I am honestly surprised about the conclusions you came to. I use LibreOffice as my daily driver, and while it’s far from perfect, Microsoft Office is not even playing in the same league in terms of usability & stability. MS Office is an abomination of bloatware, and the ribbon kills all productivity. Not to mention load times, and sporadic multi-second hangs on a quick CTRL-S. Literally the only thing MS Office has that LibreOffice does not, is MS Access - and the only thing MS Office does better is VBA, and that’s probably more so for trademark / copyright reasons rather than LO not being able to implement the same thing.
I work with “people in business”, and I see on a daily basis that most of them are unable to even memorize the simplest hotkeys / keyboard functions, such as shift + arrow keys to select, ctrl + arrow keys to jump words, wordstar (ctrl x,c,v) and so many others. I don’t think you will find many people who prefer MS Office and can work more efficiently on MS Office than an avid LibreOffice user on LO.
The office suite directs the workflow of the user, and MS Office getting rid of the standard drop-down menus in 2007, guided all MS Office users down a road to insanity.
jesterraiin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not quite. 😉
www.microsoft.com/…/office365-plans-and-pricing
E3 plan is the norm in more complicated workspaces now. Exchange, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Sharepoint are commonly used in such an environment, followed by Forms (HR department loves these and rightly so), Onedrive and PowerBI. Viva (formerly Yammer) makes waves now. Teams entered the market aggressively during Pandemics and it had evolved almost as fast, as Android. It can now connect to great many deal of applications thus expanding the possible workflow and collaboration.
The ribbon being the productivity killer you’re talking about is a non-existent issue, since typical office workers rarely venture further than the main set of icons + they have the most useful icons pinned to the quick access toolbar.
In every environment where people have been using both pieces of software (MS Office and Star/Open/Apache/Libre), the former was preferred for its ease of use.
Again: Linux/FOSS movements tends to produce the mindset that is hard to convince that there’s something wrong about anything it does, while listening to people’s - common people, instead of experienced power users - complains, and following tested and appreciated standards should be preferred.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Having worked and working with many of these:
FOSS office products have been far superior to what’s available on windows for at least a decade. There’s certainly occasionally one or the other app on windows that may shine in one aspect or two, but overall the bloatware user experience on windows is killing productivity of anyone who knows how to operate a keyboard.
jesterraiin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m sorry, dude, but now these are emotions talking through you, not actual valid points., especially since it’s obvious that your knowledge about MS dates back to 2010, I assume? It had evolved. Massively. So much it became hard to compete with, even if you take the money into accoutn.
You didn’t like it, but the fact is that I am now sitting in a corpo office, part of a body spanning across countries and continents, where what you don’t like and think bad, works well enough that nobody complains. It’s very rich corpo. It can afford a legion of experienced Linux technicians and sysadmins, and yet it prefers to pay money, serious money for licences in subscription mode. Think about it for a moment - corpos squeeze money of everything. They are greedy, to the point they wouldn’t spare a cent to save a dying man. And yet they prefer to pay for MS.
Once again: Linux/FOSS needs to start to listen to what users actually want. Scornful “this is better, use this” won’t do.
Until it changes, “20xx - the year of Linux”. 😉
kayos@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is true. I value FOSS immensely. But it’s not for everyone. It’s not for the non tech. It’s not for the people willing to embrace change; and let’s be honest ms has always done file sharing best. They still do. Yes you have to pay the man. Buy good things cost money.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I disagree. The part that you don’t see is that people prefer to use Windows products because that’s what they grew up with and they never used anything else. The majority of windows users only likes windows because posts like yours scare them away from even trying Linux. Windows is a catastrophic user experience and the majority of users put up with that because they think “that’s normal”.