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I feel like the biggest blocker to modern adoption of LibreOffice is the inability to collaborate in ways that Google Docs enables. Are there open-source implementation of Docs, even poor ones?
Yes: https://cryptpad.fr/
Given how precious and valuable time is I don't really get the aversion to using Microsoft or something similar. Pricing has come down so much that it's less than people spend on coffee. If you are working on something worthwhile it doesn't seem worth the effort to avoid using mainstream, productive and cheaply available commercial software.
For majority of users the features office provides is a waste of their time.
Since you are a start-up and thus likely seeking an exit at some point, I wouldn't recommend it. Spending 10 USD per user/month on Microsoft 365 is a small investment but it gives most users instant familiarity with the tools and provides you with tools for collaboration (drafting contracts for instance). I don't think you can save money if you look at training effort alone. In the worst case you will be seen as hard…
Use the thing everyone knows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or to run on MacOS without crashing.
Huh? I use LibreOffice frequently on macOS without any crashing at all. Is this a common issue?
And before anyone chimes in, no, LaTeX (or Markdown, etc.) would not be appropriate for these projects due to the mental overhead I'd have myself. I'm a visual person, I need to see what it looks like as I work and adjust with immediate visual feedback, and that visual aspect is often critical to the final product.
Word is phenomenal even with the missteps and lacking bits, and I pray (ineffectually) that Microsoft will eventually makes a properly compatible version for me that isn't plagued with the issues and feature disparities the SPA web versions are.
She recently got a job and has to use Office but her LibreOffice experience hasn't set her back.
Don't let the naysayers stop you.
I have a similar use case (plus add in cafes where I'd rather not be on their wifi or my own mobile data). It amazes me how many company IT people I've spoken with over the years who just don't comprehend some people work without being connected to the internet 100% of the time.
Dropbox remains my solution there. I'm also MS Office - too much interaction of documents with my clients to try anything else.
Never had success with it, being 97% as good as Microsoft Office isn't the same as being Microsoft Office. Formatting issues when sharing documents, tables that get blown out, looks kind of amateur sending those messed up documents to others unfortunately.
I still have a pretty nightmareish template of styles that started off life in Word 9x and still going strong. It was for ISO9001 docs and includes three layers of table styles alone. Our ISO9000/27000 systems are all on Mediawiki these days but that template still works fine.
There are some jolly exciting bugs in all software but I suspect you are not an actual LO user.
For text, Markdown with inline semantic HTML if necessary and CSS stylesheets if needed is better, since it properly separates style and presentation unlike word processors.
For modelling, Jupyter-like notebooks are much better than spreadsheets since they properly label objects, don't make everything a 2D grid, and use a proper programming language.
For data, databases are better than spreadsheets.
Presentations are just documents, so there is no reason to use separate software.
For drawing you can use Inkscape and Gimp.
For collaboration you can use normal distributed version control like Git (with solutions like self-hosted Gitlab).
Since you are a start-up and thus likely seeking an exit at some point, I wouldn't recommend it. Spending 10 USD per user/month on Microsoft 365 is a small investment but it gives most users instant familiarity with the tools and provides you with tools for collaboration (drafting contracts for instance). I don't think you can save money if you look at training effort alone. In the worst case you will be seen as hard…
Yeah, I am curious why the OP is wanting to avoid Microsoft here. It is one thing if you just want to use open source and maintain that ethos, but if the reason is to save money it makes no sense. Spending $400 a month for a 40 person startup is going to be a negligible cost. If it adds even a few hours a month of extra effort across your entire team, the cost savings are already gone. Use the thing everyone knows.
Style management stands as a particular example. Now you must wade through dozens of unwanted canned styles to find the ones you've set up... if I remember correctly.
For the style mess and other UI regressions that I haven't taken the time to catalog, I switched to LibreOffice. Granted, I don't exchange Office documents with coworkers much. We use (also crappy) Confluence for most documentation; and if I just want to send a document to someone, I export to PDF.
I used to love Word. I used WordBasic to automate not only technical-documentation production, but also to parse and rewrite thousands of SQL routines on a DEC VAX system and save my company weeks of engineering time.
I hate Word now because Microsoft ruined its UI. Oh, and I detest the continual hounding to log into your "Microsoft account." Nobody wants your goddamned account, Microsoft. We all have PLENTY of accounts by now.