Comment by seec
25 days ago
From experience, I can assure you LibreOffice is no real equivalent to Office. I can guarantee you that you will have people asking you about stuff that Office does just fine but isn't really possible in LibreOffice or is a major hassle.
I have been the one touting alternatives since I was very young and foolish (in particular advocating for the free Apple suite), but I have run into enough problems I couldn't solve that I don't bother anymore.
Microsoft is winning with Office because everyone else is more incompetent than them; it's simple as that. If someone could come up with a true, cheaper competitor, everybody would switch, regardless of the file format arguments. In fact, the generalized use of Google Suite for the simple stuff shows that it is the case. When people insist on Office, they generally have a good reason, and you should trust them.
I consistently see .docx files and people using Office and Google's alternative, and they don't even use templates. They use nothing more than a few fonts, some size adjustments, bold/italic/underline, maybe a table and and an image if they're fancy.
Unless they just can't handle the buttons being in a different place, as ggm said, I can't see what functionality the average user is missing. Fair enough that the Excel wizard is missing their macros, but most people are far from the level.
What are these problems you (or anyone you've met) couldn't solve? I have a hard time imagining what that could even be in the first place, since the scope of required functionality is so small; again, my grandma could probably use Wordpad if it came down to it, and from what I see other people using Word for, that seems to be true in the general case too.