Office. If Linux desktop had microsoft office, I could use it. Libre office is an unmitigated, ugly pile of shit.
There's no reason for any government office or public school system at any level to be paying for office licenses IMHO. We can communicate and teach quite well with L.O.- and donate a share of the saved budget to FOSS.
That would free more money so that the people who did need or could truly benefit from premium tools could get them.
Office compatibility still a problem for Macs in 2017. Either from FUD or in actual functionality, Office prevents people from switching from Win10 to MacOS.
Two people asked me about moving to Macs. They repeatedly asked me about Office compatibility (the FUD). For one of the users, I wasn't sure if it was OK for functionality. She is a lawyer (ie. power user of Word) and I know in Mac Excel for me is not usable.
Both of them didn't need to buy new hardware (they are fed up with Windows, not the hardware), but I couldn't even mention Linux as a alternative for them.
With 2016, it ain't much. Do they use a lot of VB scripts? I have found 2016 Office for Mac has been nearly 1 for 1 feature wise.
Also, I find Excel to be unbearably slow on a Mac, when the same file works OK in Windows. And yes, the VBA Editor on Mac versions aren't at par as in Windows.
When I bring work home, it's usually because of a deadline and these things will slow me down (including different keyboard mappings).
I have never had any problems with the word processor and spreadsheet in Libre Office (the only two in the suite that I've used). Sincere thanks to the developers.
But you can try and use WPS office. It's made by some Chinese company, it's fast and it is compatible with Office files.
I had one of my Linux epiphanies with WPS. I got a Powerpoint presentation by email, I plugged the videobeam HDMI adapter to my laptop, pressed the Fn-F8 keys to change from mirroring to using two separate displays, opened the Powerpoint file with WPS presentations and it worked beautifully.
The presentation was fullscreen in the external display, and I had the notes in the laptop. The presentation was flawless.
I had never had any other software work without issues for me at the very first try and I was very happy that it happened while running Linux.
It's not enough to be able to open 99% of the files properly, the main problem that makes libreoffice/openoffice unusable for me is that if I open a MS Office Word or Excel file, change a single character, and send it back, the file is likely to have other unintended changes in formatting or layout.
However, it has been compatible enough for all I have done in the last year and a half.
If some file doesn't open or save correctly, a bug report can be filled here: http://wps-community.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=10
It comes down to a simple test that can be easily automated - take a test file (created in MS Office), run the load-from-MS-format operation, run the save-to-MS-format operation, verify that the resulting file is identical to the source file. There might be some differences in metadata (e.g. timestamps) but the document file content should be byte-for-byte identical. If not, then the software isn't MS Office compatible yet.
It does mean that your internal in-memory document structure must be able to hold all of the information that MS Office files contain, and that the conversions between MS Office data structures and your internal data structures cannot be lossy, so your internal structure can't be so conceptually different in any aspect that you can't unambiguously convert to it and back - but that is required for interoperability, so that multiple people can do long term work on the same document with different tools.
Yes. Different MS Office versions can produce different results.