[thayne]

> Can I use Open Office across OSes?

I would recommend Libreoffice over Openoffice, but yes (for both)

And you can of course backup to your cloud service of choice. The main benefit of google docs, o365, etc. Is real-time collaboration. But there is no reason why a desktop app couldn't support realtime collaboration with a suitable backend service.

[deckard1]

The only time I've ever seen real-time Google Docs collaboration has been during meetings which should have been an email. Total waste of everyone's time. Not to mention the horrible UX of people constantly moving their cursor around and moving text around. I'd suggest that pass-the-baton style collaboration would be a much better UX if you absolutely must collaborate real-time on creating a document. Which I find the premise to be incredibly dubious to begin with.

[thayne]

Even if actual realtime collaboration is rare, there are other collaboration features that are missing in most desktop equivalents, like getting notified of changes, being able to mention people in comments, etc. that I do see used quite a bit.

But my experience is that realtime collaboration is useful. In particular, immediately after emailing a doc to multiple people it is not at all unusual for more than one person to be actively looking at commenting on, and maybe changing the document at the same time.

[silicon2401]

What do you prefer about Libreoffice? I've used both once or twice but not enough to really learn anything about them

[teddyh]

LibreOffice is an actual active project; OpenOffice is a political ghost entity.

[silicon2401]

Very good to know, thanks!

[richardwhiuk]

There are lots of reasons.

[moshmosh]

There must be exactly zero reasons—not lots—why they can't, since some native applications do, in fact, support realtime collaboration.