[bangaladore]

> Microsofts esteemed moat (office) is “Web only” on the lowest tier.

If you've ever used it before, you'd quickly come to the conclusion that web only Office is only useful for someone writing essays for school.

The moment you need to do anything more complex than that, the document renders completely differently on web vs app-- not to mention there are tons of critical features that aren't even available on the web version.

[dijit]

Sorry, I think I didn’t make myself clear enough.

I meant that Microsoft is intentionally removing their own moat.

That the tools are awful is just the standard microsoft affair. (with some notable exceptions, which ironically include Excel).

[raw_anon_1111]

I don’t do anything too “serious” as far as writing documents that Google Docs can’t handle - we use that at work instead of Office - is Word that much better than GSuite for most cases or is Office Web worse than GSuite?

[Arch-TK]

Some people have some bizarre obsession with having absolute and total control over the placement of every single last character in their document while simultaneously not caring about the fact that this placement is sometimes not reproducible and randomly becomes diseased.

My most memorable MS Word experiences are all the times I accidentally put my document into a weird state and didn't notice something was wrong until I've spent 3 more hours on it, at which point I was forced to re-create the document by copy pasting text into an earlier copy.

And the only reason I knew something was subtly wrong was because the weird VB extension I was required to use would stop working correctly. Basically this would happen when some random key element of the document had ended up with a very subtly different style. If I didn't have to worry about the VB extension breaking, I'd just have a document with some weird bug somewhere.

If I wanted a professional looking document, I would use some modern LaTeX variant maybe with Pandoc to generate most of it from something more restricted like Markdown.

If I wanted total control over the content of a page, I would use some kind of graphical publishing software with text and vector graphics.

I have zero idea what kind of Stockholm syndrome you must have to think that Microsoft Office (or any other similar WYSIWYG editor for that matter) is power user software.

It has lots of features, that's for sure. But the features form a Jenga tower. That makes it a toy.

[esseph]

> is Word that much better than GSuite for most cases or is Office Web worse than GSuite?

Excel is really The Thing. So many businesses and departments rely on it.

[raw_anon_1111]

I believe that. When I was in graduate school in 1999-2001 (MBA) before I dropped out. I learned firsthand the beast that was Excel.

[NetMageSCW]

And you’d be making the same mistake as all those people that claim Windows is too awful to use for real work. Web Office is limited, but it is more than enough for the majority of business users.