Run a Windows VM on Linux (Windows 7 runs great), problem solved

Install, back up the VM image, a lot less problems than having it as your main OS

Or, if you want a great desktop experience that is really stable and has stood the test of time - run Windows as the host and Linux as guest.

that, and the Adobe Creative Suite.

MS Office is a good point. But:

MS Office is available even for Android these days.

Otherwise Wine should work, and ain't there some cloud MS Office these days?

Except it doesn't. Office 2007 is over eight years old and runs with significant bugs.

The cloud versions are incomplete and don't work with plugins like Endnote. The cloud version of PowerPoint struggle with movies and large resources.

The vast majority of people using MS Office would do fine with Libre Office or gnumeric and Abiword.

Not if they need to swap documents with other Office users.

Not true.

There are use cases where OpenOffice is a vastly better tool for the task at hand. For instance, reading a CSV file that happens to use extended UTF-8 characters with some fields that have important preceding zeroes. In these situations it is possible to import the data into OpenOffice without the prospect of it being mangled by 'clippy'. Sure you can create a new spreadsheet and import a CSV file from disk into it with the data read as 'just text' in UTF-8 but the people I send CSV files to do not do that with their Microsoft ways. Consequently you get so far in and realise you actually need to re-read the source data because it has been Microsofted with bizarre things like capitalisation.

Excel obfuscates data and obfuscates filenames. It also promotes arcane ways of working, e.g. vlookup things held together with blu-tak and string when a simple table join on the original data does what is required correctly with no hand-crafted nonsense.

Too often I see things being solved in Excel where a small bit of code does a better job of creating the report or things like Fusion Tables do a better job of fancy presentation.

I no longer lock in to Excel world, I don't see it as a professional tool.

That there are some things Excel does badly does not magically mean other tools provide decent interchange with Excel users.

This is, unfortunately, very true.

Try collecting some accounting records in LibreOffice Calc and then finding your accountant uses Excel. Time lost fixing the mess is probably worth more than the cost of MS Office for a single incident. If you need this kind of interoperability more than very occasionally, that alone could be a deal-breaker.

Also, LibreOffice 5 on Windows 7 appears to be a disaster. We installed it for the first time a few weeks ago, on one new PC at work just to try it out, and it's exhibited numerous very obvious graphical glitches, crashes and performance problems so far even just doing basic spreadsheet work. It also seems to have arbitrarily changed a bunch of things from earlier versions, such as the default colours available for colouring or highlighting cells in Calc. Maybe the stability is better on Linux, but even then the changes from LO4 are presumably still the same and just as frustrating.

Can you be more specific?

In regards to changing defaults, that's often the case. Microsoft do the same thing, possibly worse.

Sure. The first example we noticed was that we loaded one of our most important spreadsheets into Calc, and found that most of the colours we use to code different cells don't seem to match the default palette any more. Where we used to just click a couple of times on the toolbar, now it seems we have to manually configure the exact colour or use format painting. Someone in our organisation has to update this particular spreadsheet very often, and that kind of change is going to be horribly frustrating for them (or would be, I suppose, since presumably we're not going to actually migrate any existing systems to LO5 in its current state).

Is this just in the one spreadsheet, or is it across the whole app?

Can you change the default colour palette?

Choose Tools - Options - Charts - Default Colors

https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Default_colors

All I can really say is that it was immediately apparent that a lot of the colours we used to use, which came from the default palette in older LO versions, aren't in the default palette any more, and if you go to the corresponding places in the format dialogs those colours do show up as "User" in LO5.

We'd have to look into the sorts of changes you mentioned if we were going to stick with 5, so thanks for the suggestions. However, given the graphical glitches and instability, which unfortunately make it borderline unusable on our test system, I don't think we'll be considering a larger scale migration any further until (I assume) some future updates that fix those things have arrived.

The glitches and instability appear to be across the whole suite, BTW. Basic stuff like drawing menus, toolbars and tabs is broken in very obvious ways, all the time. I'm guessing there's some fundamental problem with the routines LibreOffice uses to draw those graphical assets instead of the standard Windows functionality. Either that or there's some horrible conflict with the graphics drivers on the new machine, which is always a possibility but would be surprising at this point given how many other programs do seem to work OK.

That could actually be the issue.

Try turning off OpenGL:

You can do this by going to to Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ View.

P.S. I'm biased about LibreOffice as I have commit access and I'm working on the code at the moment. I do acknowledge its frustrating when things don't work, and I don't want to deny there are issues preventing you from adopting.

If it's not too much bother, can you file a bug?

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi

Sorry, turning the "Use OpenGL for all rendering" setting off made no difference.

I honestly wouldn't know where to start with filing useful bug reports. I'm a software developer myself, so I appreciate the need for useful information and ideally reproducible test cases, but at the moment we're seeing graphical glitches in everything from menu displays to dialogs to the tabs for different sheets, far too many different areas to isolate and investigate each one. It seems more likely that some combination of hardware/software isn't playing nicely on the test system, since presumably if everyone were seeing what we are the LO team would be seeing plenty of feedback already. If you'd like to investigate or try to triage it somehow, I can ask someone to get in touch by mail, and maybe that would lead to something specific enough to be worth putting in a bug report for more detailed investigation?

Sure, I'll do my best :-) even if I can't sort it out I can help point to the right places of maybe ask the right folks for suggestions on what's going on.

chris.sherlock79 at gmail.com is my email address, or hop onto #libreoffice-dev on Freenode and ask to speak to chris_wot (that's the IRC channel I hang out on the most frequently).

Not if you have to teach every new intern how to use LibreOffice when they know to do stats and calculations in Excel.