Comparing Office Suites
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@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
@jmoore said in Comparing Office Suites:
@Carnival-Boy said in Comparing Office Suites:
've been using Office for years and I'm still pretty rubbish with it (as in only using about 20% of its features),
i feel like this is the norm everywhere. No one uses much of the Office features. So why are people paying for all those features their organization wont use?
It's not about the features anymore, Office hasn't added a feature than 95% of people (or more) have needed in more than 10 years. The reason it keep selling - entrenchment - it's what they already had/have.
Right.... "failure to evaluate business needs".
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The main reason we didn't switch 10+ years ago was our old Word docs looked like shite in OO. updating them all wasn't worth it in management's mind (even though they never got a quote to do such an updating).
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@jmoore said in Comparing Office Suites:
@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
Every picked up a new office suite?
Yes this is absolutely correct. Most Office suites are all very similar. Sure they have a few unique points here and there but when I tried zoho docs it really was like 10 min to cover everything. Libre, OnlyOffice, gsuite, wps, are all basically the same in my opinion. Takes very little time to learn a new one.
Yeah, I've played with WPS and OnlyOffice, too. And both were "usable on the spot" without any extra setup time, too. These days the interfaces are so intuitive I can move between pretty much all of them transparently.
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@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
The main reason we didn't switch 10+ years ago was our old Word docs looked like shite in OO. updating them all wasn't worth it in management's mind (even though they never got a quote to do such an updating).
While their impression might have been correct... more "didn't evaluate".
Likely wouldn't take much, since MS Office does the conversion. And so does Zoho, and others.
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@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
The main reason we didn't switch 10+ years ago was our old Word docs looked like shite in OO. updating them all wasn't worth it in management's mind (even though they never got a quote to do such an updating).
Never tried it, but there are some scripts and tools out there.
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LibreOffice has its own conversion tools, too....
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@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
The main reason we didn't switch 10+ years ago was our old Word docs looked like shite in OO. updating them all wasn't worth it in management's mind (even though they never got a quote to do such an updating).
While their impression might have been correct... more "didn't evaluate".
Likely wouldn't take much, since MS Office does the conversion. And so does Zoho, and others.
What do you mean?
I'd have to test Zoho to see if it would work today or not...
personally, not a fan of Zoho's email interface, but really, that's kinda a last of concerns for me. I know the rest of you hate Outlook's interface, but I like it.
@scottalanmiller I asked you earlier, don't recall seeing a response - does Zoho have a centralized storage location that all uses can access?
or like OneDrive, can a user create a folder, share it with read/write to everyone in the company, and that folder and all it's contents are then available to the staff?
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@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
@scottalanmiller I asked you earlier, don't recall seeing a response - does Zoho have a centralized storage location that all uses can access?
It does, and I don't think that you asked. Used to be Zoho Docs, now Zoho WorkSpaces.
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@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
@scottalanmiller I asked you earlier, don't recall seeing a response - does Zoho have a centralized storage location that all uses can access?
It does, and I don't think that you asked. Used to be Zoho Docs, now Zoho WorkSpaces.
I did on Telegram, just not here.
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@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
personally, not a fan of Zoho's email interface, but really, that's kinda a last of concerns for me. I know the rest of you hate Outlook's interface, but I like it.
I hate GMail's interface. I find Outlooks to be antiquated, but adequate. What I hate about Outlook is how flaky and unreliable it is, making it too costly for any worker deemed employable
If they are worth employing, they are working having working email. -
@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
personally, not a fan of Zoho's email interface, but really, that's kinda a last of concerns for me. I know the rest of you hate Outlook's interface, but I like it.
I hate GMail's interface. I find Outlooks to be antiquated, but adequate. What I hate about Outlook is how flaky and unreliable it is, making it too costly for any worker deemed employable
If they are worth employing, they are working having working email.Sadly - I have to give you this completely - O365 Outlook interface is super flaky.
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Zoho storage can store Word, OpenDoc, Zoho and other file types. Zoho files are "free", no storage space used. You can download a Zoho file in any format that you like (MS Office, OpenDocument, PDF, etc.), but you only need to store it as Zoho. But you can store native formats too, it just uses some of your storage quota. But there is little reason to do so as you get the same features, but better, if you store it at Zoho native.
We converted all of our MS Office and OpenDocument files over to Zoho when we switched. It's been great.
And we share via application links, not by sharing files.
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@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
personally, not a fan of Zoho's email interface, but really, that's kinda a last of concerns for me. I know the rest of you hate Outlook's interface, but I like it.
I hate GMail's interface. I find Outlooks to be antiquated, but adequate. What I hate about Outlook is how flaky and unreliable it is, making it too costly for any worker deemed employable
If they are worth employing, they are working having working email.Sadly - I have to give you this completely - O365 Outlook interface is super flaky.
Not the interface portion, that's decently solid. It's the mail handling under the hood. I guess a little flaky in that it doesn't always display the true status of an email.
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@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
@jmoore said in Comparing Office Suites:
@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
All it takes is a company having Chromebooks, which while still pretty niche, are getting more and more common
Chromebooks are getting extremely popular in schools i will add. I go to local high schools all around to assist in dual credit registration and most schools in this area provide every student with chromebooks.
Yup, and my college age nieces use them. And a friend going back to school (later in life additional professional cert) just bought one. The last couple of years they seem to have exploded in use.
Their marketing has increased and gotten better too.
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@Obsolesce said in Comparing Office Suites:
@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
@jmoore said in Comparing Office Suites:
@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
All it takes is a company having Chromebooks, which while still pretty niche, are getting more and more common
Chromebooks are getting extremely popular in schools i will add. I go to local high schools all around to assist in dual credit registration and most schools in this area provide every student with chromebooks.
Yup, and my college age nieces use them. And a friend going back to school (later in life additional professional cert) just bought one. The last couple of years they seem to have exploded in use.
Their marketing has increased and gotten better too.
And now they run Android and Linux apps. So their capabilities are greatly expanded. And they come in more form factors, too.
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@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
personally, not a fan of Zoho's email interface, but really, that's kinda a last of concerns for me. I know the rest of you hate Outlook's interface, but I like it.
I hate GMail's interface. I find Outlooks to be antiquated, but adequate. What I hate about Outlook is how flaky and unreliable it is, making it too costly for any worker deemed employable
If they are worth employing, they are working having working email.Sadly - I have to give you this completely - O365 Outlook interface is super flaky.
Not the interface portion, that's decently solid. It's the mail handling under the hood. I guess a little flaky in that it doesn't always display the true status of an email.
So your issue with the Exchange back end - not Outlook Online?
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@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
I'd have to test Zoho to see if it would work today or not...
I'm interested in how it goes for you. I didn't have the simple success I was looking for.
I just tried to sign up for a trial account and was unsuccessful. Mostly because if I am going to test a new product that has a demo or trial, I think getting the demo or trial should be the most trivial task of the whole experience. Mine was not.
I may be a jerk, or just stuck in my ways, or be uninterested in learning new products if the existing product isn't broke; in all cases, I have zero tolerance for systems that are difficult from step one.
The difficulty with a lot of hip-new-hurry-to-market systems often comes at different times, and is often not addressed automagically when you run in to the problem.
I liken it to a product designed and built by engineers without any input from the actual users.
With Zoho, just a few minutes ago, I thought I'd trial the Zoho Workplace. I clicked "Try Now", provided the domain portion of my website, not sure why it wants that...., filled out the next form.... and was immediately told my e-mail address cannot be the same as my domain.
No explanation of what they are really looking for, no explanation of how to resolve it, no explanation about why they asked for my website address (I assume they were expecting to resolve my MX record from my website address?).
So, I moved on. Which makes me sad. I was really interested in checking it out.
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@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
personally, not a fan of Zoho's email interface, but really, that's kinda a last of concerns for me. I know the rest of you hate Outlook's interface, but I like it.
I hate GMail's interface. I find Outlooks to be antiquated, but adequate. What I hate about Outlook is how flaky and unreliable it is, making it too costly for any worker deemed employable
If they are worth employing, they are working having working email.Sadly - I have to give you this completely - O365 Outlook interface is super flaky.
Not the interface portion, that's decently solid. It's the mail handling under the hood. I guess a little flaky in that it doesn't always display the true status of an email.
So your issue with the Exchange back end - not Outlook Online?
No, it's with Outlook, but not Outlook's interface.
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@JasGot said in Comparing Office Suites:
@Dashrender said in Comparing Office Suites:
I'd have to test Zoho to see if it would work today or not...
I'm interested in how it goes for you. I didn't have the simple success I was looking for.
I just tried to sign up for a trial account and was unsuccessful. Mostly because if I am going to test a new product that has a demo or trial, I think getting the demo or trial should be the most trivial task of the whole experience. Mine was not.
I may be a jerk, or just stuck in my ways, or be uninterested in learning new products if the existing product isn't broke; in all cases, I have zero tolerance for systems that are difficult from step one.
The difficulty with a lot of hip-new-hurry-to-market systems often comes at different times, and is often not addressed automagically when you run in to the problem.
I liken it to a product designed and built by engineers without any input from the actual users.
With Zoho, just a few minutes ago, I thought I'd trial the Zoho Workplace. I clicked "Try Now", provided the domain portion of my website, not sure why it wants that...., filled out the next form.... and was immediately told my e-mail address cannot be the same as my domain.
No explanation of what they are really looking for, no explanation of how to resolve it, no explanation about why they asked for my website address (I assume they were expecting to resolve my MX record from my website address?).
So, I moved on. Which makes me sad. I was really interested in checking it out.
The whole purpose of Zoho is to host your online email/file storage presense. So I'm guessing they are working from the crazy assumption that you don't have email setup on the domain that you do have a website setup on.
So in this case, they are likely saying - you have to provide a working email address (and they assume the website domain you gave them doesn't have one). it's a bad assumption for sure.
MS gets around this by setting up a @domainname.onmicrosoft.com domain for you when you first sign up.
Since you have an existing site and email hosting, I'm not sure what the best situation would be... yep.. this is a failure on their part.
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@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:
@jmoore said in Comparing Office Suites:
@Carnival-Boy said in Comparing Office Suites:
've been using Office for years and I'm still pretty rubbish with it (as in only using about 20% of its features),
i feel like this is the norm everywhere. No one uses much of the Office features. So why are people paying for all those features their organization wont use?
Exactly. I've been using it since one of the initial releases and I'm neither proficient in it nor using anything special.
We're showing our age. I've used Word and Excel for DOS. Preferred WordPerfect and Lotus1-2-3 back then.
OnlyOffice has been great for me in the recent era. LibreOffice was more of a pain, the formatting always seemed to be just a little off.
