Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vetinari 2768 days ago
Most people do not use any advanced features, neither in Writer nor in Word. You can congratulate yourself, if your colleagues know what are styles, most just hard-code the formatting.
2 comments

The problem is not whether YOU use the advanced features. It is whether someone else does.

I generally don't require any better than Markdown and for larger documents I just LaTeX.

However I am normally sent work documents with all sorts of macros from other companies (embedded forms) to fill out for things like payments, right to work etc. These require Microsoft Office. Originally when I started I thought I could get away with Libre Office. It worked at best 50% and these weren't complex macros (I inspected them myself).

None of these forms are outside the norm of what a HR department, University faculty office or most medium to large companies use.

It's mostly _ME_ who uses the advanced features, not people around me. In cca last 10 years, I've seen exactly one Excel with macros that someone wanted other people to use. (No, you can't use VBA with LibreOffice, just like you cannot use Python UNO scripts with MS Office).

The reason is mostly security: nobody wants to run random macros on their machines (where nobody means their IT departments, the users wouldn't care) and for the uses that you mention, for random forms, web-based forms are used and links to them are getting send.

At least in my corner of woods.

If this “normal users are stupid” thing is supposed to be in favour of Linux then it’s a stale argument.
Normal users are not stupid. They just don't care.
How can you tell when the end result is identical? /s