Why should I use the OpenDocument file format?

Question

Forgive the noobish sounding question, because I'm definitely not a linux newbie anymore. The current xkcd (http://www.xkcd.com/743) got me thinking. I never had a problem with .doc files before, because everything can read them. And I'd never used .odt files before because I only recently discovered abiword-plugins lets me read .odt files in Abiword.
So, I'd like you to please convince me why I should use .odt files over .doc files. Thank you.

Answer 1

drcouzelis wrote:
I wonder if it would be worth it to teach people how to use LaTeX. I certainly don't think it's more complicated than writing a Word document in all cases. I can't believe how much time my coworkers spend try to "format" many of the 50+ page documents we work with. So often I hear problems like "This page break is wrong", "The index links are all messed up", "How do I get rid of this space?", and similar. Some of the time the answer is "We'll just leave it" or "I'll just re-write it". I thought all of those big fancy buttons on the top of the window were supposed to make writing a Word document easy? /rant
Say, is there an application that allows a person to right-click on a TEX file and "Open (as PDF)" and "Edit (as TEXT)", For any OS? You know, kind of like a JIT compiler.
...and is this too off-topic?
Well, I could share my experience here.
1. LaTeX is probably similar to Perl or Vim in terms of the learning curve. I mean, it's more "learn as you work" thing: LaTeX relies heavily on it CTAN repository and there are lots of different ways to do the same thing. Which is why all the guides are more like cookbooks with recipes how to perform different kind of tasks, not a 101 tutorial.
2. LaTeX is more oriented towards large documents, rather books than articles. Which means, one doesn't really need all of the features that LaTeX has to markup a document less than 50 pages. Most of the guides teach you how to work with books, while most of the users need to work with smaller texts. It's not a real problem for somebody who uses LaTeX for publishing his books to use it for smaller texts, but in other cases it's a bit challenging.
Whenever you grab a LaTeX guide, you can strip it off all the advanced topics and you'll find out that merely one or two chapters are needed for most WYSIWYG converts: document structure (the essential packages, etc), beautifiers (boldface, italic, underlining, etc), paragraph formatting (alignments, columns, etc) headers/titles, tables, images embedding and footnotes. All of this can be described in 50 pages at most, and that would be totally comprehensive.
So basically, one just needs a guide to LaTeX for word processing. Learning LaTeX for that purposes using publishing-oriented guides is really time consuming.
Perhaps, there is even some kind of a special macro for word processing, that has less features, but makes them easier to memorize and use - I don't know.
Actually, Pandoc's user guide could be a nice starting point, since pandoc has exactly the needed feature set. You should just expand it with some page properties (interlinear interval, page margins, etc), a review of the available tools for LaTeX (aucTeX, vim-latex, LyX, Kile, gummi, may be some popular extensions to Geany, Gedit, Kate), some popular Web resources (package reviews, tips-and-tricks wikis, etc) and some further reading.