For knowledge workers who live in these tools, the difference is stark. Even for companies who've standardized on Google Workspace or Apple iWork, advanced users will need Microsoft Office.
If you're talking about Excel I can imagine there are such features but not so much in other apps.
Backward compatibility with existing documents that are already in Word. Also, for those knowledge workers who aren’t in tech, the high likelihood that the recipient can open the document with correct formatting.
The order varies depending on what you do, each can become absolutely critical.
Set up Thunderbird on my work desktop that day, and haven't looked back. Wish I would have way sooner, to be honest.
The interface is far nicer than outlook, but the performance is just too annoying for me.
Outlook online doesn't seem to have any rule capability and can't talk to 3rd party email servers.
* Google docs are uglier than Microsoft word documents. This matters when I prepare an offer that I want to send to a client, and it should look good.
* Google slides are hideous, and the only reason I get away with using them is because programmers (including me) have no taste[1]
* Related to the looks, I sometimes buy paid document templates that I can use to format my offers. They often have an option to download a docx file, but it's complex through that you can't important it to Google docs without breaking it completely.
* Word/Libreoffice works offline (maybe docs with serviceworkers too? It never worked for me when I needed it).
* You can use word to generate documents using a template, don't think it's possible with Google docs
* Macros are not supported in Google docs
And I'm a complete noob when it comes to document editing software and actively avoid it. I can only imagine how much powerusers miss.
[1] https://medium.com/@laurajavier/google-slides-is-actually-hi...
We should just all get off our butts and learn LaTeX! Not that I have. ahhahahaha.
A specific problem in this scenario is tracked changes. Google has a history/version control but it does not map particularly well onto Word's tracked changes, which the other party will understand and is likely to want to use. Passing things into and out of Google will often result in loss of useful information like that.
Personally: Word is the absolute best piece of software for dealing with numbered lists that is easily available. In many ways it is terrible of course, but it is less terrible than anything else. Getting numbering right is important.
Google has gotten better. It used to be very bad at larger and more complicated documents. But it still doesn't have all I need to write a really good contract (at least by my standards of "really good").
Some colleagues have issues because it can't handle very large documents too (above a few hundred pages).
It is basically the opposite of most MS products. There is not one feature that stands out as to why I hate Word, it is the summation of all the little things I hate about it that is the issue.
There's a reason people use Office. Pretending that reason does not exist does not make the argument for switching better.
Stuff like font rendering, grammar- and spellchecking, the exact set of Excel formulas, graphs, templates, and VB scripting matter. The office suite’s localization changes keyboard shortcuts, Excel formulae names, and swaps between decimal points and commas. It is absolutely horrendous, but people rely on it for their daily work.
In essence, if we accept that Excel is both an IDE and a dialect of a programming language, we can compare it to asking what makes C# in Visual Studio worse when people are used to Java in IntelliJ. The answer might be “nothing, but I’m used to my setup and it’s ridiculous that I’m even having this discussion about my main work tool” for programmers, Office users, and video editors alike.
If you're forced to script in something else then why not just go to something else. Additionally, having tons of forms written by long gone employees just not port over is a tough sell at smaller offices.
But the difference is not 'killer features". The difference is in the million small details and polish. The integrations, formats, UI, workflow, things it just "gets right" that I don't even know its doing.
I try Libre Office every once in a while. But each time I try it just feels old and clunky. It's all in the tiny details that add up to the overall experience.
Clearly you're not missing anything since you're happy with what you have. But going from Office to LibreOffice is painful. Not bullet-wound painful, more like thousand-paper-cuts painful.
I assume it's just that we prefer the devil we know than the one we don't.
All of us here probably will know when to jump out of spreadsheets and have some knowledge on how to approach things then, so a simple spreadsheet on Google Docs is fine for us.
The problem outside, is that they are somewhat locked on the spreadsheet and have to stick with it, so more advanced features are welcome even though it comes with the price of the so called evil company according to the other group.
And is Office really better than Google's Spreadsheets? Idk, I don't care about small differences, but they surely annoy hardcore users, plus no one really got fired for buying IBM
Welcome to astro-turfing and shilling. A pretty commonplace occurrence since about 2014 or so.
You can only really rely on people you know and their experiences. always discount "what everyone says".
These must be paid shills. While it's actually quite understandable why real people and businesses would want to use and recommend MS Office, no one in their right mind actually thinks Teams is the best video chat tool in the world. Any serious business uses Zoom, Slack, etc.
Biggest one for me was that I could
A) start multiple chats with same audience and rename them - so I can have chat with thom dick and Harry on system architecture over a few days and separate conversation with them on performance testing issues. This is trivial in teams. I have to create awkward channels in slack to approximate the functionality.
B) seamlessly start a conversation with two people, then as you troubleshoot and expand, add more people, then jump in a call, then finish a call and keep chatting. Until recently slack would force you to start a new blank conversation when you added people - absolutely useless. Now they've hacked a solution that works up to arbitrary number of ten people and is so clearly a script in the background which still creates a new chat with added person but helpfully copies all conversation over. Then you need to add 11th person and too bad you've hit the magic number.
In operations setting and evolving incidents, teams was just better. And don't get me started on slack "huddles"!
My inlression has always been the opposite - startups used slack because it was cool. Serious businesses used teams because it worked and integrated well.
Now. I've realized lately that when people talk about slack vs teams, they're usually not actuslly talking about slack vs teams. They're actually talking about their companies security and usage policies, as incidentally instantiated through the collaboration tool of choice. I've become aware that my experience with teams is bit everybody's, due to various policies and limitations imposed, and similarly for slack.
But mostly... Not nearly as many people that disagree with average internet forum dweller are paid shills as may be believed :=)
As with the IBM model, I imagine it's simpler for companies to have a single source and a single support channel. It is possible to use Exchange sign on for non-MS systems and apps however.
Isn't that the problem with Teams? Instead focusing on highly usable text chat, the focus is growing the pile of integrations with other mediocre Microsoft products.
(Not that Slack is great; it's been bloated and slow for a long time and has likely been on steep downward trajectory since the buyout by Salesforce.)
Excel on the other hand is still miles better than Sheets for non-trivial use cases and I've seen business users revolt multiple times if you try to force them to use GSuite. To a lesser extent that's also true with Word and to an even lesser extent Outlook.
I haven't yet seen someone threaten to quit if they don't get a Teams license (but I have seen that for Zoom).
The interesting one is PowerPoint which I've noticed a lot of power users are migrating to Figma for. Also 10 years ago people would send nasty grams if they couldn't get Visio licenses but Lucidchart seems to have eaten that marketshare.
Uhhh what? I suppose I am a novice video chat user who just uses it to talk to people and share a screen, but I am clearly missing some killer feature. From my perspective, all of the platforms suck for one reason or another. Bad CPU usage, latency, but hey, they have background swapping and fun emojis!
I'm not an Excel jockey but friends who are testify to its power and flexibility.
I use Word a lot and the ease of use still beats gdoc's. For example, the macros and the "customize keyboard" options are great. cmd-l for "next edit," cmd-j for "accept and move on," cmd-; for "reject change." The speed is paramount.
People were pissed 18 years ago when the Office ribbon was implemented because it broke their workflow. MS might have gussied it up now, but they haven’t dared to reinvent it since.
Wow, now I feel old more than any "movie X was released Y years ago" factoid could make me feel.
I do realize that there are probably no ideal UIs for accessing such a breadth of options, and it was a valid attempt, but not really successful, imo. With some adjustment and practice by users, I believe something like Alfred within the app, with smart search and suggestions, would be a quicker and more efficient approach for tool activation. Since there has to be also a good way to discover features without explicitly searching for them, maybe something like the Start menu is the right approach - quick search, but also categories and lists of tools.
The ribbon is also entirely keyboard-drivable and fast that way. I’ve seen the data on why it was introduced; it was a scaling issue- the old toolbars simply could no longer fit all the functionality in apps like Excel, so they made them context-aware.
Sounds like Google Docs.
Gdoc is shitty however and i don't see how/why i want to use it over any competitors. I think i prefer Nextcloud's editor, even without the privacy/data mining consideration, and i really think that could be improved.
Gdoc is better than Jira and Confluence editor though, and better than the standard redmine editor froma few years ago (the non-markdown one), so that's nice.
edit: I just downloaded the latest version and the text rendering looks good! Now time to see how it handles dark mode (white or green text, black background).
Thunderbird is (unfortunately) a joke, and web clients aren't as nice when managing complex folder arrangements and lots of mail.
And Teams is a clunky Electron app.
[1] I'm pretty sure outlook users miss good GPG support, at least.
Calendaring in TB always felt like a bit of an afterthought compared to email, and for personal use, that makes sense. For business, strong calendaring with meetings/shared calendars/availability and the tight link to meetings (Teams)is not done as well anywhere else.
My mom had to buy a copy of MS Office. Her university provided free ms office online, but there were certain features missing from it she needed for her papers. I am remembering wrong, but it was annotations? Citations? I do not remember.
Libreoffice kinda could do it, but I could not find how online, while MS had it properly documented on their website and so many youtubers making videos on MS Office had it listed on their website.
Edit: also found out MS Office can screen record and record her webcam. Very useful for her giving a remote presentation during covid.
But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists?
Is it as obnoxious as having to use Teams for chat?
That's certainly a case of having a hammer and thinking all problems are nails xD
OBS is very powerful, but the complexity of its UI can scare non-technical newbies away. MS Office gives you a lot less power, but is much more welcoming when you aren’t technical and this is the first time in your life you’ve ever done it
OBS was a lot more complicated. Yes, professional streaming you should use it.
She was doing a ph.d in social sciences. She had little desire, or really need, to use it when MS Office did what she wanted out of the box. Screen recorded presentations with powerpoint.
> Is it as obnoxious as having to use Teams for chat?
They did not use teams for chat. They used gsuite for almost everything else.
> That's certainly a case of having a hammer and thinking all problems are nails xD
No, it really is not.
> Annotations, citations, bibliography management I can understand, even if I use LaTeX for that and consider it a far superior tool.
Really? My mother was struggling to remember how to use a Windows desktop. You really want to suggest learning latex when she had term papers to do for a $60k degree? The required document format was ms word.
Let me explain: I cut my teeth on Vim. I've been using Vim since I was 17 (I'm 33 now). Nearly everything I do for fun has been with Vim. Most of what I've done for work has also been with Vim (or NeoVim). I write documents in Vim with Pandoc. I compose emails in Vim (using Mutt). I use Vim whenever I do an interactive rebase in git. I do CAD Modeling with Vim using openSCAD. The keystrokes are just second nature to me, I think in Vim keystrokes now, for better or worse.
The IntelliJ Vim plugin is actually very good, but it's not quite perfect, there's subtle, intangible things that I have to adapt to, but are different enough to annoy me. For 99% of people, I think this is more than "good enough", and I still use it when I write Java, but I still am just unable to "like" it.
I don't use MS Office, but I suspect that if you've been using it for a long time, even tiny differences that you'd experience with Google Docs would become infuriating.
I do feel like Vim allows me to "translate my intent to the screen" really easily, and I avoid context switching as much, but I doubt it makes me appreciably faster at writing code. It's pretty rare that typing speed or "how fast I can edit" is the blocking factor for writing software.
Like, how long after the advent of software will it take before our workflows find their authentic shape? Or was that shape really just a list of flat rectangles all along?
Is it expensive? Yes. But if you're running an entire city as opposed to a small dentist's office, it's likely worth the money.
I see you have never opened a large spreadsheet in competing software or you wouldn't call MS Office bloated. Sheets and Calc are extremely slow, inefficient software. Excel alone, if you have a use for it, makes it well worth the price of admission. It simply has no competition and neither Google nor Libreoffice can serve as drop in replacements for that.
Most of the features in the Office suite get out of the way and are only there if you need it. It's no bloat to the people who need the features. Office is where Microsoft still shows love for desktop software and it shows, they open very quickly and feel responsive in a way most other software they produce don't (opening the widget board on Windows 11 is a more stuttery experience at times than opening something in Word or Excel)
> It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening
You can't save it in the cloud "by accident". When creating a new document and clicking to save you explicitly have to pick "onedrive" or "this computer" as locations.
> It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.
It took you 5 minutes because you had no idea what the user did. It's not the fault of the software if the user clicked to save to onedrive.
You can also still create new blank documents directly in the explorer.exe (right click -> new -> word document) as you always could since Windows 95 in which case you would have set a local location for the document you're working on before writing the first line of text.
I also find it interesting you're suggesting Docs, a piece of software that is cloud driven only, as a replacement for Word because a user mistakenly "saved to the cloud"
And if giving people the option to save to onedrive is a "dark pattern" then what is a piece of software that can /only/ save to google drive, exactly?
Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions is the whole desktop suite + the online apps (which are pretty competitive with Docs if you need to access something on another computer in a pinch) + 1 terabytes of storage + up to 6 users (each with their own 1tb of storage) on the same subscription for 99 bucks a year. Google can't even begin to compete on that level of offering. Some of the apps have no real google alternatives either, OneNote is an incredible tool for personal organization of ideas and clipping online content you want to keep. It's also very snappy and responsive, again, the Office division really cares about quality of desktop software in a way that has become all too rare. The people working on Windows's desktop/UI elements would do all too well to take inspiration from them because 11 is a damn sham.
Mine is a very Excel-centric view. I wouldn't miss anything else in the office suite.
I'll give 'er another shot. I'm aware of my tendency to happily burn big tech for the slightest sleight.
But both of those can cut you off at any point with no recourse. Read the EULA carefully.
The only one that can't is LibreOffice.
I'm somewhat joking (obviously MSFT file formats can do a lot more than md if you need that), but I rarely need more complicated documents.
But lots of people aren’t working at some corporate office. Mom and Pop can get far with the iMovie option like Google Sheets and Docs.
Actually now that I say that… what I want is a LibreOffice equivalent of Google Docs and Sheets and Presentations. Google is the only bad part of my Docs experience.
It's been interesting to watch because he's happy to embrace better tech but hates dark patterns.
But I don't like excel much either. If working with spreadsheets was a bigger part of my day job, I'd switch to excel
Or just pay a few devs or a few hundred to make it better and still pay less in fees every year.
You don't want Google to have data that is used to govern a federal German state.
The "lost" MS Office doc is infuriating, though - have had to help my son with several different variants of that for school over the years, including the reverse, where it's insisted there is no document at the location in the cloud drive it is meant to be, but where it turned out this was because it hadn't been synced from the local drive...
Precisely because some of that "bloat" is useful for others. Off the top of my head, I really dislike that Google Docs doesn't support stuff like creating your own styles to apply in the document. My use case, for example, is having a style for inline code, with a monospaced font and a different colour, which I can do in Word creating a new style and applying it, but can't in GDocs.
> The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.
It should appear as a recent file once you open word, no matter if it was saved to OneDrive or locally. And it certainly isn't so hard to choose where to save it, if OneDrive, a SharePoint site or locally. At least nowadays.
I was helping an elderly relative who works as a translator and hasn’t touched a modern version of word in about 5 years.
They had a new computer and I got an ms office sub for them.
The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.
It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening. It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.