Slashdot Mirror
Forrester Research Shows Steep Decline in Free Office Suite Stats
An anonymous reader writes that although many Linux users (and others) are at home with OpenOffice and LibreOffice, typical organizations are as addicted as ever to MS office formats. In 2011 13% of organizations had OpenOffice variants installed on some computers. Today that number has dipped to 5% according to Forrester Research. ... The poll included [shows totals] over 100% as many organizations have multiple versions of offices installed. Also surprising, Office 2003 is alive kicking and screaming as almost 1/3 of companies and governments still use it even though EOL for Office 2003 ends with XP on the same date! The good news is online cloud-based platforms are gaining traction with Google Docs and Office 365 which are not so tied to Windows on the client."
So to avoid locking our data into a Windows-only proprietary format, we'll lock it into a Windows-centric Microsoft-owned cloud? Oh yeah, that's going to work much better.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
how is allowing another company, e.g. Google, access to your documents good news ?
I don't think that's the full reason for the decline, but it didn't help. At first we were pushing Open Office at work, and then one day we had to start pushing Libre Office. So, people would say "What's wrong with Open Office?" and then you say "It's complicated... blah blah blah." And then they say "Okay, we'll just use regular Microsoft Office then."
Fuck Libre Office
Fuck Linux
Fuck all you goddamn freetards
This isn't really a survey of businesses, just people who buy Forrester Research products.. I wouldn't say it's a representative sample of much of anything.
Sure, but does Netcraft confirm it?
Office 2003 is alive kicking and screaming as almost 1/3 of companies and governments still use it
I still use Microsoft Office 2003 and the reasons are simple:
- It works. Creating a document today isn't any different today than it was in 2003 or 1983. You type stuff onto a page. I have yet to encounter a situation where Office 2003 can't do exactly what I need. Newer versions of Office simply add extra bloat.
- Microsoft's god awful "ribbon" which has rendered all newer versions of Office unusable.
- Office 2003 has none of Microsoft's "activation" bullshit.
.. and at risk of being modded a Troll and losing any rep.
Office 365 is a good piece of software. Okay, so it's complete shite to use but it's not just an office suite, it's a platform on which you can run your business. IMO for the first time in 20 years, Microsoft has actually come up with a good piece of software. They've certainly leveraged their proprietary format lockin in order to get businesses to use the platform, but using the platform isn't any particular problem.
The platform itself provides the fundamentals of what businesses need to get up and running. It's pretty stable and not horribly expensive. There are other competing platforms out there (some even much better) but they still don't fully support Microsoft's proprietary format. So Microsoft leverages that format but creates something that not only provides the tools you need, it empowers small business. They've done an excellent job to keep the Office brand running and kudos to them for that.
Any open source competitor will need to be hosted, provide better facilities, have a clear migration path and have format compatibility for any hope in the future.
3 things are working here:
Outlook has an absolute stranglehold on business email. Until that is resolved, M$ Office isn't going away.
Word is still the standard for document creation. The docx format doesn't play nice on LO/OOo.
Excel has a few technical advantages over LO/OOo. Again the file format cross combatibility is an issue too.
The ribbon interface was responsible for the uptick in Lo/OOo Office. People have resigned themselves to the interface despite it's still not liked by a great many users, which is one of the reasons for Office 2003's continued use, that and the upgrade price (or lack of upgrade pricing). M$ also gave away M$ Office Starter edition free for a while, which helped people entrench themselves in the M$ ecosystem.
Who cares? The software works, it will keep being used until something better comes along.
Office 2003 was the last truly good version of Office (in my opinon at least). It worked properly then; without the quirks of Office 2000 (and still works perfectly now, having full compatablity with the new Office file formats via an update), didn't have the deliberately obtuse ribbon user interface - which steals a large chunk of screen space, and if hidden to reclaim that space, requries more clicks than simply having a toolbar did. I fail to see any good reason to switch, as unlike the move from XP to 7, no new features of any consequence have been added, and no (positive) updates in speed or behaviour have been made.
I cannot speak for OpenOffice, as the last time I used it was ~7 years ago - and at the time OpenOffice felt like something from the Windows 3.1 era.
I also cannot speak for LibreOffice, as I have never used it.
The good news is online cloud-based platforms are gaining traction [...]
How is this good news?
Posting that here is like someone on Moveon.org hyperlinking an article from www.redstateblog.com (or whatever the hell the right wing version is).
I read Neowin as well. I like balance.
I notice they have things like Windows Server 2012 R2 launch details that slashdot feels is not important. But if it is Linux related, I feel a link from there is like reading a link here about a non-baised spin about IE and Windows on slashdot if you know what I mean?
I wonder if those statistics include governments that tried to use it but went back due to users hating change? Or used an ancient version of OpenOffice that was not as compatible as MS Office?
As much as I love free software I admit I paid a lot of money for Office. It is the only thing that I know that works when making critical documents that must look write and be editable. No replacement for Outlook as well sadly (I HATE OUTLOOK). I feel it is kind of like the old Gimp vs Photoshop debate all over every article comes out.
People need a reason for change. Being just as good wont cut it. Better different and better will. Windows CE and blackberry were untouchable in 2007 ... the iphone redefined the standards and crippled both. No one could stop IE. It wasn't until Firefox was freaking fast and secure before anyone wanted to leave though Mozilla did exist prior. I think making a better LibreOffice wont help as clouds and having your documents anytime and anywhere are taking over as evident with Google Docs and Office 365. An open source web based office suite that is cloud based and works anywhere might be where the FOSS can really shine and give somethign different.
http://saveie6.com/
Office '97 on XP still work well enough. Mostly use only Excel, and haven't yet found one single feature that I might be missing.
Want to stop the decline? Make a version of LibreOffice or another FOSS odt/odt editor that works on my tablets.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Obvious troll is obvious...
Just who paid Forrester Research for this ..er research?
Obvious WHOOSH is obvious...
I wanted to read the full report. You can too if you go here:
http://www.forrester.com/Market+Update+Office+2013+And+Productivity+Suite+Alternatives/fulltext/-/E-RES102262
$2495 for a fucking survey? Get fucked Forrester. Now there's no way for me to verify if the survey is legit or not.
I wonder how much of the decline has to do with the Oracle acquisition of Sun and subsequent forking of Open/LibreOffice. Businesses tend to not like uncertainty; I can speak for a few that were beginning to experiment with OpenOffice in 2008-2012 as the de facto alternative to MS Office... but then the Oracle-induced forking as well as the advent of the tablet and cloud ecosystems all probably led to this effective decline.
...and managers don't know any better.
The reason is simple: most managers don't have a clue about IT. To them the financial success of MS and its ubiquitous products mean that they are the best. It also gives them accountability, if something goes wrong. Who do you pass the blame to when something breaks? They love to call vendors or contractors and scream at them to fix something. With OSS there is no one to scream at and who the fuck is the apache foundation anyway, some kinda hippie native american powwow? To them open source is unprofessional because there isn't a guy in a suit with billions in the bank to prove its success. They live in a different world where success is measured by money and status. OSS eschews that mentality and is looked down upon because of it.
My manager once told me that he wished MS made all of the software we needed: ERP, CRM, CAD/CAM etc. He just liked how everything was tied together and interoperated. Another thing that annoyed me was once our router crapped out, a Netgear business router with VPN and dual WAN ports. I quickly hacked together a router using PFsense and a bunch of NIC's in an older P4 desktop which worked out quite nicely. My manager saw the setup and didn't like it. Why? Because how can a computer be a router? He just couldn't get his head around it and called in our IT contractor who installed another shitty Netgear router. Even fucked up my secure automation network that was isolated from the other networks and the separate wifi network. When things broke and he asked me why I told him to call the contractor and complain to them because they broke the system I had installed. Nothing was done because as doing so would admit that he was stupid. Thankfully he no longer works for us and I relieved myself of most IT duties.
As usual bad stats are meaningless. So they polled how many companies had office installed? 1/3rd of them had office 2003? So that translates into open office failing and MSFT winning? wtf?
Maybe, just maybe, the days of business being done in word documents and spreadsheets are fading and we're now moving towards business getting done in specific applications and instead of documents we're storing things in a database. My current job is maintaining a Database and CRM. We basically get contacted by some department whos business processes are a mess, they've been using Excel and word to do everything for 10 years, and we build them a front end for the companies database. Now records are stored forever, or less, depending on the need. Required fields are actually required. We don't have one off versions of documents stored on someones hard drive only to be lost when they leave the company. We've even done away with most email. Federal regulations that specifically target email are nasty. Simply giving giving employees chat clients let them do their normal human chit-chat without leaving a messy legal trail should a court case arise. Now requests and such are logged IN the CRM. It's clear to the person using it that they shouldn't put their Banana bread recipe in there, so they go to chat.
If anything I'd say the stat regarding people using Office 2003 is very telling. They're only keeping it around for legacy purposes. It's not that open office is dieing, it's the entire concept of "documents as files" that is dieing.
That's because people no longer need Word file format capability. The new lingua franca is PowerPoint. And Impress renders PowerPoint files differently enough (and vice versa) that people are back to relying on authentic Microsoft Office again.
I don't know why Slashdot is so utterly obsessed with drawing bizarre comparisons between commercial and open-source products.
LibreOffice (I'm just choosing LibreOffice as an example) isn't trying to compete with Microsoft, it's trying to offer an alternative. An alternative for people who either can't, or won't (for reasons beyond money) buy Office 365 or whatever Microsoft is currently offering. This entire discussion seems to hinge on the idea that LibreOffice and similar projects are trying to -destroy- Microsoft, which simply isn't true. If it were, why would they bother implementing import -and- export filters for Microsoft formats and others? They'd have nothing to gain from it, unless the intent is to make open-source software communicate better with closed-source software. That doesn't sound like a competition to me.
The problem is that any big corporation who has bought into the Microsoft solution du jour is kind of stuck with that decision for a while...a few years at the very least. You have to hire people who know how to use the software, for one, or train them in on it...if you have to train them in on it, there are plenty of programs and instructional courses out there that one can buy to help learn how to use Office or whatever. I'm not even sure where I'd -begin- training someone in on LibreOffice or OpenOffice. Look up a wiki page? Youtube videos? That's not the sort of choice that will give a manager much confidence, which is probably why such good, free software doesn't get used more often. Lack of knowledge and employee proficiency in a given product has a lot more to do with why they keep buying Microsoft year after year, it's usually easier than training an entire company in on a new system. If considerations like that were taken away and you could download a better program in 10 minutes for nothing, install it for free, on every system across your entire corporation without licensing costs...why the FUCK would you buy Microsoft? That seems to be the flaw in most Slashdotter's logic...they focus solely on the cost comparison of each product, whereas in reality there are MANY more reasons why a company might not even have the -option- of choosing OSS.
OpenOffice or LibreOffice
I've been using Google Docs for the past 2 years because I can't make up my mind the case was easy when Oracle managed OpenOffice but now Apache does I'm lost.
Someone tell me which one to choose and why.
An anonymous reader writes that although many Linux users are at home with OpenOffice and LibreOffice, typical organizations are as addicted as ever to MS office formats.
To frame the argument this way allows you to ignore the maturity and focus of MS Office apps. Pre-press work can be outsourced to a printer. Everything else moves at the speed of the anonymous clerical worker. Full time staffer. Office temp. Senior volunteer and so on.
The good news is online cloud-based platforms are gaining traction with Google Docs and Office 365 which are not so tied to Windows on the client.
Office 365 includes lightweight web apps.
But the heavy lifting is done using the more familiar, versitile and locally resident MS Office Suite. With full versions of the apps streamed to other PCs or Macs when you need them.
I ditched OO and LO on about 100 small business networks because I wanted to ditch JAVA.
I know of several small businesses (under 50 employees) who use libreoffice (and open office before that).
Is forrester focusing on large businesses or is there some kind of unintended filtering effect in play?
Or perhaps large businesses grow into office.
You have to understand... Office is some gaudawful expense like $500 a copy BUT, it costs about $large fee + $10 per copy for an enterprise license.
I own the latest office. It cost me $10 since i worked for a large corporation they let me buy a copy and the license is good regardless of employment status.
I use openoffice. I was going to Libreoffice but they have an issue with printing drawings with transparent layers which i use a lot. It's scheduled for a release but I think it's another year or so.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
People use what works best for them. Open Office an Libre Office are not the only alternate office products out there. There is that crap that people try to pawn of on other in Apple products (Pages I think), and Corel's kick at the can, and KDE's stuff, and likely a bunch of other commercial stuff. Even Microsoft's light version of office that they put on home computers, that no-one uses if they have to. And out of all of them MS Office, for better or worse, is the king. Everyone in software knows that if you make a new product for people to use at work, and it sucks, they will figure out how to do what they need to do using something else. The corollary is that if you give them something to use that works they will use it. People use MS Office and not other office software.
The point is, Microsoft has somehow hit on an office suite that people can use easily enough to do 99% of what people need in business and home. If Open Office and Libre Office want to compete, they need to make their suites match the ease of use level. They need to stop differentiating themselves so much from MS Office and figure out what it is that MS Office does that people like, then do it themselves.
I personally find OOo stuff and LO to be clunky. Clunkier than MS Office. No I don't like everything about MS Office, but I do like it better than any other product out there. And I've used a lot. Hell, I even wrote a third of many thousand line manual for operating a smelter using Wordstar... when it wasn't WSIWYG... i.e. you needed to embed control codes in your docs. Figure out what the market wants then make it. And don't be so friggin stuck on being different.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
There, I said it.
I work with documents frequently.
The open source alternatives are not as good.
Further, pretty much anything can read/write to .docx format, which is XML-based, so you're definitely not locked in.
There's just a discernible difference in quality and when you're trying to make a good impression on the job, that's important.
Futurist Traditionalism
One of the failings of all these free Office suites is that they try to be MS Office and basically if they can be distinguished as being not office then they have failed. So my suggestion is to pretend that there are no existing office suites; what do people want to do? Then you move forward from there. A good start in that direction would be a product that I use called Bean. It is a very simple Mac word writing tool. The focus is on just writing words. It is fast to load, clean of interface, and doesn't do much in the way of formatting. Another good product is Scrivener; this product focuses on what you need when writing a complicated document such as a book.
Google docs isn't too bad and brings the whole cloud thing to the table fairly well but I just don't see your average document generating office drone begging their IT department to help them with the switch.
Here is a simple set of examples. Years ago I worked in an office where the secretaries used Word Processors. That is they used machines with big 8 inch floppies that could only do simple 80 characters per line word processing and print it to a printer that was basically a modified typewriter. In the office there was a shiny new IBM machine with Word Perfect and a sort of good quality dot matrix printer. The secretaries were super happy when I got it working and almost immediately were fighting over it. A few years later I witnessed secretaries demanding to upgrade to windows and Word for windows because it could make the new laser printers dance. The key there was that Word Perfect 4.2 for DOS liked to display things in 80 monospaced characters. But a laser printer could do around 132 characters per line and thus a WYSIWYG interface was a huge leap. Keep in mind that all of the above secretaries were very very good at using their previous systems and thus these switches were painful but there was something they wanted so they demanded it and learned it.
So fast forward to the present and present your average Office user with Open Office. What is the win for them? For most people there is only a loss as things like the bad dictionary, and the slightly different interface will just be a pain. Maybe the CFO is happy with the lowered cost of operating but that is not how you win the hearts and minds of the average user.
So the key to getting people to switch over to Open Source non Office environments it to offer them something that they really want. The reality is that they will give up many office features and put up with other pain if they are getting something super cool. So matching MS Office feature for feature is not needed in the winning product.
This is where I come up empty. As I say the simple products like bean are good enough for me. Maybe the solution lay in a cool way to accomplish the work presently being done in the MS office suite using your mobile? Something where all the existing might of MS doesn't get them very far. Plus something truly innovative would no doubt be initially dismissed by MS as "missing the point".
But he is right anyway.
Only 155? WTF?
They have LibreOffce at 1% is that 1 or 2 companies of their sample?
Version 4.1 (incorporating the "experimental features") that Oracle put into OpenOffice is good. In fact, I'd say it's on a par with Office 97 overall. (97 was the acme of Microsoft Office, in my nostalgic recollection).
A lot of bugs were fixed in LO 4.x, and it's possible to use styles effectively. It's still too hard to make, manage, and use templates, though. And there's still no outline mode. But apart from that, it's very good.
It's not the document format. It actually IS the UI. Office 2010 was fucking amazing. I'll say that as a windows, linux (ubuntu, fedora, and zorin os user). It's all about the ribbon yo. If you want linux on the desktop you have to copy that ribbon mentality. if you don't...welll continue listening to the anti microsoft crowd. BTW, the sidebar in OO and LO sucks, just like Windows 8.
what is the point of emulating paper for documents that will never be printed?
The main problem with both suites is that they BOTH suck at reopening files created by the same version of software, same machine and only minutes after saving. The problem is worst when you open the NATIVE (as in ODF) format document on another machine (regardless of OS).
You spend a lot of time formatting a document, just to have it show up like garbage the next time you reopen it.
Instead of cramming more bloatware and useless features, what about both Apache and Libre spending time FIXING the biggest bugs they have today?? If they did that, then maybe people would start using their suites as a competitor to MS Office ... because right now the tool is just not good enough for real usage.
I keep trying to use open office ... and I've tried libre office as well. I have attempted to push my employees to abandon microsoft office repeatedly. But they keep pointing out non-trivial inadequacies with the free office packages which I think could, and should be addressed.
Recently I wanted to print out a spreadsheet with a lot of rows and columns in a compressed format, so it would fit on one page. Microsoft Excel 2003 (a decade ago) handled this perfectly: the printed output was tiny but completely readable. Open office? It was completely unable to handle the task.
I'm not really complaining....it's hard to complain about something people are giving you for free. But it's pretty apparent that Open and Libre have nothing (or at least nothing important) in which they can claim significant superiority over Microsoft Office comparable appplications of 2003. And I think that should be the target. Microsoft office hasn't really advanced in basic function for probably 99% of the user base in 10 years or more. But the free offices STILL haven't caught up.
So that is suggestion #1. Catch up with 2003.
Suggestion #2? Try to move toward an interface which is more in line with the microsoft standard. Or, if that is legally sketchy, at least try to match the functionality in an easily mastered way.
#3? Well, the Open Office takes FOREVER to load. Why??? Why is the code so inefficient and/or bloated? Making Open/Libre BLAZINGLY fast to load by trimming the pork. At least speed could then be owned by one of the free offiice suites, and that would garner a lot of willingness to switch, I think.
A very minor not pick - the standard for law is Word Perfect. You said "share or read documents that other people send to you (such as anything in contracting, law, real estate, medical, etc)".
More significant is the claim "share or READ". I've found that LibreOffice is MORE reliable for reading files from various versions of MS Office then MS Office itself is. For collaborative editing, sending a complex document back and forth, sure you'd want to both use the same version of the same software, if you forgot that much better collaborative platforms are available, such as Google Docs.
For collaboration, working on the same document via Google docs really works better than emailing different versions around and changes. That actually leaves a pretty narrow set of circumstances for which MS Office is actually the best choice. You realize that when a newer version of Word comes out that doesn't handle your existing Word 200x format documents properly.
Only an incompetent idiot would suggest INSECURE garbage like dropbox or copy for anything business.
Both services may be "good enough" for the ignorant consumer user who just want to save some junk so that they can access it anywhere. But for business they are the dumbest thing you can suggest.
,,, alternative?? Google Docs / Apps is just plain garbage that does no better than a basic text editor.
Apparently you do nothing but plain text. Google docs is the worst garbage you can use today to create any document with even basic formatting.
Apparently you do nothing but plain text. Google docs is the worst garbage you can use today to create any document with even basic formatting.
As everything should be. Plain text only.
I do all my work in vi, like everyone else will soon.
Office 97 was buggy as all hell. Anyone else get the Red X of death on your images? Images in general were an absolute joke.
Play Command HQ online
XML based formats from Microsoft are anything but straightforward to implement. So long as the measure of quality is to render MS documents the same way as MSOffice, then it is clear who will score the highest.
You and those who modded you up think you are 'pragmatic', but really you are just drowning in the cool-aid.
Cassandra stuff about "open" document formats doesn't matter to anyone. A few fringe people care about not being able to open 1980s document files in 2038, but no one else does because all they care about is the document they need to produce by tomorrow that no one will probably even read. Money is not important for companies - dropping a few hundred on Office for everyone in the company isn't even a line item on their budget. So there's no way to win this war. You can't sell Open/Libre/Whatever Office on price, because price isn't important. You can't sell it on openness, because no one cares. You can't even sell it as an alternative to the Ribbon/Clippy/etc interface because anyone who cares about actual document production is using LaTeX anyway. The idea of an MS Office compatible open-source program is just plain dead. There's no case to be made that anyone cares about.
'merica... Fuck Yeah!
(Posting anon to keep mods)
If my own org is any benchmark and it might be - corps are just too fucking cheap to upgrade from MSO 2003. So there's little upside to worrying about OO or Libre vs MSO more modern file formats.
This really hasn't been true in a very long time now. WordPerfect does still have some adoption in the legal field, but it has been losing ground to Microsoft Office for over a decade and isn't anything close to the majority even there. The reason it was held on to for so long were for specific features like track changes and using templates and macros (rarely in law do you start from a blank document, it's always a form you are filling out details in) and courts would require documents to be in a specific format for some of those features. As time has moved on though, Word replicated those features (poorly perhaps, but they still are there) and courts started to make deals with Microsoft to get discounts.
It might very well work better. Assuming the order for PCs is similar to what happened on Unix then we would expect a progression (each step taking many years) of:
1) Mostly commercial software on commercial OSes
2) Mostly free software on commercial OSes
3) Mostly free software on free OSes
To shift from 2 to 3 requires the makers of the remaining commercial applications to support the shift in operating systems. With Microsoft making lots of money on their server products (especially on enterprise) and Office products they might be willing to be less protective of their desktop OS if they can get more from these other revenue sources. Windows in the cloud makes possible a shift from 2 to 3 the same way that SCO based Unix solutions creating Linux variants made possible a shift for the Unix community in the 1990s and early 2000s.
"Forrester's Office 2013 And Productivity Suite Alternatives surveyed 155 Forrester clients that use Microsoft Office,..."
(emphasis so very much mine)
breaking news, people who use Office, use Office!
http://blogs.computerworld.com/desktop-apps/22995/microsoft-office-squashes-google-apps-open-source-alternatives
Imitation is the wrong game. You can't get in front of your competitor because you have to wait for his move to imitate it subsequently. This is the wrong approach.
Linux / FLOSS needs to invent new shells / user interfaces, new kinds of applications. We have to bring something new to the table. A table full of food is a good comparison. If you meet with friends and family to have a brunch or picknick together. Then if you bring something new and spicy to the table, you will get recognition. But if you just bring with you another cheese, another saucage, people will not recognize it as "new".
My son's school has a "use whatever you want as long as you can collaberate" policy so of course I encouraged my son to use OOo and LO... He found it practically impossible to work with fellow students with Microsoft Office... So unfortunately, it's a non-starter.
What could possibly go wrong?
What is called "sharing" is actually electronic send and read/markup. So LibreOffice has built in PDF Export for that. Why would you want to send your biz partner a document that could easily be edited/changed and misinterpreted (or made fraudulent for quote etc)?
Seen it done many times. Why should we base a document creation and sharing infrastructure based on these kinds of users?
And pretty much none of my clients would even entertain the idea of housing their document workspace with Google, or even Microsoft. I'm talking about industries like legal and medical, where the documents aren't always just basic formatting. If all you need to do is READ a document, then it was probably saved as a PDF in the first place.
By the way, I've only seen Word Perfect installed once in the last 10 years, and even that was only there "just in case" they ran into a really old file or something, and only on one computer. Maybe there are still large sections of the industry that use it daily; I just haven't seen them.
Being there since 3.0
You are correct Google docs has a way to go but the nice mix of cloud, real device, auto-updating folder etc is quite handy. A simple example that doing something different can be quite compelling. Now if they could just take it to the next level...
As a practical matter, you are "locked in" to whatever Office program you use - online or otherwise. OpenOffice is free and open source, but unless you use it company-wide, you will have compatibility issues with whatever the next guy uses. For instance, if you bring your presentation to the conference room and they don't have OpenOffice installed, then you will have problems (yes, you can use PDF but that has limitations for presentations). Yes, there is no excuse for not installing a free program - except that you may not have Admin rights on the machine or other IT issues.
At home we tried to use OpenOffice (actually LibreOffice) exclusively. We struggled, mostly with PowerPoint, but also with Word formatting glitches when collaborating. In the end, I sucked it up and loaded MS Office. My wife simply has to be compatible with the rest of the world - same reason I keep one functioning Windows box around. I can RDP into work, so I don't have that need.
I can totally confirm your compatibility issues with Libre Office / OpenOffice, they destroy formatting of almost all Microsoft Office documents. Have you tried out SoftMaker Office? I use it for two years now, and main reason for buying it after a free trial period was its brilliant interoperability with all kinds of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats. It opens and saves them faithfully without formatting losses. It costs a fraction of Microsoft Office with 3 licenses, free updates and technical support included, and has a comparable scope of features as M$O. You get a free 30-day-trial for Windows or Linux from SoftMaker website.