>A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives.
This is an incomplete take. People use MS Office because everyone else uses it. In practice, that means if you try an alternative, then there's no assurance that your documents will render or function the same way on an MS Office installation.
I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. I had to write a tech report to submit to our funding agency, using a Word template they require. It looked great on my computer. But when my advisor reviewed my document on his MS Office installation, the formatting was all wrong and unusable. Ditto for spreadsheets and slide decks (I can't count the number of times Google Slides mangled my PPTX formatting after I accidentally opened the file in the browser and it auto-saved). That's the reality of doing non-trivial work with external stakeholders if you're not using MS Office.
When I worked in an office with my linux machine, Libre office worked for me. No issues really. I didn't do anything super complex, but it was nice to be able to open those file formats.
Though to be fair, I didn't really have a choice in the matter. its was that or the web version of office.
Yeah. I'd go further: Office is a clear exception to the rule that the alternatives tend to be better than the complacent market leader with the massive lockin. Using LibreOffice (or cut down stuff like Pages/Numbers or Google Docs) gets me missing Office features pdq even when I don't need the compatibility, despite me not particularly loving Office's last couple of decades of interface changes, having limited interest in "cloud" and "AI" features, not exactly being a power user of Excel and even having fond memories of other systems' features like WordPerfect's Reveal Codes. And the compatibility issue is obviously massive
This was in the early 2010s. Then I tried again in the late 2010s. And again (with Google's suite) a year ago.
It doesn't work when you're required to submit MS Office documents to people who pay you. You can't tell them "LibreOffice is so great, you should use it too!" You either use MS Office, or you look like a sloppy amateur when your figures are the wrong size and the text is overflowing off the side of the document.
Heh! Maybe 14-15 years ago I got my small employer to start using OpenOffice. They couldn’t afford Office licenses for everyone, but it was super handy to give everyone a word processor.
One time we were having a hard time exporting Word docs that a customer was able to open and view correctly. After much back and forth, it turned out they were also using OpenOffice and it was having trouble opening the emulated Word docs we sent. We cut out the middle man and started sending them OOo’s own native docs. Problem solved!
I know that’s far from the common case, but it made me so happy at the time.
This is an incomplete take. People use MS Office because everyone else uses it. In practice, that means if you try an alternative, then there's no assurance that your documents will render or function the same way on an MS Office installation.
I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. I had to write a tech report to submit to our funding agency, using a Word template they require. It looked great on my computer. But when my advisor reviewed my document on his MS Office installation, the formatting was all wrong and unusable. Ditto for spreadsheets and slide decks (I can't count the number of times Google Slides mangled my PPTX formatting after I accidentally opened the file in the browser and it auto-saved). That's the reality of doing non-trivial work with external stakeholders if you're not using MS Office.