Yo Mike,

Not *everyone* uses M$ Office - the OpenOffice users for example.

Absolutes like "everyone" and "never" are easy to shoot down... like
you just did. But the majority of people out there do use MS Office.
Not everyone, but most people do.


Furthermore, if someone sends me a M$ office file, I can read it with OpenOffice but they can't use M$ office to read an OpenOffice file.

This is the reality of how it must be done. Being the underdog trying
to unseat the king, OpenOffice must be able to read MS Office files.
Not being able to read .doc files would be a huge hurdle for OO users
simply because of how common .doc (and .xls...) files are. MS-Office
had to do the same thing when it was trying to establish itself. It had
to read WordPerfect documents and Lotus-123 Spreadsheets. Similarly
neither WordPerfect nor 123 could read MS-Office files at that time.


Does M$ office allow you to export documents as PDF file? OpenOffice does.

MS-Office does not have this ability. I don't see that happening
anytime down the road either. Doing so would be damaging to the
relationship they have with Adobe.

On Windows PDF export works at the printer driver level. You get (buy)
a special printer driver from Adobe and "print" to a PDF file. This way
any and all applications can generate PDF files. There are also a
number of free PDF print-drivers available as well. (I never use them
though... I just email .doc files.)