4 ms·

Better at what? Most users just write simple letters in Word and make simple lists in Excel. I am known as an Excel power user, and Excel is better at some thi

Better at what? Most users just write simple letters in Word and make simple lists in Excel. I am known as an Excel power user, and Excel is better at some things than calc, but not very much. Calc is better at exporting unicode CSV, which is big news for a developer. 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users

qeternity 10y ago
> 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users It's really not. Office is the single MS product that is actually better than the competition (Libre, Apple, etc) and it's also THE core business software. Most businesses might have huge ERP systems, but the war is won in the Excel trenches. If you're an organization of 1,000+ users, $100kpa is nothing.
- mistermann 10y ago
  No one pays $99/user/year anyways.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
> Better at what? Mostly, better at interoperating with Microsoft Office. LibreOffice works really well, but if you need perfect metric-compatibility, or macros, then it doesn't quite suffice. Likewise for Google Docs (and additionally, Google Slides lacks numerous features desirable for building good presentations).
taspeotis 10y ago
> 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. And at $150/yr it includes Exchange/SharePoint/Skype/Teams. The latter three aren't particularly exciting but not having to worry about email/calendaring is a big win.
- tracker1 10y ago
  Despite the quirkiness of eventually consistent email patterns, the calendar integration with exchange/outlook even on web is pretty damned nice. I'm getting used to the office gmail/docs/calendar, but the integration still isn't nearly as nice as outlook. The mail in gmail is much better though (as long as you stick to the web interface, go imap and prepare to be f'd up).
sbuttgereit 10y ago
I only write simple letters and, while I do actual accounting work in Excel which is just a little more than simple lists, I'm not using Excel as a database either... as I use databases for that (i.e. don't ask me how to do a VLOOKUP). Even in these simple tasks, MS Office is simply superior in terms of function and productivity if you are performing those simple tasks frequently enough. Could I get by with LibreOffice or OpenOffice, yeah, and did so for a couple years straight and off/on before and after that time. I use to be annoyed to no end by the bloat and heaviness of MS Office... and then after prolonged use of LibreOffice/OpenOffice (yes, both), I came to greatly appreciate MS Office. The only part of office which I use regularly which I'm not very happy with is Outlook (OK, really only use Word, Excel, and Outlook... can't comment on the other parts of the suite as it's been more than a decade since I regularly used things like Access). I'm also disappointed by the Office 365 cloud integration/features: feels very much like a philosophical approach to technology that has lots of Microsoft servers in your enterprise's data center and the outside world is kept at bay rather than collaborated with... Google does that much better... LibreOffice not at all. The number of quirks that caused something to not be quite right or the performance differences I experienced (noticeable in spreadsheets) makes free LibreOffice look very expensive and $99/yr MS Office look cheap. Much more productive in MS Office overall. Having managed IT operations in the corporate world, same experience there: the only place I would (and did) deploy OpenOffice (LibreOffice didn't exist yet) was to the field and the field being to retail chain store personnel. In the chain in question they only wrote simple letters and used spreadsheets for simple lists, generally had very little/no computer experience, and they didn't do office suite work with any regular frequency at all. In that case, the productivity hit was drowned out by the noise of overall lack of computer literacy and they didn't do those tasks with any real frequency, so the Office licenses really didn't make for good investment... but I can tell you that I deployed MS Office to all of the HQ staff and middle managers and glad to have done so. In the past few years, I would probably rank the desktop office suites (meaning available for use on the desktop) as MS Office, G Suite, LIbreOffice. I have Office 365, but tend not to use the online versions of the apps so won't comment on them.
- jimnotgym 10y ago
  I actually agree that my accounts team would be more productive with Excel. But for the other 99% of users?
jasonlotito 10y ago
> Better at what? Style support for documents. LibreOffice doesn't have complete style support. This is the one thing right now keeping me from even considering it.
- jimnotgym 10y ago
  I'm using styles in Writer in the same way as I do in Word.
- kiwijamo 10y ago
  What is it missing? Styles is something I think OO/LO do reasonably well already, and have done so since the StarOffice days. I am specifically talking about paragraph styles so I wonder if there is some other type of styles OO/LO is indeed missing.
milesrout 10y ago
$99 per year is pretty tiny per user. Remember that each of these users is being paid tens of thousands of dollars per year, which means that they will be generating (roughly, on average) 2-3x that in value for a company. $99 to make someone you're paying $30k more efficient is pretty good value.
- jimnotgym 10y ago
  It depends. I would give technically skilled users whatever they are productive in. I see plenty of users who would never get past sorting and filtering. Libre office calc is at least as four as excel for that

qeternity 10y ago

> 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users It's really not. Office is the single MS product that is actually better than the competition (Libre, Apple, etc) and it's also THE core business software. Most businesses might have huge ERP systems, but the war is won in the Excel trenches. If you're an organization of 1,000+ users, $100kpa is nothing.

mistermann 10y ago
No one pays $99/user/year anyways.

JoshTriplett 10y ago

> Better at what? Mostly, better at interoperating with Microsoft Office. LibreOffice works really well, but if you need perfect metric-compatibility, or macros, then it doesn't quite suffice. Likewise for Google Docs (and additionally, Google Slides lacks numerous features desirable for building good presentations).

taspeotis 10y ago

> 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. And at $150/yr it includes Exchange/SharePoint/Skype/Teams. The latter three aren't particularly exciting but not having to worry about email/calendaring is a big win.

tracker1 10y ago
Despite the quirkiness of eventually consistent email patterns, the calendar integration with exchange/outlook even on web is pretty damned nice. I'm getting used to the office gmail/docs/calendar, but the integration still isn't nearly as nice as outlook. The mail in gmail is much better though (as long as you stick to the web interface, go imap and prepare to be f'd up).

sbuttgereit 10y ago

I only write simple letters and, while I do actual accounting work in Excel which is just a little more than simple lists, I'm not using Excel as a database either... as I use databases for that (i.e. don't ask me how to do a VLOOKUP). Even in these simple tasks, MS Office is simply superior in terms of function and productivity if you are performing those simple tasks frequently enough. Could I get by with LibreOffice or OpenOffice, yeah, and did so for a couple years straight and off/on before and after that time. I use to be annoyed to no end by the bloat and heaviness of MS Office... and then after prolonged use of LibreOffice/OpenOffice (yes, both), I came to greatly appreciate MS Office. The only part of office which I use regularly which I'm not very happy with is Outlook (OK, really only use Word, Excel, and Outlook... can't comment on the other parts of the suite as it's been more than a decade since I regularly used things like Access). I'm also disappointed by the Office 365 cloud integration/features: feels very much like a philosophical approach to technology that has lots of Microsoft servers in your enterprise's data center and the outside world is kept at bay rather than collaborated with... Google does that much better... LibreOffice not at all. The number of quirks that caused something to not be quite right or the performance differences I experienced (noticeable in spreadsheets) makes free LibreOffice look very expensive and $99/yr MS Office look cheap. Much more productive in MS Office overall. Having managed IT operations in the corporate world, same experience there: the only place I would (and did) deploy OpenOffice (LibreOffice didn't exist yet) was to the field and the field being to retail chain store personnel. In the chain in question they only wrote simple letters and used spreadsheets for simple lists, generally had very little/no computer experience, and they didn't do office suite work with any regular frequency at all. In that case, the productivity hit was drowned out by the noise of overall lack of computer literacy and they didn't do those tasks with any real frequency, so the Office licenses really didn't make for good investment... but I can tell you that I deployed MS Office to all of the HQ staff and middle managers and glad to have done so. In the past few years, I would probably rank the desktop office suites (meaning available for use on the desktop) as MS Office, G Suite, LIbreOffice. I have Office 365, but tend not to use the online versions of the apps so won't comment on them.

jimnotgym 10y ago
I actually agree that my accounts team would be more productive with Excel. But for the other 99% of users?

jasonlotito 10y ago

> Better at what? Style support for documents. LibreOffice doesn't have complete style support. This is the one thing right now keeping me from even considering it.

jimnotgym 10y ago
I'm using styles in Writer in the same way as I do in Word.
kiwijamo 10y ago
What is it missing? Styles is something I think OO/LO do reasonably well already, and have done so since the StarOffice days. I am specifically talking about paragraph styles so I wonder if there is some other type of styles OO/LO is indeed missing.

milesrout 10y ago

$99 per year is pretty tiny per user. Remember that each of these users is being paid tens of thousands of dollars per year, which means that they will be generating (roughly, on average) 2-3x that in value for a company. $99 to make someone you're paying $30k more efficient is pretty good value.

jimnotgym 10y ago
It depends. I would give technically skilled users whatever they are productive in. I see plenty of users who would never get past sorting and filtering. Libre office calc is at least as four as excel for that