I agree, but it doesn't make Chromebooks useless. Your average user just wants to be able to type and set a few basic formatting options in a WYSIWYG editor, which Google Docs easily provides.
Chromebooks are fine "Mom Machines" most of the time, or fine laptops to stash in your car in case of unanticipated need.
My opinion is that people need to stop attempting to conflate the market of true casuals, served by phones on the low end, tablets on the middle end, and netbooks like the Chromebook on the high end, with the market of serious users needing real desktop operating systems and applications, using laptops on the low end and high-powered desktops on the high end.
They are separate use cases, and we're best served if each segment focuses on itself instead of trying to be all things to all people. Manufacturers seem scared that if they don't provide it all, they'll be obsoleted, but I believe it's just the opposite; there's enough overlap in these markets to share (for instance, I have a smartphone, a tablet, a Chromebook, a real laptop, and multiple big huge desktops; certainly atypical, but normal people are fairly likely to have a smartphone, tablet or Chromebook, and a real laptop, and that's not going to change anytime soon). The paranoia is wasting a lot of our time.
yes, people who need their collection of macros or advanced mail merge are going to have trouble adapting to google docs.
but the original argument in this thread was that chromebooks couldn't do things that "your mother" needed to do. Google docs can't replace all the power-user features of MS Office. but that doesn't make a chromebook unsuitable for everybody.
A number? What are these exactly? I keep hearing people say this, but I can't think of any reasons where I would really need MS Office.
I haven't used Word since Word 97, and I have never come across a use case that Open/LibreOffice, Google docs or Latex couldn't solve for me. I would imagine that the same would apply for most people.
On the other hand, I remember collaborating on many reports using Google docs because that was the only application featuring decent real time multi user editing.
Serious spreadsheet users - the sort who run overnight calculations. For that job, Excel is simply the best there is. These people then make damn sure everyone else has MS Office too.
LibreOffice Calc sucks, but LO know it, and Kohei Yoshida is working very hard to make it not suck. LO 4.2 will be much faster. Then they just need to recreate VBA ...
Than LO? I'm sure there's stuff it does faster. Does it do Excel sheets more compatibly?
Or do you mean better than Excel? If it's better than Excel at the sort of sheet I mean, that's important news for the people who run such sheets - they'd be moving to Linux yesterday.
Gnumeric is better than LO and Excel for calculations. You can use several scripting languages (you can use Python, I use a functional, dynamic, term-rewriting language called Pure), it has more statistical functions built in, and is more accurate than Excel.
Regardless, it shouldn't matter what OS. Gnumeric runs on Windows, and I've had Excel running on Linux w/ Wine...
How is it as a replacement for Excel, though? By which I mean, shove in an OOXML spreadsheet with VBA in it. That is the use case that counts as a "substitute" for Excel for the users I'm talking about.
I personally think it's ridiculous that those are the terms people think in. If it's not exactly the same it's not as good, never mind the actual merits.
Thankfully the world is changing, MS products are no longer as essential as they once were. Excel really is the last holdout...
Technical document preparation. When you're dealing with stuff like tables, graphs, footnotes, appendices... Word makes it easier. I know there's probably a way to reproduce everything in Google Docs, but it's not as easy/automatic.
I don't recall printing anything else than boarding passes in years. Documents nowadays are written on a computer, and also shared and consumed on a computer.
And even those only when flying outside of Europe, as here we can use QR Codes on smartphone screen at the gate.
Word has a competitor called Google Docs that works just fine in the browser.
Desktop-only apps need to adapt or get left behind.