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Add to SafariWhen comparing Office 365 vs Abiword + Gnumeric + Dia (formerly GNOME Office), the Slant community recommends Office 365 for most people. In the question“What are the best office suites for UNIX-like systems?” Office 365 is ranked 5th while Abiword + Gnumeric + Dia (formerly GNOME Office) is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Office 365 is:
Office 365 is laid out the same way with a similar ribbon interface that will be instantly comfortable to long-time Microsoft Office users.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to transition from MS Office
Office 365 is laid out the same way with a similar ribbon interface that will be instantly comfortable to long-time Microsoft Office users.
Pro Excellent integration and compatibility with MS Office desktop applications
Pro Allows for real-time collaboration
Multiple people can work on the same document at the same time.
Pro Speech to text dictation
Linux never got it together
Pro No installation required
Pro Lightweight
Both AbiWord & Gnumeric are designed with low resource consumption in mind. As such they are great applications for older computers.
Pro Great import/export features
Pro Free and open-source
Pro Straight forward
'Old' style menu structure is lovely to support users.
Pro Multilingual
Over 30 languages are supported.
Pro Collaborative editing
Abiword is able to edit online collaborative documents.
Cons
Con Proprietary
Uses proprietary software.
Con Dependant on having an Internet connection
Con Cloud dependent
Does not edit local files, they have to be synced first.
Con Unusable for business in the EU
Cloud applications are mostly incompatible with the EU general data protection regulation.
Con Has only a fraction of Microsoft Office functionality
Office 365 is not a complete replacement for Microsoft Office. The most advanced functionality still can only be found on the desktop.
Con Expensive
$35/user/mo.
Con Almost abandoned
Very few updates and bug fixes.
Con Default format is only readable with Gnumeric
Gnumeric is able to read/write a lot of file formats including ODS, XLS, XLSX, but it's default .gnumeric format is only readable with Gnumeric.
Con AbiWord has a dated aesthetic
The interface hasn't had a facelift since it's inception in 1998.
Con File interchangability
You may like it or not, but this is an O365 dominated world. And at some time you will need to send somebody the result of your work digitally. Then not being able to share a compatible file format is a pain. Even if your application is great and light (which it is).
