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Comment by thesuitonym | Hacker News Reader

I mean... You can open Office documents in the browser, but for anything beyond basic tasks it's not even close.

For most users it is enough. I know a number of companies that nowadays only provides the basic office365 license to their employees (which disable access to desktop apps) for cost saving reasons. They only provide the full license to a small subset of administrative users who are totally irrelevant in an OpenBSD related discussion as they would use windows or MacOS desktop anyway.

its not enough tho. because even the most basic of users still need to open and edit files from advanced users.

recent only office builds are not quite there, but far superior to office Web.

I've yet to experience that in what, 7 years of using web version of office365 in 3 different companies?

I honestly thought there wasn't even an offline installer anymore, and office.com was the only way to open documents in office these days.

The typical Office installer is a small bootstrapper that requires an Internet connection to download required files, but applications themselves are native and work offline (some features and applications use web tech for UI, of course).

Subscription-based licensing requires periodic check-ins, but perpetual product key-based licensing is available, though compared to the subscription versions, the release cadence for new features is slow.

The online component of traditional apps like Excel works best as a means for sharing documents, with the web UIs useful for reading and light editing, and the same documents fully editable in the native apps.

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