[bitwize]

"Rapidly changing commercial realities" haven't produced a tool as useful or flexible for analyzing large amounts of financial data as Excel. They also haven't produced an alternative word processor that can correctly read and format any arbitrary Word document. Go ahead, try and tell your boss that you never read that important memo he sent out because your office suite mangled the document.

For interacting with the business world, Microsoft Office is absolutely essential -- a bargain at thrice the price.

[dbaupp]

In many ways, Excel is too flexible and yet not flexible enough for data processing: it temptingly allows people to do some analysis but can very easily build up into a crufty mess of unreadable in-cell formulas and VB macros.

Often a database, JSON or just plain CSV files, combined with R or Python+libraries, will give a far far better result (faster, maintainable, more flexible presentation, reusable, VCS-able).

[slurry]

Excel is completely terrible but it puts real analytic power in the hands of non-technical people. For most business organizations, Excel alone is worth the price of Office, even if only a couple of accountants or marketing people use its power features.

Better to solve the right problem the wrong way.

Come to think about it, "too flexible and yet not flexible enough" describes all the popular scripting languages, too - Python not least among them.

[andmarios]

Someone isn't using MS Office apparently. I've seen more incompatibilities between various versions of MS Word than between LibreOffice and any version of MS Word.

[pktoss]

This might be true for YOUR use case and company. We are talking about Greek high-schools, which use like 1% of the capabilities of Excel,Word or even LibreOffice's calc and writer. So IMHO this point is moot.

If nothing else I would prefer Greek students get used to the emphasis writer places on using styles instead of "ad-hoc" formatting.

[shmerl]

You need to start changes somewhere. It's not absolutely essential - it's what MS wants you to think. Think different.

[codeka]

I've never seen an office application that so badly mangles a Word document that you can't even read it. 100% fidelity is not going to happen, but unless you're designing brochures or things for print, you don't need 100% fidelity.

[bitwize]

I've never seen an office application that so badly mangles a Word document that you can't even read it.

Back in a former job, I was managing documents for a big project. The government mandated the use of Word format. When I opened some of the documents up in LibreOffice, only a single, completely blank page was visible. This tended to happen with .docx files but not with .doc files.

So YES, open source office suites DO mangle Microsoft Office documents beyond readability. The only thing that's guaranteed to work is Microsoft Office, so governments and businesses will keep using it.

[stephen_g]

If you're designing something for print, you shouldn't be using Office...