Discussion on:

10 big improvements in LibreOffice 3.5

is better on formatting with MS Word.

We have to interact with people who will probably take another 5+ years to move to FOSS including LibreOffice. When we have to input our info into their Word formatted docs, it becomes quite a nightmare to set the formatting - tables, fonts, headers and other things change.

The closest we get to doing a reasonable job is to save locally as ODT, do all the new formatting in ODT, and then save back as .doc, and keep our fingers crossed hoping that most of the formatting stays. Sometimes it does not, and becomes a real pain, esply when there is an urgent need to send the document off ...

These are nice improvements. But it's a shame that some very simple things are not implemented. For example, Calc still cannot display the number of rows returned by a filter. This is a shame IMHO. It would be so helpful and easy to implement.

"In Writer, you can open up the word count window and watch it update as you type."

That's a big improvement? In all the documents I created in Open Office, I had a header in which was inserted a field called "Word Count", which showed me the total word count of the document, and updated every time I click 'save'.

Now, you want me to have a separate open window for word count? I can insert the statistics/word count field in my header in LibreOffice, but in my document it only displays the word "Statistics", and doesn't actually show the word count unless I print-preview the document.

This is not a "big improvement".