It's hardly news. In fact I switched from MS Office to StarOffice 5 in 2000 precisely because of never ending problems with documents. I even had trouble with doc files that one of my colleague made on the very same version (MS Office 2000) running on the same OS (Win98SE), apparently because we had different default printers.
Coincidentally I am currently building a few template ODT/ODG documents on a up-to-date Mac in LibreOffice 3.5.4 that are subsequently filled and converted to PDFs via JODConverter 2.x on...
and the output is virtually the same, barring a slight difference in font rendering.
(and I too, ditched Office when it completely failed to open my final home produced Word 97-produced document in Word 97 at the university, while Word 2000 did open it with all images suddenly placed at the top-left corner of the first page. StarOffice on the Sun workstations opened it without a hitch, with few pictures offseted by only millimeters. At that stage I could care less about font substitution.)
