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Comment by Bedon292 | Hacker News Reader

As much as it would be nice to have an alternative to MS Office, it seems like a lot of these 'killers' focus on the wrong things that are needed.

1. Completely offline use, including local save, backups etc. Which goes completely against the cloud. But this is something that Microsoft got right with 365. I can install it and use it completely isolated from the internet and still collaborate online if needed.

2. Academic writing features, like citations, footnotes, and things like that. No alternative I have tried has ever been able to easily do these things, and MS Office has them all built in.

3. Suite interoperability. I need to be able to make a chart in Excel. Copy and Paste (Ctrl+C/V, not some export process) it over to Word in the document, then paste it into PowerPoint for the presentation. Or maybe save it out as a PNG for Latex or something.

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"2. Academic writing features, like citations, footnotes, and things like that. No alternative I have tried has ever been able to easily do these things, and MS Office has them all built in."

There are dozens of things like this for different niches. You need citation tools, someone else couldn't do his job without pivot tables, someone else uses imported shapes in powerpoint ten times a day, and so forth and so on. That's a big reason that I'm skeptical anyone will be "killing" MS office anytime soon.

Right, there are so many 'little' things in MS Office, that people use all the time. It is likely that no one person is using all the features, but on any given day all of the features are key to someone's job. And since they have the home field advantage, it will be a long time before anyone can come close to killing it.

That's the first time I read that "feature-creep" is actually a good thing :)

It's complicated!

The crazy feature bloat is a real negative for Word, and yet also a huge strength.

It's interesting look at documents produced and consumed by different industries to get a real grasp on the variety of use cases

Oh, and a legal document written in Word 2.0 an æon ago needs to have every word on the same line, and paginate identically on every subsequent version

It isn't necessarily. It's perfectly reasonable to have a streamlined product that supports those features that are most commonly used. And to tell someone that wants the other 90% of features that get 10% of the use to go with some other product.

On the other hand, if your objective is to build something that does incorporate more or less every feature that people use, then you're going to need a lot of features because so many workflows have specialized requirements in some area.

The classic adage is that each user only uses about 60% of Office, but every user uses a different 60%.

Completely agree with this. Google suite has struggled to gain adoption in my past 3 companies because of a number of little things it doesn't quite get in parity with Office. It's a (rare?) example of when the 80% or even 95% solution isn't enough.

Also, few products are so ingrained in a user's workflow as Office. Many professionals have been using the suite for over a decade(s), so the switching cost is high.

My company was to move completely away from Office to Google's suite of products 3 years ago. Except for just the few macro jockeys that required Excel. It's harder to get approval for an Office license now, but most people that had Office 3 years ago, still have it today (except for Outlook, that one is gone). It's really Excel that seems to keep people from moving to Google's product, though. Word and the others aren't that big a problem.

Excel is the biggest one, for sure. I still think there are many who really prefer the features and functionality of PowerPoint and Outlook, though. I haven't seen that be the case for Word, but Word has never really been a significant part of my work flow.

I suspect that "dozens" is understating the size of the required feature set by multiple orders of magnitude.

And it's not just the size of the feature set that makes tackling this difficult - that's something that a company like Amazon could solve by throwing hundreds of programmers and millions of dollars at the problem. But they can't just rebuild the education of the users to invoke their particular use case.

Yeah my mom has been in marketing analytics for the last couple of decades and given some of the spreadsheets, tables and graphs I've seen her work on I'm skeptical of anything coming close to replacing Office any time soon. Outside of your typical Google Docs (Drive?) use-cases, MS Office is a set of true professional tools with all the nuance and depth that entails.

Exactly. You will have to take Excel from the cold dead hand of accountants, actuaries, anyone working in finance, etc. If Microsoft get Excel (online and offline) integration with Big Data right, and I find them a bit lagging on this, they will be the kind of the hill for this market. Once you get people used to a tool, it's hard to change habit. It's the same thing with programmers and programming languages.

If you haven't tried LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/) in a while I highly recommend it. Works great with Zotero for citations and they have fixed a lot of the formatting issues in Writer/Word and data manipulation shortcomings in Calc/Excel. I haven't needed MS Office for 4 months.

I have, and at least for my purposes it did not fit the bill. It has been a little while, and maybe they got footnotes working finally, but before they were horrendous. And yes the Zotero plugin is nice. Libre Office is definitely the closest alternative to MS Office, but just not quite there for me. I do recommend it all the time for people who are very lightweight users though.

Have you tried it since version 5.2? Previous versions didn't cut it for me either. This one does. For one, it now has multi-column copy/paste in Calc.

The problem with LibreOffice is that it has terrible Word compatibility.

Documents just come out looking completely different. Tables go over extra pages, text is randomly overlayed, etc.

In my experience, this typically happens if you're using the manual layout systems, nudging and adjusting image sizes and text boxes pixel by pixel until the output is "perfect." This is brittle even in Word. You should be able to insert a section or paragraph without messing up your whole document.

Instead, use paragraph breaks, page breaks, and styles to typeset the document. Choose top/bottom wrapping of images, and keep tables simple and clean.

It usually looks better, it's easier to edit later, and it just works in whatever editor you're using - whether Office 97, Office 2017, Google Docs, or exporting to HTML.

I can't control what others do in the documents they send me...

Well, at least we are documenting the problems, you can filter by "docx" to see for yourself: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Tracking_Bugs

So it's easy to jump in, if one has a passion to fix interop issues..

The problem with Word is that it has terrible LibreOffice compatibility.

And if word were trying to replace libre office, that might be the case.

I also love it to the point of having it installed even when I have access to Word.

My reason is because I find it much better to clean up other peoples weird formatting (yep, seems some people don't use styles. Or use styles and then go over and fix every heading manually or something.)

I came back to LibreOffice recently. Hoping not to experience previous problems. It soon bungled a save of one of its own documents causing me hours of work. I expect to go back to Word, sigh.

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