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Comment by nehal3m | Hacker News Reader

I tend to avoid their office suite, is the online version mature yet? If so, then who cares which platform they support their native apps on?

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Mature? Yes. Better than Gdocs, debatable, but IMO yes. Replacement for the desktop app? Not quite, but it depends on which feature you specifically need.

Interestingly my wife is offered O365 online as part of her Master's school as a way to write research papers. When she submits them in canvas, it cannot link to the document she wrote online, so it must be downloaded to her laptop which is a Mac. When that happens the only way to look at it is in our personal version of Word, locally, which distorts quite a bit of things, losing indention or adding spaces is common. It was surprising to me that a docx file is rendered so differently between the 2. This is a common problem for the professors it seems as they are asking people to download the docs to personal office apps and export them to PDF, negating the entire purpose of O365 online that they provided...

The web app versions are slower/laggier, have fewer features, and require an internet connection. They’re not quite as performant as google docs, but in some cases have more features (while missing features in other cases). The UI/UX is marginally worse than the desktop apps, which already aren’t great unless you’re already used to them.

If you don’t care about quality and aren’t an Office power user, they’re fine.

I'm using PowerPoint online to make a presentation where .pptx is required.

It's annoying. A lot of features (video cropping, changing slide master title, ...) do not work in the online version. I literally had to ask a colleague to edit the slidemaster title for me.

Also, it's quite slow in loading pictures, videos.

If you live in word/excel, it's far from perfect. If you sometimes need to work in it, it's perfectly fine. It's just a little bit more buggy.

Mature - maybe? It's certainly not a replacement for the application, as the online Word still falls flat on its face when trying to open, or even worse, modify, some of our larger documents.

The online versions are subject to warrantless government surveillance, whereas the local versions can still operate solely on local files and be denied access to the internet entirely.

This is the last private and secure way to use MS products. When that is gone, we’ll be stuck using fake f/oss wannabe-Excel.

Have you really tried running ms office in a complete offline computer?

After a few weeks without connection it just refuses to work only allowing read mode.

Ouch! So much for the sustainability of all the work we pour into this ecosystem. I don't get why freedom to operate is so low on corporate priorities.

Because it's not a problem most corporations have. They have internet access and thus 365 Desktop Applications can call home and register.

I have modified my version of Excel to continue working in, uhh, nonstandard circumstances.

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