Out of curiosity, where does HN stand on Office suites? I use iWork for most of my work, but if I need to work on something quickly on any computer I use Google. What do the rest of you use? Does anyone prefer Office?
Plus, LibreOffice is kind of the only option on Linux.
I don't use my Mac for anything serious outside of XCode.
So far I have sent .doc files to my boss without issues.
Make a presentation within L.O., save it to the native L.O. format, then when I open it again later, things have moved and fonts are different.
Any form the company sends me will be displayed incorrectly. Maybe fields won't be fillable, or only some of the checkboxes will check. Maybe the 2 page form will magically spread to 3 pages. Maybe it won't print at all.
I love Abiword, and Gnumeric, and LibreOffice. I recognise that general people hate computers and can't understand them, and they want something very familiar. One of the (many) things I'd do if I had the money is create excellent quality documentation for these projects, in a variety of formats, and pay for them to hire researchers / designers.
EDIT: I'm not comfortable using Google products. Partly for the privacy stuff, but mostly because of the online need.
OpenOffice failed me on the compatibility front every time I tried it. Google Docs are terribly slow, and I find the general UX unfriendly.
Google's Spreadsheets are nice for collaborative work, but i'm not just impressed with word/presentation/drawing/etc.
I actually do a lot of drawing with MS PowerPoint (figures for papers/presentations/hw/recitations/etc), and love OneNote + Skydrive syncing (just so easy to organize, add different media, and access). If i did more with spreadsheets (as opposed to just loading batches of numbers into Matlab), i might do more with Google Docs....but i don't see that happening anytime soon.
It will also be interesting to see how this shifts now that Google is charging everyone to use Google Apps from the get go.
I sometimes get the impression that the product has just a little bit too much "techdemo" feel.
- sure you can collaboratively edit, but not very well: edits to the top of the document will cause repages that make any other editors editing the bottom seesick. There isn't really a good track-changes implementation either - not something you could use to discuss whether changes are good.
- You can do some styling, but again it comes across as not really practical for continual extensive use. Word doesn't do a brilliant job of keeping themes/styles consistent throughout the document, but google docs doesn't even try. Just using a different font consistently requires vigilance - there's no defaults you can change. Also, the styling features are really limited in the first place.
- Practical tools for writing are sparse. You'd think with their unrivalled big-data text analysis capabilities gdocs would have best-of-the-best spelling/grammar checkers, but they're just basic. The editor view enforces a paged layout, even if you're not writing pages (and when you are, it's not necessarily good for productivity to have it so in your face the whole time). It's html-based, but html export is rudimentary, and css support essentially absent.
Frankly, I don't think Gdocs has limited takeup due to poor document interop, I think it has poor takeup because it's just not a very good rich text editor. And it's crucial selling points - always online, cheap, hassle-free synchronization - just aren't that unique anymore, nor executed all that well.
Unlike you I've never run into problems with the collaborative editing. The relative lack of features is not a hindrance for me either, and in some way it's a benefit - less UI clutter.
It does certainly lack features, though, and things like the spreadsheet suffers from performance problems (a spreadsheet with more than a couple of hundred rows is total agony), but for me it's still meeting more requirements than Office.