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Comment by glossyscr | Hacker News Reader

For a long time I would have agreed--Office is Windows' killer app since the Windows version is way better than the other OS versions.

But looking deeper it's getting harder and harder to justify Office:

For presentations I prefer Keynote. It's not perfect but still better. Spreadsheet I use Google Sheets, inferior to Excel but good enough and live collaborating is unbeaten and this is my number one requirement.

Word is the only one where is no substitute for. Google Docs doesn't have paragraph numbering and misses a review mode which is super important when negotiating contracts.

So, Word is Office's last lock-in.

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The problem is not the lack of alternatives for personal use (I use LaTeX as a Word alternative), it's collaboration. If you are required to produce Word documents, PowerPoint presentantions, etc., using certain corporate templates, or as part of a standardized workflow, then you really need windows.

Also there are other, more specialized programs that require Windows such as SolidWorks, etc.

I am using SoftMaker Office 2016, (http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office-linux) on my Linux box and it works great for collaborating on MS Office documents - preserves formatting and everything else without a problem.

LibreOffice is pretty good these days. Like Google Docs, it's not a drop-in replacement for Office, but good enough for many uses.

LibreOffice Impress is horrifically bad. The Undo function is unreliable which is an enormous data-destroying pain in the ass when editing a presentation. The tools for editing text and vector graphics are also inconsistent and buggy.

I do all my presentations with Slidy. I can't think of a better "tool". It also make it so easy to put your presentations online:

https://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy2/

No offense but "ew". The demo page is hideous and I don't see how you can easily do graphics with that. Maybe it's fine for making slides for people to look at later, but for actual presentations slides, that looks like a recipe for PowerPoint hell.

I guess if you use impress/PowerPoint to do you graph, which I don't.

LibreOffice is good enough for typing up a few simple paragraphs and occasionally tweaking the font.

Anything even slightly complicated, though, will look like a modern webpage rendered in IE6. This is merely annoying with Word documents, but downright catastrophic with PowerPoint slides. I don't care how many obscure features it can emulate if it can't even render line spacing properly.

Except for the Find feature that never works right. Cmd-F and try to paste into that box, for example. I use LibreOffice daily but that one is annoying. It crashes once a week too. I think LibreOffice is close, but I don't think most people are going to give up Excel for almost as good as Excel.

Sounds like you're referring to this bug, which is finally seeing some attention

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49853

LO should basically never crash, ever - the stability work is stupendous. If it does, there's something deeply wrong with the system.

If the crashes are reproducible, do be sure to file a bug.

> Word is the only one where is no substitute for. Google Docs doesn't have paragraph

Have you tried LibreOffice? In terms of both stability and MSO interoperability has greatly improved over the OpenOffice days. It has every feature that you should expect a word processor to have.

Check out SoftMaker Office 2016. Its word processor TextMaker is superiour to Word regarding features (it includes many that Word doesn't, e.g. address database. epub export etc.)., speed and reliability (never had a crash or screwed formatting which I often had with Word). The spreadsheet and presentation apps are also excellent, and all programs are highly compatible with Microsoft Office formats.

Sometime you just have to collaborate with people that live inside the Microsoft bubble... And Excel is still a pretty hard lock-in for "power users".

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