The people I know use LO for essentially political reasons.
I've never really tried to use anything other than MS Office, because for my whole career I've been interacting with people on Windows using standard Windows/MSFT tools, and so any inconsistency / glitch in document exchange would automatically be my fault if I insisted on using LO or Apple's tools or whatever.
Plus, honest go God, Word and Excel are really, really good at what they do. Word got their more slowly, but once Excel ate Lotus 1-2-3, there really never was another competitor there, and Excel just kept getting more and more powerful. It's a wonderful tool.
(Now, there ARE people who learn Excel but refuse to go further -- into a true database, or into a proper business intelligent /reporting tool, or whatever -- and end up creating their own really janky versions of these things within Excel with macros and insane formulas hidden out in AA:5234 or whtaever; that's a problem for sure. But it's not so much an Excel problem as it is a problem with the lack of an obvious next-step ramp for those users.)
> Now, there ARE people who learn Excel but refuse to go further...
Since Power Query was first included by default in 2016, I've introduced tens of regular Excel users. Because there's no way to work cell by agonizing cell, there's a mental tension for a few minutes then usually the concept of working with fields and sets clicks into place so well you can practically hear it. Even if they never use PQ again, they often change how they use spreadsheets for the better. If you're really lucky they don't just start using PQ, they find the advanced editor and start doing some basic fiddling around. While it's fair to criticize M [0] as a niche language that only exists in a tiny corner of one company's data modeling features, it's also what finally motivated me to learn functional programming. That accessible step by step ramp from introduction to functional language data modeling in a common office tool is an underrated juggernaut of a feature.
>But it's not so much an Excel problem as it is a problem with the lack of an obvious next-step ramp for those users
This is something of a general issue that was essentially created by the success of MS Office. With "everyone" using MS Office or something quite similar, there really wasn't a huge market or interest in a different program that was just an incremental step up.
There are exceptions but, for the most part, people tried to push MS Office to do things it wasn't really designed to do because the next step was jumping to some complex and expensive program from Adobe or whoever.
>for my whole career I've been interacting with people on Windows using standard Windows/MSFT tools, and so any inconsistency / glitch in document exchange would automatically be my fault if I insisted on using LO or Apple's tools or whatever. //
How long is that career? Over my working life StarOffice/OpenOffice/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice have been far more compatible (for relatively basic documents) with other versions of MSWord than MSWord has, I don't really have experience of cross-compatibility from the last 5 years or so though.
And no, what you say absolutely has not been my experience. Any rich formatting tends to get lost or munged, and support for stylesheets / templates between Office and non-Office platforms was woefully lacking.
If you're alone, sure, the free or Free option might be a good choice. But your time has value, so if you're collaborating with other people using true Office, just use Office. You'll be happier.
I've never really tried to use anything other than MS Office, because for my whole career I've been interacting with people on Windows using standard Windows/MSFT tools, and so any inconsistency / glitch in document exchange would automatically be my fault if I insisted on using LO or Apple's tools or whatever.
Plus, honest go God, Word and Excel are really, really good at what they do. Word got their more slowly, but once Excel ate Lotus 1-2-3, there really never was another competitor there, and Excel just kept getting more and more powerful. It's a wonderful tool.
(Now, there ARE people who learn Excel but refuse to go further -- into a true database, or into a proper business intelligent /reporting tool, or whatever -- and end up creating their own really janky versions of these things within Excel with macros and insane formulas hidden out in AA:5234 or whtaever; that's a problem for sure. But it's not so much an Excel problem as it is a problem with the lack of an obvious next-step ramp for those users.)