alt Hacker NewsFWIW, LLMs make this 95% less of a problem.
It’s possible to create read-only viewers for Word, Excel & PowerPoint files that are more-or-less pixel accurate on 99% of files, so long as the user has the correct fonts installed (or, in the case of the PowerPoint, they come embedded).
There's plenty of viewers, I think even MS used to offer free MS Office readers.
We need interoperability between MSOffice and everything else. But were stuck with MSOffice because even the so called open format is not well documented.
MS Office is the last roadblock for Linux desktop. It's literally the last thing holding back many users from moving to anything else.