[tootie]

I don't think a lot of businesses are really that dependent on the sophisticated Excel features. And if they are it's concentrated in certain areas. You can buy per seat licenses (honestly no idea how MS prices this) for whoever needs it and out the rest of the enterprise on something else for their documents.

[gpresot]

But why should they do this? MS Office 365 is 150 USD per year per user. For the vast majority of companies, large and small, this is a very small price for a software that is so engrained in daily business processes and activities. If a company is at the point of deciding about cost cutting by cutting excel, it probably is beyond salvation (certainly in the developed world, but i dare say even in developing countries). And the productivity loss of the first year would probably negate any saving.

[throw0101a]

> But why should they do this? MS Office 365 is 150 USD per year per user.

As someone in the Linux/Debian/Ubuntu area of my organization, the main headache with licensing from what I can see as an 'outsider' is not so much the price as the auditing/compliance overhead.

We can spin up/down as many Deb/Ub/CentOS systems as we want and not care, which as much RAM and (v)CPU as needed.

Trying to do the same with Windows and/or VMware seems to be something else.

[sjy]

Absolutely. 150 USD is a trivial amount of money in most bureaucracies, but the time cost of getting that expense approved and accounted for could be weeks.

[jankiehodgpodge]

Excel is sold as a bundle with Office 365. Many if not most large companies are already paying for O365 for emails/teams/MDM etc anyway.

[tootie]

My company is standardized on G Suite and only dole out MS licenses on request.

[haukilup]

Thanks for the anecdote! There does seems to be diversity among the suite of tools large companies use to conduct business.

The parents point seems to still stand -- a significant proportion of companies use Office internally, and Excel is bundled as a part of O365.

[sjy]

To add another anecdote, I've noticed that many educational institutions (including government departments with tens of thousands of staff and hundreds of thousands of students) use G Suite. I'm sure some corporate staff in these organisations have Microsoft Office too, but there are many people in large bureaucracies who use Google Docs and Google Sheets daily.