Re: Life without MS Office

[John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>]

There are absolutely things you can do with the genuine article from
Microsoft that you cannot replicate exactly by any other means.

Whether the exactness is important is dependent on many things. I am
sure that for many shops, LibreOffice or the offerings from Google are
Close Enough(tm).

The two main areas of potential issues are (1) document compatibility
and (2) rendering.

Compatibility is a concern if you're going to be exchanging documents
with outside parties who do not necessarily use the office suite that
you use. It's probably rare that one party cannot open the other
party's documents *at all*, though I have definitely seen it happen.

Much more common is that screen or print renderings will be different
between different applications opening the same document. Well, not
just common but inevitable. But most of those differences will be
relatively minor (or even unnoticeable if you're not a typographer,
graphic designer, etc.). Sometimes, the differences are very
noticeable, even to an untrained eye. But those still might not be
very important depending on what the use case is or who is ultimately
going to be reading it.

All the issues can be worked around in some way or another, but for
some businesses, the annoyance of dealing with them is going to be a
greater cost than just going with Microsoft.

John Y.


On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 9:46 AM Jeff Crosby <jlcrosby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> We standardized on google apps in 2009.  We also use LibreOffice and have
> not purchased any MS Office licenses since.  The latest Office we have is
> 2003.
>
> We have a couple employees (one in particular) who whine about wanting MS
> Office.  Because they don't "like" something in one of the other options.
> Or don't want to learn.
>
> Any of you out there that get along without MS Office?  Ever run into
> something you can't do with either LibreOffice or google apps that Office
> has?