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While businesses definitely don't need all those features, I guess most use it for compatibility sake - to work with existing files and to collaborate with others who use MS Office. What's current state of open-source alternatives that can work with the MS file formats?
Haven't opened Microsoft Office in I think 7 years. Haven't also used Apple's Office suite either - it is just Google Docs/presentations/sheets/drive for everything. I feel my life is better. They were massive installs and I prefer to have everything online all the time anyhow - just safer and more convenient.
If you have absolutely nothing in your documents that you wouldn’t mind giving the FBI to read without a warrant or probable cause, it is possible you are wasting your one and only life.
A good example would be anyone in the state-legal cannabis industry. This is still a federal crime (Schedule 1!), and giving cloud providers (and thus DHS without a warrant thanks to FAA702) concrete detailed evidence of same is, from a criminal liability standpoint, the same thing as mailing the FBI photos of your meth lab with your return address on it.
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Open source... But yeah.. ms won this game
There is no foss competitor to Excel.
For new work that I might have otherwise done in Excel, there are good options. Collabora works. Libre Office works. Google sheets works. And Grist is quite good, and self-hostable.
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Open Office, Libre Office, Only Office to start.
I want to love these, mostly because they're FOSS and Office/Google Spreadsheets seems to get more and more bloated, and subsequently slower. But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts. I'm waiting for some FOSS spreadsheet solution that doesn't just try to copy Office…
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Do you know anyone who does serious financial work in anything besides Excel?
If they do serious financial work I for sure hope they do not use Excel or any other spread sheet tool. It can go wrong so many ways.
Not only that, software nerds are rediscovering that they can build so much in Excel. You don't need an app for everything.
This feels like a dangerous game they're playing. Yes, there is some lock in, but competitors exist and are better than ever. The new "features" they're justifying this with (Copilot) isn't even something that most people want
Can I just get the version without CoPilot for cheaper? Or at all? Likely they'd charge more for it.
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Open source... But yeah.. ms won this game
There is no foss competitor to Excel.
Is there any reason to use Office nowadays except for being able to open documents sent by institutions where secretaries still use Word/Excel/PPT? (universities, etc.)
Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job.
For professionals who use these tools, suggesting they use LibreOffice or something is the equivalent of someone coming to you and suggesting you give up your customized Emacs or Visual Studio Code setup in favor of Notepad++ because they both edit text and highlight code.
Is there any reason to use Office nowadays except for being able to open documents sent by institutions where secretaries still use Word/Excel/PPT? (universities, etc.)
But nothing beats excel or power point.