Quote:
Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx
Gee my post is beginning to sound like a rant ... oops ... not intended ... just writing out loud so to speak trying to justify to myself as to why I use one thing over another, I think
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Nah, you didn't get enough of a head of steam.
I use LibreOffice myself--if you're going to be free of big corps, might as well be free of Oracle, too. And I like Softmaker Office enough to pay for it. Both are useful in their spaces.
But for the more robust and complicated projects I stick with MS Office.
(At work I oncr oversaw an effort that built, in months, a complete advanced economic analysis tool using MS Office modules: excel provided the compute engine, project the scheduling, word the text editing, and powerpoint the graphics. It allowed the coders to spend 75% of the time we were paying for on the underlying algorithms and debugging the analysis logic. It was production-ready from day one. Then the PTB spent 10 times as much and three years duplicating the functionality into a standalone C++ app.

)
The reason the free (and "free") suites haven't much dented MS Office domination is that there is way more to it than just the three core desktop apps. There's the entire server side of the family and Project and Visio that are totally unchallenged. The SDK alone puts it in a different category for corporate use.
There's room for everybody but too much time and emotion is wasted waving fists.