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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

What are you talking about? The file format is most certainly not the "main selling point" of Office.

Yes it is because people expect their office suite to handle MS formats flawlessly as a basic requirement, and the best at that is naturally MS Office. Nobody cares how or if Word handles ODT files, but if another word processor doesn't handle DOCX for exporting and importing without issues then it will be treated as unusable by lots of users, no matter how wonderful it is in other respects. In this space UI and features are (for me, sadly) secondary and support for a specific file format is king.

Well, OK, fair. In that respect even the Mac versions of Office have some problems. But even setting that aside Office has more features.

I would say that the main selling point of MSO is Excel - because it's the program the people who sign the cheques live in all day every day. So they buy themselves and everyone MSO, not anything else.

Completely agreed. There isn't a credible competitor to Excel, because Excel isn't in the spreadsheets business--spreadsheets are in the Excel business, and nobody else is good at being Excel. (This is distinct from the file format, because we're talking about bug-for-bug compatibility at runtime too.) Even Mac Office isn't sufficiently good at being Excel to be Excel.

Until that changes--I'll check back in a decade or two--LibreOffice and friends, no matter how legitimately good, will be also-rans in the corporate world.

That's questionable. Is Google Apps a friend? 'Cos a lot of offices are shifting to that, even if its spreadsheet is pitiful. With Excel for the few that seriously need it.

I do concur that Calc is the main issue for LO. They've finally got it to a state where serious improvement work can start ...

No, I use word because I still think the UX is leagues ahead of LibreOffice.

Even Microsoft uses their evil proprietary format as a selling point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAUJa7Ng2xg&hd=1

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