I also write in Open Office. I've scrawled notes on every surface known including skin. But I never write the story longhand. A) my handwriting is so bad from years of computer dependency that even I can't read it sometimes and B) I type as fast as I think, but not so with handwriting...I hate the logjam of ideas.

When Bees and I wrote our VS ep together, I used Word's merge function more than once to synch things up. As I recall, I copy/pasted the Gdocs version and saved as a Word doc, then compared it to my local copy to accept/reject. I seem to recall a formatting issue kept making fake changes when I tried a proper export. I have a theory that I have yet to test that it's easier to synch up when both of you are using the same editor locally before uploading to Gdocs.