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Comment by hamsapelea | Hacker News Reader

Hmm the average joe is already using google drive rather than office et al. Works on linux and mac better than the office stack works on windows.

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I was really surprised to learn that according to Okta’s Businesses at Work 2019 report[1] Microsoft Office is still significantly more popular than G Suite, at least in the workplace:

> Office 365 increased its lead and continues to dominate the total pool of apps by number of customers, and it’s growing its active unique users by 55% year over year.

I wrote a bit about the report[2]. Another interesting finding is that people actually prefer using Microsoft Office products:

> Our survey found that 67% of knowledge workers prefer Microsoft Word over Google Docs, while only 15% report the opposite. When it comes to email, 49% prefer Microsoft Outlook over Gmail, while 35% report the opposite.

[1]: https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/2019/

[2]: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/31/office-suite-market-...

The Google Docs word processor objectively sucks, it's barely a rich text editor.

To wit, you can't even define custom styles!

And both Word and Google Docs pale in comparison to LaTeX for demanding customization work. But "barely a rich text editor" suffices for the vast universe of documents which barely need rich text.

Except when your target market is captured by network effects and demands a particular file format regardless of how appropriate it is for the material.

The lack of custom styles is really problematic for a very common use case, documentation. I'd rather use Markdown for the purely tech stuff, but I thought I'd use Docs for collaborating with non or less technical people. That just doesn't work, too tedious.

Yes, it does. At the same time it works incredibly well for collaborative editing. But the number of quirks and errors in the product are enough to drive you mad.

Google drive absolute shit on Linux.

Idk what it’s like on Windows but all Linux has is the web UI anyway so it’s probably the same.

It feels almost intentionally bad, I’m not sure what’s going on there but I’m pretty sure you couldn’t pay me to use it. IMO at least with SMB you don’t have to use that godawful file manager.

I agree. I've used rclone and another ML based program (forgot its name) with varying success for GDrive on Linux. RClone seems to be the best so far for my use case.

I wish Google provided better integration of GDrive w/Linux...

I'd be very surprised if this were true. My experience is that in actual offices, MS Office is king and it would be very hard to move most workflows away from it without exactly replicating it bug-for-bug.

To be honest i never worked in such a backwards office where people still use ms office

Like it or not that is the majority of offices everywhere.

Bug-for-bug? Nah. Just come up with something even remotely as productivity-enhancing as Excel is and you might have a shot. Fact is, people who think this already exists underestimate that powerhouse of productivity. It is possibly the most used programming environment on earth.

Even Excel isn't as productivity enhancing as Excel is. Microsoft has been trying to get people into .net macros for years but a lot of places are still using VBA.

Here's my hot take, as a Linux distro developer with an Office356 sub: Excel is absolutely ridiculous and anyone who thinks anything in the FOSS world can compare or stand up to what Excel does is completely deluding themselves, and this is a major reason why Excel will never be replaced, or even touched, by FOSS solutions. PowerQuery is absolutely game changing (and no I will not accept "but you can cobble together awk and 5 other tools to run a preprocessing pipeline before opening your spreadsheet", that's not competition, it's a joke.)

I hate saying this considering how much LibreOffice, etc have invested -- but OTOH I imagine they understand their competition better than the average programmer who uses Office suites to track their month-to-month finances and thinks they've got it figured out.

There is the fact that actually challenging Excel as a product and implementing any competitor would technically require a substantial amount of labor and effort, on a very large scale. But that's just one part; the fact is that you can't actually win a battle unless you're willing to analyze where you've already lost. I think most FOSS users don't actually realize how badly they are losing to products like Office or even (the inferior, IMO) G-Suite. This isn't surprising in the grand scheme considering how much software freedom we've lost in the past few decades; it's just one more lost battle, but it still stings.

This isn't a situation that pleases me, but at the end of the day between an O365 family sub and the alternatives, it was very easy to make the choice given the returns I got.

TBF, depending on data size I’ve had much better results with awk and friends than with Excel.

I use Linux exclusively and have since 2003. Also, I don't put any of my work in google drive/docs/GSuite for anything. Google simply has enough of my life, I'm not giving them my business data as well.

Average student is using Google Docs and Drive but the office workers I hear are driven by corporate culture, and traditional places of work like accounting offices haven’t culturally embraced these kinds of solutions.

Things is like publisher, illustrator, etc. can replace word. Open office is respectable. But all the google docs champions need to wake up.

Google docs is absolutely inferior in its power, formatting options, display performance, ability to write mathematical equations and diagrams directly into the document, etc.

Every time I had to produce a non-trivial report in google docs I grind my teeth and end up rendering these things elsewhere and insert them as png.

Additionally, google docs gives you no ownership over the software or the files I find it's commercial model unsettling.

For diagrams try draw.io

What do you use for math document formatting and presentation? The publishing world I'm aware of is still running on Adobe.

LaTeX

It's not like we are using modern products in most local companies I've worked for in the last decade. Everyone is still on 2008 and older office products. Hell I'm lucky we have AutoCAD LT 2014 at my current job. Its the most up to date piece of software in the whole office other than web browsers.

At every company I've worked at gmail and google drive are blocked at the firewall. I dont know how any big company would allow their data to be stored or copied externally.

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