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Comment by neverm0re | Hacker News Reader

Is Office even necessary anymore? Where I work, most people are using LibreOffice or Google Docs and not a single complaint about document exchange or document formats. There's a few Office holdouts, but even they haven't had an issue exchanging documents with the rest of us. Even I behave like a normal human being and use LibreOffice instead of Emacs when I wanna play nice at work.

What exactly is the killer feature of Office to people not obsessed with Outlook? Mac doesn't even have that, having to settle for EntouRAGE. (EDIT: My mistake, not used Mac Office in a long while -- Outlook now exists!)

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"Is Office even necessary anymore?"

Can't speak for OP but for many people, yes, it is. My sister works in arts admin. Dealings with funders are done using Word files with macros and protected areas. Works ok on Mac Word (they use Apple at work) but not with Open/LibreOffice.

When I set up an old thinkpad for my sister to use at home, I suggested Ubuntu and got an earful. So an OEM copy of Windows 7 and she got a licensed Office 2010 under her employer's licence agreement.

Also William Gibson...

"Word is, I'm told, horrid, but it talks to publishers, which is really all I use it for."

http://william.gibson.usesthis.com/

I really hope the UK government can stick to this...

https://blogs.fsfe.org/gerloff/2012/11/01/the-uks-new-open-s...

(It was posted to HN some days ago)

Outlook on Mac certainly exists - and is much, much better than the thoroughly aneurysm-inducing Entourage.

But yeah, at my last two jobs we've exclusively used Google Docs, and it's been a dream. No more hunting your inbox for a (probably outdated) copy of the Office doc. Sharing is a dream.

It's not quite as usable as a native app. I would be rather happy if there were a native client to GDocs, but as it stands, the ability to collaborate, share, and disseminate far, far trumps whatever usability gaps between it and Office.

Yep, Outlook (Office 2011) replaced Entourage (Office 2008) on Mac.

Yes it is. Downloaded Office for Mac Demo exactly because it's the only tool I can use.

(didn't try clicking the email link, I'm gonna probably order the box online)

Why exactly I need Office? Word. For publishing. OO or other will mess the styles, formatting, etc.

Apparently the publishing tool doesn't accept other formats.

There isn't really a substitute for Excel if you want to use big spreadsheets (more than, say, a few hundred rows and a few dozen columns). Neither LibreOffice nor MS Office is really good for hard-core curve fitting, but Excel has a few options that LibreOffice lacks (at least nth-degree polynomial fits and maybe some others). Even when you can use LibreOffice for your spreadsheets, it's often significantly slower.

LibreOffice works just find for my word-processing needs.

Edit: Forgot about Gnumeric for a moment. It's probably twice as good as LibreOffice for what I need, but doesn't do 100% of what Excel does.

> Is Office even necessary anymore?

I still keep a print-out of a requirements document on my desk that our windows-running QA person printed for me, because there is nothing else in our office that'll display it properly. Office for Mac, Google Docs, LibreOffice, etc - all display revision garbage mixed in with content, outdated text, etc.

I could ask the client to re-send the document without tracking information, or converted to a PDF, but due to their various chain o' command issues, it would probably take a week.

So yes, Office is still necessary, at least in our case.

> most people are using LibreOffice or Google Docs and not a single complaint about document exchange or document formats

I had to edit a presentation urgently. It was nothing exotic, made with PowerPoint. LibreOffice failed to open half the images, as did Keynote (which I bought just for this purpose, because it was an emergency). I can't tell you what happened, just that the one time I needed LibreOffice (or similar) to work, it didn't.

As for Office generally, I still haven't found a good substitute for Excel (sadly).

I recently did an on campus interview with Microsoft. Before the interview, they sent me an application to fill out with my basic information, interests, etc. The application looked like absolute garbage if you opened it with Wordpad, Libreoffice, or Google Docs. I ended up downloading a trial version of Office just to fill out the application.

So the only reason I've ever had in the past few years to use Office is that other people still use it, and Google Docs and LibreOffice are not perfectly compatible 100% of the time.

If you are sending documents back and forth with clients then I still think word is better. The fully integrated review mode is nice showing the history, not versions of the documents.

Also, the only time I really focus on non-code for hours at a time is when I am flying and thats when its nice to be able to work on a) production descriptions b) sales decks and c) job posts or other docs, all of which are better in the Office application.

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