7 ms·

That's just inaccurate. Microsoft Office is one of the easiest things to replace; LibreOffice takes some getting used to, but it does what you need it to do. W

That's just inaccurate. Microsoft Office is one of the easiest things to replace; LibreOffice takes some getting used to, but it does what you need it to do. What's going to be harder is Microsoft Exchange, but if people work in a company that uses Exchange, they need to push their Exchange admin to enable SMTP and IMAP. You should not be using Exchange for calendar synchronization anyway, and I am sure there are better dedicated alternatives in the OSS world. Probably something like Nextcloud which comes with numerous useful apps. For video editing I think Kdenlive does everything you need for basic editing.

blacklion 3y ago
> Microsoft Office is one of the easiest things to replace; LibreOffice takes some getting used to, but it does what you need it to do. Nope. No. Nada. No way. MS Office is one of hardest software to replace. On the same level as proprietary SCADA system alike. I know this hard way. Yes, if you only need prepare new small documents and print them out into PDF or on physical paper, you could replace MS Word with almost anything - LibreOffice, OpenOffice, KWord, Google Docs (though, Google Docs has very primitive style system, but if you need to make small simple documents, you don't need good style system anyway). As soon as you need to work with documents created by others, and exchange these documents with others in office format (not PDF), oh man. When document was created in Office'2000 (yes, in 2020s), edited by several other versions by different people on computers with different fonts and locales, when it contains images, sections with multiple columns, is formatted half with styles (both paragraph and character ones) half by direct applications by attributes like "Bold" and "Interline space"... And you need to edit it and pass to the next person with unknown version of MS Office - good luck to use anything but MS Word. Same with Powerpoint. Yes, MS Word could break such document too - but typically by rearranging images and adding unneeded pagebreaks, not by showing only blank pages or replacing all fonts with Courier New. After any alternative you could get anything, literally anyhting. And your OpenOffice will show "perfectly" formatted document, only your counterpart with MS Office will complain that YOU ruined document. How do I know this? My wife is freelance translator. We've tried not to pay for MS Office several times, because, you know, new version of *Office is compatible for MS Office at last. But no, it could be Ok for next 10 clients, all looks good, and eleventh will yell t you by phone because result you provided him looks completely different in his MS Office (including, as I mentioned, empty pages without text at all or all these fancy fonts replaced with one Courier New - it is real cases from my experience). And don't let me start to rant about Excel where people write crazy macros in VBasic and such - good luck to use any other software when you need to communicate and exchange documents with other Excel powerusers.

blacklion 3y ago

> Microsoft Office is one of the easiest things to replace; LibreOffice takes some getting used to, but it does what you need it to do. Nope. No. Nada. No way. MS Office is one of hardest software to replace. On the same level as proprietary SCADA system alike. I know this hard way. Yes, if you only need prepare new small documents and print them out into PDF or on physical paper, you could replace MS Word with almost anything - LibreOffice, OpenOffice, KWord, Google Docs (though, Google Docs has very primitive style system, but if you need to make small simple documents, you don't need good style system anyway). As soon as you need to work with documents created by others, and exchange these documents with others in office format (not PDF), oh man. When document was created in Office'2000 (yes, in 2020s), edited by several other versions by different people on computers with different fonts and locales, when it contains images, sections with multiple columns, is formatted half with styles (both paragraph and character ones) half by direct applications by attributes like "Bold" and "Interline space"... And you need to edit it and pass to the next person with unknown version of MS Office - good luck to use anything but MS Word. Same with Powerpoint. Yes, MS Word could break such document too - but typically by rearranging images and adding unneeded pagebreaks, not by showing only blank pages or replacing all fonts with Courier New. After any alternative you could get anything, literally anyhting. And your OpenOffice will show "perfectly" formatted document, only your counterpart with MS Office will complain that YOU ruined document. How do I know this? My wife is freelance translator. We've tried not to pay for MS Office several times, because, you know, new version of *Office is compatible for MS Office at last. But no, it could be Ok for next 10 clients, all looks good, and eleventh will yell t you by phone because result you provided him looks completely different in his MS Office (including, as I mentioned, empty pages without text at all or all these fancy fonts replaced with one Courier New - it is real cases from my experience). And don't let me start to rant about Excel where people write crazy macros in VBasic and such - good luck to use any other software when you need to communicate and exchange documents with other Excel powerusers.