> (The same goes for Office. People use Word and Excel because they know how to use Word and Excel. Otherwise, they'd be saving themselves the license fee and be using Libre Office or Google Docs.)
reply
I can tell you that this is definitely not the case. I've used Word a lot in (non-software) engineering setting, and there are a large number of features used on a regular basis that simply are not available in LibreOffice or Google Docs. Things like citation support, text wrapping for images, and a good equation editor.
I hate excel. For some reason, it has become the standard for creating any grid-based documents, even though the table support in word would often be far superior when equations aren't needed.
I hate the lack of smooth scrolling, especially when you have differing cell heights. I hate the lack of cell padding, leading to manually sizing every row.
Most of all, I hate the total lack of focus. What sort of document is it aimed at creating, these days? The answer is certainly not what is was 10–15 years ago, but the basic interface hasn't changed much (ribbon aside).
I agree with what you're saying, I've seen it used to write up a text document! Talk about missing the point...
Often equations are needed, along with graphing. It's very expandable and customisable by a non-programmer with VBA.
I'm not saying it's the best, but it's pretty good at what it does, and there's not a better spreadsheet application that I've found.
As an aside, I've seen it be used for managing portfolios worth millions. Then you get a clever IT dept say 'oh no, you shouldnt be doing that on a spreadsheet' and so a new IT project is created to retire the spreadsheet and copy the functionality. Predictably, the project is late, over-budget and under-delivers, so the spreadsheet lives on. Tragic tale of far too many IT projects.
While I agree with you that MS Office has -in general- the most features of any common WYSIWYG document suite (note: that's just how I categorize this kind of software), Word isn't really the best example for it. Pretty much any feature in Word can be matched with LibreOffice and most can be matched with iWorks Pages (while the later is worlds simpler to use). What distinguishes MS Office the most IMO are:
1) smart art in PowerPoint
2) most of the data analysis and pivot table tools in Excel
3) powerful and mature, albeit cumbersome scripting support (VBA)
These features are important for a multitude of reasons, but for those who only need a good word editor, MS Office is certainly not a necessity anymore.
I can tell you that this is definitely not the case. I've used Word a lot in (non-software) engineering setting, and there are a large number of features used on a regular basis that simply are not available in LibreOffice or Google Docs. Things like citation support, text wrapping for images, and a good equation editor.