Larye Parkins
As a user who abandoned MS Office sometime in the 1990s for StarOffice, OpenOffice, and LibreOffice, respectively, all I can say is, LibreOffice is more than adequate for every task for which most people use MS Office. The word processor has all the features one expects, since WordStar and WordPerfect, the other similar major systems I've used (Ashton-Tate's Framework had a completely different approach, treating a document as an hierarchical tree, with the ability to collapse branches to an outline format). The spreadsheet works like every spreadsheet since Lotus 1–2–3 and Excel, and LibreOffice Presentation is a better PowerPoint than PowerPoint, in my opinion. I've never used the command-line options to MS Office, but the ones in LibreOffice work great for batch processing documents.
LibreOffice took a long time to get usable compatibility with Microsoft Office OpenXML, but most of the improvement was on the Microsoft side, when they had to make some adjustments to secure an ISO standard. Still, LibreOffice is not MS Office, so those with a need for 100% compatibility for document exchange should stick with MS Office, or convince others to switch to LibreOffice, which is completely open and follows the Open Document Format.
Peter Popov
To me, personally, Libre lacks a lot of the functionality I get from O365. Yes, I know it's free, but O365 Family is literally $2/month per user, and that includes 1TB of cloud storage. For the price of a cup of coffee and a doughnut, we might as well ignore that argument.
That aside, here are some of the areas I find LibreOffice (and iWork for that matter) lacking:
Embedding live charts/tables with auto-updating is much more consistent in O365
Themes and styles. The default ones suck, but the ability to create and apply custom ones is handled much better in O365
Online tools and content - templates, design suggestions, stock images, etc. Yes, Google search exists, and I'm sure you can get the same job done manually, eventually, but not with just a couple of clicks.
Tablet support - from a touch-friendly UI to inking, O365 is years ahead
OneNote - no comparison whatsoever, it's best-in-class
Outlook - again, no contest when paired with Exchange. That's unless you're on a Mac, then it sucks
Online collaboration - again, O365 is best in class. Even Google Docs can't compete (but then again, it's the poor man's Office.) Ironically, Delve does a better job at searching than Google - if the goal of search is to find what you need, not everything there ever was
Data sources, pivot tables, and plugins - nothing beats good old Excel when it comes to data manipulation, unless you learn to code. And if that's not stopping you - well, PowerQuery and PowerPivot are your friends. They're no Python or R, but neither are the latter anywhere user-friendly when it comes to visualization
To summarize, if you use the full capabilities of Office, there's nothing out there that beats it. There is some competition for the basic use cases, but once you graduate from those, you'll need Office, and at that point you'll regret not being familiar to it.
I get this with my brother all the time, as he's being forced into Gdocs at work. Things that are trivial (for me) in Excel are a nightmare to get in Sheets, but he still finds Excel difficult after 8 years with Sheets. Me, if you put me in front of Libre, or Gdocs, or (yuck) iWorks, I run into one limitation or another within 5 minutes of trying to get my work done. But I will admit, I'm not an average user.
That aside, here are some of the areas I find LibreOffice (and iWork for that matter) lacking:
Embedding live charts/tables with auto-updating is much more consistent in O365
Themes and styles. The default ones suck, but the ability to create and apply custom ones is handled much better in O365
Online tools and content - templates, design suggestions, stock images, etc. Yes, Google search exists, and I'm sure you can get the same job done manually, eventually, but not with just a couple of clicks.
Tablet support - from a touch-friendly UI to inking, O365 is years ahead
OneNote - no comparison whatsoever, it's best-in-class
Outlook - again, no contest when paired with Exchange. That's unless you're on a Mac, then it sucks
Online collaboration - again, O365 is best in class. Even Google Docs can't compete (but then again, it's the poor man's Office.) Ironically, Delve does a better job at searching than Google - if the goal of search is to find what you need, not everything there ever was
Data sources, pivot tables, and plugins - nothing beats good old Excel when it comes to data manipulation, unless you learn to code. And if that's not stopping you - well, PowerQuery and PowerPivot are your friends. They're no Python or R, but neither are the latter anywhere user-friendly when it comes to visualization
To summarize, if you use the full capabilities of Office, there's nothing out there that beats it. There is some competition for the basic use cases, but once you graduate from those, you'll need Office, and at that point you'll regret not being familiar to it.
I get this with my brother all the time, as he's being forced into Gdocs at work. Things that are trivial (for me) in Excel are a nightmare to get in Sheets, but he still finds Excel difficult after 8 years with Sheets. Me, if you put me in front of Libre, or Gdocs, or (yuck) iWorks, I run into one limitation or another within 5 minutes of trying to get my work done. But I will admit, I'm not an average user.
There's a lot to be said about the difference between being familiar with a product or an expert in it. I worked with an Excel expert once and looked into porting his application to a web app, which would have been nearly impossible, the difference between declarative and procedural design, plus my inadequate knowledge of the finer points of the Excel command set and workflow. Though, I did write web code for him that parsed formatted report text files (that weren't CSV) into Excel sheets and combined multiple reports with additional analysis.
In our shop, my wife uses a Chromebook and Google Docs in her studio and Ubuntu and LibreOffice in the office; I have difficulty navigating GDocs, from simple unfamiliarity, while she just uses the features on both that she needs for simple transactions, with a "cheat sheet." As I noted in the original post, I find the chain of office productivity suites that were developed on and for Unix/Linux since the late 1990s adequate for my purposes, as a bridge to the more basic Microsoft Office files and as a supplement to the traditional Unix document production and tabular data processing tools, which can be seamlessly integrated with your own code.
The argument between Microsoft Office and LibreOffice only makes sense if you run them on Windows or Mac. For those of us who work exclusively in Unix and Linux, using the Microsoft tools, by necessity in the Cloud or on a separate Windows physical or virtual machine, makes the workflow disjointed and not amenable to automation with code. As for those "special" unique features: as Larry Wall, author of the Perl language says, "There is always more than one way to do it." The other point is I simply don't like Microsoft products—they don't work the way I think, and interoperability with Unix requires willingness of the Windows admins to implement the capability as an add-on, which few are willing to do. I hated Outlook when forced to use it at client sites, and PST files are a nightmare.
In our shop, my wife uses a Chromebook and Google Docs in her studio and Ubuntu and LibreOffice in the office; I have difficulty navigating GDocs, from simple unfamiliarity, while she just uses the features on both that she needs for simple transactions, with a "cheat sheet." As I noted in the original post, I find the chain of office productivity suites that were developed on and for Unix/Linux since the late 1990s adequate for my purposes, as a bridge to the more basic Microsoft Office files and as a supplement to the traditional Unix document production and tabular data processing tools, which can be seamlessly integrated with your own code.
The argument between Microsoft Office and LibreOffice only makes sense if you run them on Windows or Mac. For those of us who work exclusively in Unix and Linux, using the Microsoft tools, by necessity in the Cloud or on a separate Windows physical or virtual machine, makes the workflow disjointed and not amenable to automation with code. As for those "special" unique features: as Larry Wall, author of the Perl language says, "There is always more than one way to do it." The other point is I simply don't like Microsoft products—they don't work the way I think, and interoperability with Unix requires willingness of the Windows admins to implement the capability as an add-on, which few are willing to do. I hated Outlook when forced to use it at client sites, and PST files are a nightmare.
Peter Popov
Oh, I absolutely agree on the Linux bit. In fact, even on Mac, Office is severely lacking compared to the Windows version. And of course the online versions are downright inadequate for my usage. The things they can do can easily be done in Gdocs, Libre, or even iWorks, and from then on it's just a matter of taste.
I don't typically consider Linux when talking about office work. It's just not its forte. Sure, developers use it, as well as some purists like (I assume) yourself (and myself, two decades ago,) but neither are the type of user associated with a heavy reliance on productivity tools. I bet they would script a data manipulation doodad in a language of your choice faster than I would be able to click my way through it in Excel. Sure, they might have to reply to the occasional email and even (gasp!) deliver a presentation once in a blue moon, but those activities are far from being their bread and butter.
It's the same argument as in GIMP vs. PhotoShop. It's not even what the software can do, it's what a user can do with it when time is money. The last time I had to do a presentation in Slides, it was such a painful experience, I actually drove home, prepared it in PowerPoint, imported it into Slides, fixed about a million import errors, and was done with it in less time than the first three slides had taken me in Slides. It was just a miserable experience.
As far as being an expert, I'm far from it, and I do look up complex formulas all the time. I'm more of a power user - the kind that will run 15000 Monte-Carlo runs of a 1500-step simulation in unscripted Excel. An expert would use VBA or something more sensible like Python. If I were a data scientist, I'd probably do the same, but for my use, I just occasionally need to process data and create executive-level reports and presentations, and the OSS tools are simply not cut out for that type of work, not in a time crunch anyway.
Outlook is only good with Exchange and is a real nightmare with any other mail server from IMAP to Gmail. Thunderbird has it beat in those, hands down. It's when you start using it in a corporate environment that it starts to shine. Shared calendars, delegation, polls, rooms and resources, conferencing integration… It's just in a league of its own. If all you do is email from time to time, it's not your thing. Also, you're being quite nice to PST files, they are hellspawn!
I don't typically consider Linux when talking about office work. It's just not its forte. Sure, developers use it, as well as some purists like (I assume) yourself (and myself, two decades ago,) but neither are the type of user associated with a heavy reliance on productivity tools. I bet they would script a data manipulation doodad in a language of your choice faster than I would be able to click my way through it in Excel. Sure, they might have to reply to the occasional email and even (gasp!) deliver a presentation once in a blue moon, but those activities are far from being their bread and butter.
It's the same argument as in GIMP vs. PhotoShop. It's not even what the software can do, it's what a user can do with it when time is money. The last time I had to do a presentation in Slides, it was such a painful experience, I actually drove home, prepared it in PowerPoint, imported it into Slides, fixed about a million import errors, and was done with it in less time than the first three slides had taken me in Slides. It was just a miserable experience.
As far as being an expert, I'm far from it, and I do look up complex formulas all the time. I'm more of a power user - the kind that will run 15000 Monte-Carlo runs of a 1500-step simulation in unscripted Excel. An expert would use VBA or something more sensible like Python. If I were a data scientist, I'd probably do the same, but for my use, I just occasionally need to process data and create executive-level reports and presentations, and the OSS tools are simply not cut out for that type of work, not in a time crunch anyway.
Outlook is only good with Exchange and is a real nightmare with any other mail server from IMAP to Gmail. Thunderbird has it beat in those, hands down. It's when you start using it in a corporate environment that it starts to shine. Shared calendars, delegation, polls, rooms and resources, conferencing integration… It's just in a league of its own. If all you do is email from time to time, it's not your thing. Also, you're being quite nice to PST files, they are hellspawn!
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