alt Hacker NewsIt's easy to think that Word's functionality is what you see on the Ribbon, mentally map that to Google Docs, and think that the latter can replace the former. But Word is extremely deep. The templating and style sheets allow for a level of fine grained control that doesn't exist in alternatives. There are features that exist purely for the legal market, like Table of Authorities, and customizable line numbering and hyphenation.
Maybe one day there'll be a product to replace Word, but it won't succeed by claiming to be a generalist replacement but only as a niche product that solves a particularly painful problem for lawyers and then expands over time to capture more use cases.
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Even basic features are missing from Word competitors. Not a single one competently handles spellchecking multiple languages in the same document.
I swear Google Docs also used to do a better job of replicating Word's ribbon, and has slowly pruned it of a lot of features that are individually niche, but cumulatively very important.
I haven't used Microsoft office products in more than a decade. And Windows in more than 15 yrs.
Google offers so many things free out of the box. And for serious spreadsheet sort of work, I use numpy.
Google pretty much won the Office software war.
I completely agree.
On the Google Docs front — I wrote specifically about its viability as a Word successor in an earlier post, "Why Lawyers Will Never Use Google Docs".
https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/why-lawyers-will-never...