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Comment by akmarinov | Hacker News Reader

Do people still use Office? Google docs gets you 99% of the way there. Haven’t touched Office in a decade.

Google docs gets you 99% of the way there so long as you are doing a simple task, like a simple data table or a simple letter. For simple tasks it’s very user friendly and efficient. But it lacks features to do anything more complicated than that.

Like what? (Honest question)

Aside from being a native app which is faster and more reliable, and works without an internet connection, and you can be confident that Office will always open a document you've been sent as intended with all features. Aide from that, the main missing features are in excel. Sheets is missing hundreds of functions and lots of customisation/features in its charts, pivot tables, and data analysis functionality. It also can't handle large data sets (30k+ rows) which you'll run into regularly with any kind of data logging.

It is possible you will never use these functions, but the entire professional world runs on excel sheets and registers (even though there is probably a tool somewhere that would work better for individual use cases). The universal compatibility is very valuable and the cost is negligible for businesses.

It’s funny you should say that because I was joking with someone the other day about google workspaces “the only thing google docs needs is a decent editor (vim),” but in seriousness, if you are referring to vbscript or macros then you are missing the market that google is aiming at.

I'll take a project to develop some automation in Google Apps Script any day before I take a VB scripting job.

"People" don't buy office. Corporations buy office, and Google docs doesn't get you anywhere near 99% of the way towards what corporations need from Office. There are entire workflows built around janky plugins to explorer, reams of VBA macros, retention policies in exchange etc.

If it's your job, you want the best thing, even if it's only 10-20% better. Performance and offline capability of a native app alone is a strong selling point.

Google docs get you 99% there. But Microsoft's moat is in the 1%. e.g Finance and other niche stuff where the programming language is Excel.

Yes a lot of people still use Office, especially Excel

Really? This feigned ignorance is like the old canard “do people still watch TV? I haven’t watched TV in 20 years”

Well, in some large companies, legal documents are managed by contract management systems which generate the documents in MS Word format. So the embedding is deep. I'm sure I could open it in Google Docs... but then I'd have two problems.

Source: I just received such a thing.

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