this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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One of the main places windows is used, like it or not, are organizations and companies. Especially small ones. Specially ones that are not in wealthy countries. And the only thing that keeps them from switching to linux is microsoft office. (Most importantly Word, excel).
My company has ~20 people and I would switch them over to linux if it wasn't for word and excel.
While libreoffice is great on it's own, companies send eachother xlsx and docx files. And libreoffice isnt great at reading or writing them. Specially complex ones. I don't think it's much of libre office's fault, but more the shitty incompatible, unstandardized microsoft formats.
Currently I'm the only Linux user in the team, and I constantly advocate Linux, but I know if anybody switches, compatibility with microsoft office is going to be a problem. I can take the risk with the tech team but not the office section (hr, sales, secretary accounting etc.) really.
Microsoft dominance in businesses is part of what's making me think all businesses are in cahoots with each other to make sure the only businesses that are successful are ones that take power away from the public.
Try onlyoffice and slowly try to shift to libreoffice with open document formats. Or just skip that part and move everyone to the web versions of office. Also if you guys are on office 2010, the last time I ran it via wine, it worked completely fine.
No you cannot shift to open document formats because you can't send an odt file to another company. They will not know what it is. In the enterprise world you have to "send them the word" or "the excel".
I'm most case you provably want to just send the document as PDF, don't you? For which use case do you want to send an editable document to another company?
Man I feel you and I know it's just how things are. But I often ask myself the following question: Why are lots of office workers so bad with computers? It's the tool they use for 1/3 of working day in their life. Just like a craftsman should learn to use their tools. No, instead they always act like it's something only tech guys should know about.
An electrician drives around in their van full of their tools. They are expert in their tools, but some can’t even change a tire on the van.
It’s the same with office jobs. You use a bunch of tools on the computer, but the computer isn’t necessarily a part of your tool set, it’s your vehicle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument#Response
Did you try OnlyOffice? I heard it has good compatibility with Microsoft Office's files, it's available on almost every OS, and looks easy to use. However, I'm not sure if you can create very complex documents like with Office.
It's good but not great. The documents will still get messed up and look wierd sometimes.
This is the same thing that keeps my parents on windows. I do agree it’s not libre offices fault