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[–] 27 points 6 months ago (15 children)

One of the main places windows is used, like it or not, are organizations and companies. Especially small ones. Specially ones that are not in wealthy countries. And the only thing that keeps them from switching to linux is microsoft office. (Most importantly Word, excel).

My company has ~20 people and I would switch them over to linux if it wasn't for word and excel.

While libreoffice is great on it's own, companies send eachother xlsx and docx files. And libreoffice isnt great at reading or writing them. Specially complex ones. I don't think it's much of libre office's fault, but more the shitty incompatible, unstandardized microsoft formats.

Currently I'm the only Linux user in the team, and I constantly advocate Linux, but I know if anybody switches, compatibility with microsoft office is going to be a problem. I can take the risk with the tech team but not the office section (hr, sales, secretary accounting etc.) really.

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  • [+] 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (8 children)
  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (7 children)

    No you cannot shift to open document formats because you can't send an odt file to another company. They will not know what it is. In the enterprise world you have to "send them the word" or "the excel".

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Man I feel you and I know it's just how things are. But I often ask myself the following question: Why are lots of office workers so bad with computers? It's the tool they use for 1/3 of working day in their life. Just like a craftsman should learn to use their tools. No, instead they always act like it's something only tech guys should know about.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    An electrician drives around in their van full of their tools. They are expert in their tools, but some can’t even change a tire on the van.

    It’s the same with office jobs. You use a bunch of tools on the computer, but the computer isn’t necessarily a part of your tool set, it’s your vehicle.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I'm most case you provably want to just send the document as PDF, don't you? For which use case do you want to send an editable document to another company?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    It's called collaboration. When I worked as a toolmaker, I needed to use SolidWorks, despite not being a big fan, because our customers used SW and they were often literally on the other side of the planet.

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  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Did you try OnlyOffice? I heard it has good compatibility with Microsoft Office's files, it's available on almost every OS, and looks easy to use. However, I'm not sure if you can create very complex documents like with Office.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    Microsoft dominance in businesses is part of what's making me think all businesses are in cahoots with each other to make sure the only businesses that are successful are ones that take power away from the public.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago*

    There is stuff Office 360 or whatever is called to that online Microsoft Office can do just fine from Firefox or Chrome based browsers. But if things get overcomplicated, it's as good or even worse than Libreoffice at handling xlsx, docx documents.

    Even current Office struggles with early Office documents.

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