While I’m a Windows user buying a lot of MS’s developer tools, I fail to see the need for changing Word every couple of years. I still have Office 2007 which covers 95% of my needs.
When we looked to switching away from Office to something else people would say 95% was covered by say Google Docs or another tool and people would go hmmm and see that as a negative. I asked for the person to tell me what the 5% we were missing and maybe we could fulfill that need with another tool. One week later we made the switch since no one could find a single thing anyone would be missing. One year later no one is missing anything and we were covered for 100% of our work needs.
I would say our company of 400 people have very little need for Word and they don't know how to use Excel besides making budgets with no real complected formulas.
Did you explore using Mail Merge?
Depends on whether you want the data to be easily reusable or not. Is there no need for any summarisation of the data on these reports? Is the layout of these reports standardised in any way?
Mail merge isn't exactly an advanced feature, all you need is a basic Excel spreadsheet containing the data you want to insert. Takes 10 minutes or less to teach someone how to use it.
I am certainly not trying to say mail merge is an advance feature. I am just saying MOST people can not do a mail merge, THE VAST majority.
Does anyone really want to become dependent on a web app, where you have no control over whether you move to the next version or not?
I can ask all sorts of questions to make people move away from Google Docs. Just because you manipulated some people into making a bad decision doesn't mean you're right.
On the the offline front, ODF[1] is taking over country by country because you can't beat free.
[1] http://mrpogson.com/2015/09/17/libreoffice-installations-in-...
Yes, a group of people could invent workarounds such as using Dropbox and copy files to new names such as PetroleumContractVersion1.docx, PetroleumContractVersion2.docx, PetroleumContractVersion3.docx, etc. Other manual methods of sharing could be blasting email attachments back and forth and CC'ing collaborators. Those methods are tedious and error prone.
Another option is to install a SharePoint server and use its document sharing features. That's probably overkill and many folks would think the Sharepoint "cure" is worse than the disease.
Since many folks find GoogleDocs sharing feature to be useful, it seems logical that adding such capabilities to a desktop word processor would help many workflows.
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=office+2016+collaboration
The Dropbox 'badge' as they call it adds a bit. It'll tell you who else is editing, let you comment/annotate, do 'automatic' versioning (i.e. not make you save versions manually), and share from within Word/Excel. It's about as much 'cloud' as you'd want. Maybe the realtime collaboration will work well, hard to tell. That would be a major selling point, if they manage to sync edits well.