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Writer has excellent Word import/export capability. Why not LaTeX, you might ask? Because I have to remain compatible with MSWord and articles are passed back and forth. I will be attempting to use LibreOffice Writer for my next technical article.
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But, if you want to use it as a poor man's easy 2-D CAD, this limitation will get you sooner or later. For me, this is not really a problem since I use it for diagrams and illustrations for work. It only does dimensions to two decimal places (WTF?). There will be some pain points, but the forced updates, pop-ups, and adware (from MS and affiliates) just really suck. Since my new work computer came with Win 10 and Office 365, I have seriously considered moving all new work to LibreOffice. It will probably read your old Visio files, and I would search your old Visio version for the templates (since you paid for them already) LibreOffice has continually gotten faster and more stable, and is in many ways (not all) better that MSOffice (that I also use extensively). I have been using LibreOffice for over a decade now to do schematics and diagrams for illustrations in publications and patents, probably since it was OpenOffice 3.x or so (been so long that I forget).
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