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Comment by beanjuiceII | Hacker News Reader

what does this matter anymore with office 365?

The web version of Office apps still is not the same as the full-featured fat desktop version, which only runs on Windows and Mac OS.

You can't use the web version offline, they are not a PWA, for instance.

The full featured version doesn't even run on Mac OS. Excel, PowerPoint and Word for Mac are all pale imitations of their Windows counterparts.

The irony is that Excel started out as a Mac app.

The web version of Word is a bad joke. I couldn’t even use it for editing a story the last time I tried it because it either didn’t have change tracking or it didn’t work correctly. At least the iOS app is useable.

Don’t get me started on Excel.

Web apps in general are a bad joke. They never, ever work as well as a real desktop app. At best they are a port in a storm because you can't use the real version of the application for whatever reason, but they aren't viable as a replacement and likely never will be.

No COM integration, no VBA and no Active Directory support.

Business and engineering software uses Windows APIs to integrate with MS Office and Active Directory. The APIs are not portable and hard to replicate on emulation layers. The software is old so expect a huge pile of examples of Hyrum's law. So you need bug-for-bug API layer implementation to run those software elsewhere.

Migrating companies off from that software is actually harder than creating a clone of Windows.

The browser version is lacking several features compared to the Windows and Mac versions.

Office 365's web version is pretty dreadful.

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