Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1505

I guess it's possible. My limited experience suggests that a particular version of MS Word will do okay with files produced by the previous version, and perhaps a few versions before that, but of course might not be able to process files produced with a newer version. (No need to discuss the business reasons for that last property.) I don't have a sense of how far back you have to go before things become unreadable, but I have heard that there *is* a limit, so Word users can find themselves with old files that can't be processed by the current version of Word. This seems to connect with discussions elsewhere of data being lost because it's stored on media that can't be read by current equipment. Maybe not many people care, or MS would do better in this regard.

As for whether OpenOffice does better .... It seems like they already accept a more diverse set of possible input formats, so maybe it's easier for them to support old formats and they do. I have no idea, though -- after all, it's free software, and supporting old file formats may not be one of the developers' priorities ....

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