For knowledge workers who live in these tools, the difference is stark. Even for companies who've standardized on Google Workspace or Apple iWork, advanced users will need Microsoft Office.
If you're talking about Excel I can imagine there are such features but not so much in other apps.
* Google docs are uglier than Microsoft word documents. This matters when I prepare an offer that I want to send to a client, and it should look good.
* Google slides are hideous, and the only reason I get away with using them is because programmers (including me) have no taste[1]
* Related to the looks, I sometimes buy paid document templates that I can use to format my offers. They often have an option to download a docx file, but it's complex through that you can't important it to Google docs without breaking it completely.
* Word/Libreoffice works offline (maybe docs with serviceworkers too? It never worked for me when I needed it).
* You can use word to generate documents using a template, don't think it's possible with Google docs
* Macros are not supported in Google docs
And I'm a complete noob when it comes to document editing software and actively avoid it. I can only imagine how much powerusers miss.
[1] https://medium.com/@laurajavier/google-slides-is-actually-hi...
We should just all get off our butts and learn LaTeX! Not that I have. ahhahahaha.
A specific problem in this scenario is tracked changes. Google has a history/version control but it does not map particularly well onto Word's tracked changes, which the other party will understand and is likely to want to use. Passing things into and out of Google will often result in loss of useful information like that.
Personally: Word is the absolute best piece of software for dealing with numbered lists that is easily available. In many ways it is terrible of course, but it is less terrible than anything else. Getting numbering right is important.
Google has gotten better. It used to be very bad at larger and more complicated documents. But it still doesn't have all I need to write a really good contract (at least by my standards of "really good").
Backward compatibility with existing documents that are already in Word. Also, for those knowledge workers who aren’t in tech, the high likelihood that the recipient can open the document with correct formatting.
Set up Thunderbird on my work desktop that day, and haven't looked back. Wish I would have way sooner, to be honest.
The interface is far nicer than outlook, but the performance is just too annoying for me.
The order varies depending on what you do, each can become absolutely critical.
Outlook online doesn't seem to have any rule capability and can't talk to 3rd party email servers.
Some colleagues have issues because it can't handle very large documents too (above a few hundred pages).
It is basically the opposite of most MS products. There is not one feature that stands out as to why I hate Word, it is the summation of all the little things I hate about it that is the issue.
There's a reason people use Office. Pretending that reason does not exist does not make the argument for switching better.
Stuff like font rendering, grammar- and spellchecking, the exact set of Excel formulas, graphs, templates, and VB scripting matter. The office suite’s localization changes keyboard shortcuts, Excel formulae names, and swaps between decimal points and commas. It is absolutely horrendous, but people rely on it for their daily work.
In essence, if we accept that Excel is both an IDE and a dialect of a programming language, we can compare it to asking what makes C# in Visual Studio worse when people are used to Java in IntelliJ. The answer might be “nothing, but I’m used to my setup and it’s ridiculous that I’m even having this discussion about my main work tool” for programmers, Office users, and video editors alike.
If you're forced to script in something else then why not just go to something else. Additionally, having tons of forms written by long gone employees just not port over is a tough sell at smaller offices.
But the difference is not 'killer features". The difference is in the million small details and polish. The integrations, formats, UI, workflow, things it just "gets right" that I don't even know its doing.
I try Libre Office every once in a while. But each time I try it just feels old and clunky. It's all in the tiny details that add up to the overall experience.
Clearly you're not missing anything since you're happy with what you have. But going from Office to LibreOffice is painful. Not bullet-wound painful, more like thousand-paper-cuts painful.