The Open-office suite still has problems when opening documents created with the Microsoft Office suite; I created a Powerpoint presentation in MS Office and saved it in the pptx format and it would not open in the Libreoffice suite in Ubuntu 12.10 at all; That is a serious problem; but this can happen with the Libreoffice suite as well; if you save the Powerpoint presentation in the *.odp format, this might help alleviate the issues that you could experience when sharing files between the Microsoft Office and the Libreoffice suite. The German government was trying out OpenOffice on their computers and they had no end of problems when sharing files between office suites; but they were using an ancient version of the venerable OpenOffice suite and this is why they were having so many problems. If they were using the Libreoffice suite then they might be able to cope; but it is hard when one company is using Microsoft software exclusively and you are wanting to use free and open-source software for a change. Microsoft should be forced to provide a free format that Office 2007 and 2010 supports and will work perfectly with the Libreoffice suite. The current version is 3.6.3; this is a very good office suite; but the compatibility between the free suite and the Microsoft software needs work to improve compatibility.
But there are reasons why everyone is still using Microsoft Office after all of this time. One of them is the fact that Microsoft are dominating the field in terms of their Office products that are now available on the mobile platforms with the release of the Office 365 suite. But doing work on a mobile device is not much fun at all; compared to a proper keyboard for typing away on an essay or a huge thesis. That is why the PC will always dominate for the user who wants to do real work on their machine instead of playing Angry Birds or browsing Friendface. I am using a proper computer keyboard to type this; whilst listening to the Unreal Return to Na Pali soundtrack. I have not updated to the latest Linux Mint 14 yet; I have customized my Linux Mint 13 installation so much that I do not want to have to go through the hassle of installing another copy of the distribution and then re-installing all of my software again. I wish you could upgrade the Linux Mint distribution in place instead of going through that bother. The OpenSUSE and Debian 6.0 distributions as well as Ubuntu can be upgraded in place; it takes a long time and a lot of bandwidth; but it does work. Backing up your data beforehand is a good idea though, in case the upgrade goes awry; but that is not necessarily the case if you perform the upgrade correctly.
But if you are using OpenOffice and you wish to share files with Microsoft Office users; saving in the *.doc format will help.