To avoid the pitfalls mentioned in the article, most places I know have stopped sending MS Word or ODFs but instead use PDFs.
Converting documents from Word to ODF or vice-versa is full of issues as no conversion here is 1-to-1 (same applies for conversions of e.g. old MS Word formats to newer ones - don't know for various ODF implementations).
If you don't collaborate on the document writing, IMHO pdf is the best representation for both of the formats and all those offices that require ODFs instead of MS Word do accept pdf files as well.
Creating a pdf from a MS Word / ODF file is a matter of seconds to 1-2 minutes for very large documents.
This might be obvious, but PDF isn't usually reflowable (and if it is, it's not very easy to do so), which makes for a painful reading experience on a smallish widescreen monitor, and isn't editable easily.
I usually just decide between plain-text, HTML, Google Docs and LaTeX/PDF, going up the ladder as the complexity of the document requires, or if it needs to be editable.
I hate it when I'm e-mailed a Word document that could easily have been plain text, in which case it would be searchable and more easily found when looking through e-mails manually.
I had a bad time working with other people's word docs in Open Office, but I found Google Docs does an excellent job in converting them to a usable format.
In the end though I too use pdf and make the other people do the hard work for not using Open Office on their end :P
I could save the Google doc back to Word format, but I have no idea how different it will act and look.
Converting documents from Word to ODF or vice-versa is full of issues as no conversion here is 1-to-1 (same applies for conversions of e.g. old MS Word formats to newer ones - don't know for various ODF implementations).
If you don't collaborate on the document writing, IMHO pdf is the best representation for both of the formats and all those offices that require ODFs instead of MS Word do accept pdf files as well.
Creating a pdf from a MS Word / ODF file is a matter of seconds to 1-2 minutes for very large documents.