I've never seen an office application that so badly mangles a Word document that you can't even read it.Back in a former job, I was managing documents for a big project. The government mandated the use of Word format. When I opened some of the documents up in LibreOffice, only a single, completely blank page was visible. This tended to happen with .docx files but not with .doc files.
So YES, open source office suites DO mangle Microsoft Office documents beyond readability. The only thing that's guaranteed to work is Microsoft Office, so governments and businesses will keep using it.
