this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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In just see no alternative to Microsofts Office tools. I think 99% of all companies in Western world rely on Microsoft office.
technically libreoffice exists, they really need to fix office comparability though
No, they just need to enforce PDFs for things that leave an office so everyone else isn't locked into loading and running a bloated mess just to view a read-only spreadsheet.
The analogue to the printed chart isn't an XLS6 attached to e-mail. It's a PDF.
That's it. Done.
I'd prefer a Wiki style software that exports to PDF. Why aren't we all using wiki's, with build in version control and diagramming, like Confluence, Youtrack, etc..?
Then, you'll get people whinging that they need Adobe Acrobat Professional in order to edit the PDFs!
Something something leading a horse to water
Those are moving goalposts. The LibreOffice devs do their best, but they'll always be a step behind. The correct solution is to get people to move away from closed yet ever-changing standards made by monoliths who wish to retain a monopoly.
Note that I'm not saying that's easy or even possible. Only that it's correct.
MS Office rules the corporate world because their standards never change.
the fact that there is .xls and .xlsx, .doc, .docx ... proves otherwise.
Yes they can still load and handle the old formats, but evidently the standards did change. As they are pushing for Office365 this will become an even more regular scenario as they want to force everyone to use the latest software, which then is only available in the subscription model.
How documents are stored by MS Office has changed constantly over the last 40 years, as have the feature sets of the different applications, for which a new variant format if not a new format outright might be created each time. The file extension is a guide but not a complete indicator of what's going on inside.
Microsoft have the advantage of knowing the exact structure of all the previous formats so they can auto-detect and load a document transparently without the user having any idea there might have been a difference.
Because the formats are proprietary, and follow no published standard (or not fully published), third parties like LibreOffice have to literally reverse engineer every single one of those formats and variants every time a new one pops up. It's a game of whack-a-mole. Moving goalposts like I said.
And it's often the case that reverse-engineering a format covers only, say, 99% of cases; those used in most of the documents that a would-be reverse engineer has seen. And then someone tries to use LibreOffice to open a document with a feature from the other 1% and it looks incompetent.
There's also that it would be illegal to decompile a copy of MS Office to figure out exactly how it does it, so they have to work from the documents that MS Office generates and take their best guess. If Microsoft got even a whiff of the idea that someone working on LibreOffice had decompiled it, the whole project would be sued into oblivion.
...until they come up with the New Outlook which is total shit.
Open a document created in modern Word in Word 97. Then tell me the standards never change.
I've never had compatibility issues. Of course many people have, but a lot of the time people are blindly speculating about potential badness.