For me, standard "offline" Office suites are really "things of the previous millenium". MS Office or Libre/OpenOffice alike.
I use Google Docs for everything. It's simpler to use, it's simpler to share documents, it's inherently more mobile. The updates are instant. And so on.
Now I would be glad if there was free (as-in-speech) alternative to Google Docs, so I could just host it myself on my server. There IS etherpad, but it doesn't do tables and works slightly differently.
What do others think? Are "offline" office suites still relevant?
I got bitten by this problem once: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/docs/t7MZYkHnL... . Essentially, one fine day, google docs couldn't draw a scatter-plot that connected the plotted points with a line (the feature got removed for some reason). From the timeline of that thread, it took months to get the feature back. This is just unacceptable. Ever since, I have decided to stick with a native app for office software (excel on win + mac and some other stuff for Linux).
As a complete convert to Google Docs I say largely irrelevant.
The reality for me (and I'd imagine a large chunk of computer using population) is that I very rarely need all the features of Excel and Word to do my job, so the benefits of an online suite (collaboration, sharing etc) outweigh the lost features.
I envisage Word becoming more of a publishing application for those few people in a company who need to make publishable documents. The rest of us will survive with only ~16 fonts.
Absolutely. The alternatives -- OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Docs -- are all broken in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways, especially if you're a long-time Office power user.
There really is nothing comparable to the Office suite when it comes to features and interoperability. Yes, it has its quirks, but you just can't make the other products do what the Office products can do.
I use Google Docs for everything. It's simpler to use, it's simpler to share documents, it's inherently more mobile. The updates are instant. And so on.
Now I would be glad if there was free (as-in-speech) alternative to Google Docs, so I could just host it myself on my server. There IS etherpad, but it doesn't do tables and works slightly differently.
What do others think? Are "offline" office suites still relevant?