Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1503

Yipes. I'm not sure I encountered this behavior in the long-ago year I spent using Word regularly. I have been told, though, that formatting details can vary depending on -- the printer driver, maybe? so the way the document looks on Person A's computer may be different from the way it looks on Person B's computer.

Aside: Maybe someone more clueful can explain this "Word files look different on different computers" -- not so much the technical details as why this is apparently considered acceptable behavior, both by the developers and by the users. Someone I work with has recently been introduced to PDF and is surprised to learn that there are file formats that don't have this property. :-)?

Yipes again. I haven't used OpenOffice in a context in which I'm working with its native file formats, only as a semi-subsbreastute for Word, so no agree-disagree here. And the fact that it deals imperfectly with foreign file formats -- well, that's a challenge Word doesn't have to face, or only faces to a lesser degree.

I guess so. I'm probably pickier than most people about stuff like this, but still, some of the glitches seem like they'd annoy almost anyone -- like bulleted-numbered lists that print either without bullets-numbers, or with the wrong numbers. Maybe I'm a lot pickier than most people ....

I forget what program you want to import-export from, but the folks over in comp.text.tex may have some thoughts about to-from TeX. "FYI", maybe.

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.