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$O.
You get a free 30-day-trial for Windows or Linux from SoftMaker website.
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As a practical matter, you are "locked in" to whatever Office program you use - online or otherwise. OpenOffice is free and open source, but unless you use it company-wide, you will have compatibility issues with whatever the next guy uses. For instance, if you bring your presentation to the conference room and they don't have OpenOffice installed, then you will have problems (yes, you can use PDF but that has limitations for presentations). Yes, there is no excuse for not installing a free program - except that you may not have Admin rights on the machine or other IT issues.
At home we tried to use OpenOffice (actually LibreOffice) exclusively. We struggled, mostly with PowerPoint, but also with Word formatting glitches when collaborating. In the end, I sucked it up and loaded MS Office. My wife simply has to be compatible with the rest of the world - same reason I keep one functioning Windows box around. I can RDP into work, so I don't have that need.
I can totally confirm your compatibility issues with Libre Office / OpenOffice, they destroy formatting of almost all Microsoft Office documents. Have you tried out SoftMaker Office? I use it for two years now, and main reason for buying it after a free trial period was its brilliant interoperability with all kinds of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats. It opens and saves them faithfully without formatting losses. It costs a fraction of Microsoft Office with 3 licenses, free updates and technical support included, and has a comparable scope of features as M$O. You get a free 30-day-trial for Windows or Linux from SoftMaker website.