spreadsheets I get from others has held me back from ditching Excel entirely. I still haven't been able to work out a way to switch away from PowerPoint slide decks that I have to share with others (which is pretty much every presentation deck I produce). I'm a pretty heavy user of animations in PowerPoint, and the faithful conversion of that is non-existent. If Microsoft was better with keeping parity between OS X and Windows Office, then I would have never explored adopting LibreOffice, but since there are enough differences to matter, I figured it couldn't hurt to wean myself from Office where feasible.