Re: Blaming North Korea?
So what happens when you need to open a very formatted MS Office documents. At some point or other a customer or supplier will send one over that can't be opened very well by OOo or Libre Office and you are back to square one.
Part of what is mandatory training for our people is understanding the concept of styles in word processors, and the notion that a word processor is not DTP. This whole nonsense about "not looking the same" only came about because people started to use word processors as layout tools without the smallest notion of what that entails - naturally enthusiastically encouraged by Microsoft as it created another lock-in of their users, and even provided pressure to upgrade (or did you really think that subsequent versions of Word formatted differently by accident?).
For a start, we focus on content, not layout, so we disabuse new staff quickly from such notions, which they may have picked up in previous employment. Next, we teach them about styles, why they exist and the massive benefit in using them over localised formatting. For a letter it's less important, but if you get into reports over 10 pages it is VITAL that users know the difference between structure, content and formatting. In other words, we teach them document creation and editing from a publishing perspective, which removes any dependency on Microsoft Office. It also helps people understand Apple's "Pages" in the unlikely event they would want to try that, because that's actually DTP with word processing added - the reverse of MS Word - which makes it harder for beginners to use than it ought to be (which is why Numbers is even weirder: that's DTP with a spreadsheet in it, which doesn't work for most people).
That said, there IS a valid argument for MS Office, and that is for people who use very complex Excel spreadsheets. However, we don't have those because of our auditing requirements. Anything that complex is costly, complex to maintain and hard to audit which conflicts with the transparency demands of our business model.
When we interface with customers, we tend to work with content. If a customer needs a Microsoft editable document instead of the PDFs we tend to export, it means we're working on content. Worst case, we'll install LibreOffice for them. LO is free and it's platform independent which means it renders on all platforms the same, provided you have the right fonts available - and that's a matter of embedding them in the document using "File - Properties - Font" and ticking the 'embed fonts in document' box.
We're old hats at IT - we've seen all the tricks MS has used over the years to further people's addiction to its product. Once you have seen through that, it gets very hard to trust them any further and the upside of a desire to do without is that it saves you a lot of grief, time and resources. That it saves money is just a bonus, but our business is based on trust and Microsoft blew that years ago.