> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.
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.
This is true. Among other things, I do a lot of label printing and the tools in MS Word are miles more mature. You get these same types of responses when people list off all the alternatives to Photoshop. Just not the same.
Yes, my pet peeve is printing as pdf. You can control line thickness, size, placement of row borders to pixel perfect in Excel & it will get printed to pdf or paper exactly as it is. But not from Google Sheets or Excel Web, even same excel sheel imported in these & then printed will have slight difference in what you see on screen and what gets printed. I understand its because of browsers limitations to place stuff on pixel scale.
Mostly because of network effects and wanting software that will be supported for another three decades potentially and can open my document long-term. Google cancels products all the time and has practically no vision.
I am exclusively Google office user, but... Out of the top of my head:
* 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.
MS Word templates are one of the most awful things I've ever messed with. I had a fun time using them with pandoc to produce autogenerated word documents. ARGH! The nightmares!
We should just all get off our butts and learn LaTeX! Not that I have. ahhahahaha.
Is it just about the default font? Most office workers have 0 sense of aesthetics and sometimes official guidelines actively make things ugly (like forcing fonts like Times New Roman on everyone). Or the cutesy Calibri on official notices.
As a commercial lawyer, I often have to exchange drafts with another lawyer somewhere else. Almost everyone will accept Word, far fewer are happy with a Google doc. Obviously I can generate a Word document from Google, but that isn't quite the same.
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").
> What features in Office are essential for those users that you don't get from Google?
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.
...since then they will send you back a scan of a printed-out copy of said PDF in which they scribbled their comments and modifications with pen and marker?
Oh boy. Outlook users are in for a surprise with "New Outlook" is forced on them in the near future. Microsoft has been pushing and warning about this change for some time ....
I use outlook for work mails and tried new outlook for a short while. It’s like an alpha version, it’s not even close to feature parity, a pure showcase for a new design. If it ever becomes the only version, I’m switching to thunderbird.
I used the default Mail Microsoft Store app for the past 2 years at work. The past 6 months, it's been telling me to move to Outlook desktop app. A couple weeks ago, it wouldn't allow me to use the Microsoft Store app anymore, so I installed the desktop version, tried to login, and got an error message that my account would only work on the webapp.
Set up Thunderbird on my work desktop that day, and haven't looked back. Wish I would have way sooner, to be honest.
Thanks, but I just switched back. Just far too bad performance (for my use case of ten-thousands of mails in subfolders), and as a bonus a spam filter that ignores actual spam, but marks real mails as spam consistently.
The interface is far nicer than outlook, but the performance is just too annoying for me.
Oh, very cool. Thanks for sharing -- glad to know I have this option if I want to go back. Now that I have Thunderbird set up, I'll probably never use the UWP Mail and Calendar app or this Wino Mail app.
If some kind soul wants to point to an email client that has a capability like Outlook rules I'm dying to know about it. I have a mate whose business is entirely based on a big set of Outlook rules to do processing and there doesn't seem to be any good alternative.
Outlook online doesn't seem to have any rule capability and can't talk to 3rd party email servers.
Google Docs can't automatically number headings, figures, and tables. It also can't automatically update cross-references ("see Figure 3 in Section 3.4").
Some colleagues have issues because it can't handle very large documents too (above a few hundred pages).
I think it's less about feature parity and more that the users have spent tens of thousands of hours in MS office and don't want to relearn all the shortcuts and menus and subtle behaviors -- muscle memory stuff.
All the plugins for excel, word and powerpoint integration. And we have to be able to send attachments with actual files, not links. Law firms and banks are pretty set in their ways here. It has to be office and windows.
Google sheets doesn’t remotely compare to excel for serious financial modeling.
I hate Microsoft products in general but Excel is just good. It is not one feature but the whole package as a system.
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.
In that case, they can use FreeOffice, whose office suite is indistinguishable from MS Office and works on Mac and Linux! (Granted, I say that as someone who very much does not live in those tools except as a rare hardship imposed by normies society.)
This. Believe me, Office and Office clones are very distinguishable. It's like saying a Macdonalds burger is indistinguishable from a Gordon Ramsey burger. They may both be food, but they are very much not the same thing.
There's a reason people use Office. Pretending that reason does not exist does not make the argument for switching better.
Imho it doesn’t come down to one or two killer features, it comes down to momentum.
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.
Sort of unrelated, but, VB scripting not working on web versions felt to me like it really killed a giant moat of legacy code to draw from.
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.
You're happy with what you are using, so that's great, and I'm not knocking that.
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.
There are significant feature differences that enterprise users consider dealbreakers just between MS Office for Windows and MS Office for Mac, let alone Office clones.
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.