Office 365 is very nearly OS agnostic and getting closer daily...
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Office 365 is very nearly OS agnostic and getting closer daily...

I like having options and recently, avoiding Microsoft's buggy Windows updates has been a nice option to have that I have exercised for more than a decade. Of course, running a non Microsoft OS as your daily driver presents some challenges that I use to address by keeping a virtual machine spun up for access to software that would only run on Windows. These days, not so much.

Instead, Office 365 web apps have gotten close enough to the native Windows variants in terms of function and capability to make the differences only matter to folk who are automating functions inside their native Windows Office 365 applications. Today there are exactly two applications for my job left that REQUIRE me to use Windows and they are seldom used. Instead, a bunch of Firefox or Chrome browser windows get me through 99% of my daily tasks.

This has made my prior efforts with Libre Office and Gnome Evolution redundant. Don't get me wrong, both of those application suites do a great job replacing Outlook and most Office applications, but they were always chasing a purposely moving target of Microsoft compatibility bugs which meant the software could NEVER operate as reliably or predictably as the Microsoft equivalent. Now, that is no longer an issue. Yes, there are some differences between the web apps and the Windows native versions, but those differences are rapidly shrinking and because Microsoft owns both solution sets, they can freeze one while chasing development goals in the other. One of the many issues alternative office products have always had was chasing a series of proprietary formats and API functions that Microsoft continued to alter whenever the competition got too close. Microsoft has finally decided to write the OS agnostic office software I've always wanted and that has driven development on projects like Libre Office, Kolab, and Evolution for decades.

It is a shame that this solution IS a Microsoft solution, but better to be rid of the half of their buggy software I can and still have an option for using their office products than to have no options, or much more limited options. Don't get me wrong, Libre Office is an excellent product and is absolutely the best office suite no money can buy. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it will ever become the defacto business office suite tool that Microsoft Office has been and continues to be. It's not that Microsoft's product is better, it's just that the installed user base is several orders of magnitude larger. If you google Office 365 training, you find a plethora of resources both free and paid to the tune of 211 million or so hits. Libre Office training only nets you 38 million hits in comparison. That's very indicative of the uphill battle such software projects face in attempting to compete with Microsoft's Office suite.

If you are absolutely through with Microsoft's endless Windows 10 update snafus you have the option to use a Chomebook, a Mac, an android phone, or nearly any other device where you can get either the Microsoft developed device app or the use the web apps for Office 365 in the browser of your choice. They are getting better daily and enough so that as of last week, my daily driver for Office 365 is now a web browser. I don't miss the desktop applications and am happy to have a portable option that I can use on any of my devices from my inexpensive jail broken Kindle Fire tablet using Google android apps (Amazon's app store is WAY out of date) to a 10 year old laptop running LXDE and Firefox. Your mileage may very and if you are using a bunch of VBA code, your adoption experiment will likely be a short one. For my purposes, the web applications are now more than adequate and have freed me from Windows for 99% of my work.


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