🤷‍♂️ The relevance of Microsoft Office?

I have to ask myself, what is the relevance of Microsoft Office these days? I don’t have it for my Mac, but I do have it for my office Windows 10 machine. I keep getting flyers offering Office for $30, and even at that price I ask why? Why would I waste that kind of money, especially for the Mac?

I see why people get Outlook, it’s integrated with Exchange. It’s a terrible app, and you’d be better off using just about any other POP client to connect to Exchange, but I see why people use it. I connect to that same Exchange Server with my Mac and the Mail client from 2018 and it works without issue. Email and calendar items come in just fine.

As for the rest, I simply don’t understand. Office had relevance 10-15 years ago. Word was at the front of word processing with its use of fonts and layout. Excel was soaring in popularity. It had all the cool features like SUMIF, and Conditional Formatting.

But, what’s the point of Office these days?

Word is now the most bloated and convoluted word processor I’ve ever seen. Compared to the features and efficiency of Scrivener, it’s unusable for actually writing a document.

Calculating a table is pedestrian, any app that accepts numbers can do it. It’s not the jaw dropping feat it was when VisiCalc hit the streets.

Why haven’t people switched over to one of the many other “Office” variants, specifically LibreOffice?

When only 10% of the Office features are used by 90% of the people, buying Office is throwing money away. Plus, it’s an exercise in frustration, weeding through all the crap to get to the features you want.

If you’re using Excel for some PowerBI action, that makes sense, but if you’re part of the other 90% that loads a sheet of numbers into a table, you’re wasting time and money.

I think I load Excel once a quarter to look at a table someone made, that could have been sent out as a PDF.

In the last two years, I’ve loaded Word twice, and that’s only because it was in .docx format, not because it was some intricate, highly formatted, elaborate Word document.

With all the other capable and cheaper offerings, I don’t see the point of Microsoft Office anymore. Each app is crammed full of features that look neat as bullet items on marketing copy, but they aren’t features anyone needs or uses.

Users would be better off looking for a product that does the job, and does it well, without all the fluff and bloat, rather than using a tool that’s included as part of their “subscription.”