As the title says how essential is Microsoft Office to you in current space year?
Time was it was Microsoft Office and a handful of unfortunate cretins using Lotus Notes.
Lotus Notes fortunately went the way of the dodo so it was MS office and their weak thing they gave away with low end consumer computers. Some domain specific things (usually high end business or legal, maybe a handful of web things) might have had their own custom setups for certain things but different matter there. You also got desktop publishing vs MS office for as anybody that has ever tried to place an image or three in Microsoft word will tell you is often a nightmare.
In the business side of things if you were not using full fat Outlook from Microsoft to do email and calendar you either had something very custom or were not playing at all in business.
There were a handful of crayon eaters (mac users) during that time that tried to send me whatever Apple office program was a thing there.
Open Office (these days most will probably go with the Libreoffice fork that the sale of Sun Microsystems to Oracle caused to happen) slowly got the ball rolling and was heavily sold on cross compatibility with Microsoft formats, today, and for quite a while already, it might even be better at older MS office versions/formats than current MS office is. Similarly WINE (the program most use to run Windows software on Linux) and the ability thereof to handle MS office.
Both Gnome and KDE (the big two Linux full fat desktop environments kind of then and sort of to this day) had their own desktop office setups, not sure anything really ever used them while libre/open office was a thing, though gnumeric had a measure of popularity in some circles (it was quite easy to get standalone where libreoffice/openoffice were geared more towards full installs clocking several hundred megs that bothered really lightweight things that might want to boot from CD or even business card CD).
Throughout most of that then kids that were taught IT, often aided by "generous" donations from Microsoft themselves, were often taught MS office for complete cretins and not how to properly use it, never mind something actually useful like programming; it has been said the greatest failure of the education system from at the latest 1990 onwards has been that not every kid knows programming, at least to basic levels, like they might know maths. I don't necessarily disagree (related http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ ) and it will be something future generations look back on in shock and awe over, possibly up there with people not knowing how to feed themselves.
Google came out with an online only office program that famously featured collaboration a bit later than some of the things above, at this point its gmail email service was no longer invite only and while maybe not the juggernaut it is today was definitely a major player. Its MS compatibility was worse than the Libreoffice and while collaboration was a thing for many years before then this was sign in with gmail and go from there (give me convenience or give me death as a great album title once read). However the ability to keep it within the google ecosystem means it has clawed its way to prominence, to the point MS came out with a counter offer (several years too late for some) in the form of office 365 that is MS office but online, and more than once have I heard of high end IT jobs going to the one that did a google docs access grant to a CV/resume over the conventional email it and hope approach as it shows IT savvy apparently (and to be fair it is better than the utter mangling that I have seen from job agencies and probably handily dodges the oxygen thieves that are HR departments). They have also since added support in the same sorts of UI and whatnot for their website hosting features, which in addition to the email thing actually makes it a complete setup if you trust your data to google/alphabet.
Today I don't even have a cracked version on my many computers, most of my clients don't have it (or only have a single install "just in case"), I have used libreoffice for years at this point, and most of my big documents are written in LyX which is frontend for the latex programming/markup language that most big publishers and science journals go in for where possible.
If I am asked a question more than any other it is usually "can you edit this PDF" (PDF printers also being a popular thing for me to install during that, and de facto method of dodging MS incompatibility between systems).
The few clients that get me to do anything with MS office are usually people that really came to depend upon it in its heyday, and might be the remaining examples of one of the truisms of MS office -- "nobody uses more than 10% of the functionality of MS office, however uses a different 10%". In my case a client does a mail merge as a foundational part of their business once a year that I get dragged in to help oversee. I have helped a few kids with the learning from home thing as well and a lot of those are not even using it.
At lot of things that once were custom programs, or expensive custom templates for things, are today rendered as websites as well which is nice (even more so now web java and flash seemed to have died a death, activex being a distant memory).
To that end I am back to the premise of/main question of the thread -- how essential is MS office to you these days? Any observations you wish to add are also welcome.
Time was it was Microsoft Office and a handful of unfortunate cretins using Lotus Notes.
Lotus Notes fortunately went the way of the dodo so it was MS office and their weak thing they gave away with low end consumer computers. Some domain specific things (usually high end business or legal, maybe a handful of web things) might have had their own custom setups for certain things but different matter there. You also got desktop publishing vs MS office for as anybody that has ever tried to place an image or three in Microsoft word will tell you is often a nightmare.
In the business side of things if you were not using full fat Outlook from Microsoft to do email and calendar you either had something very custom or were not playing at all in business.
There were a handful of crayon eaters (mac users) during that time that tried to send me whatever Apple office program was a thing there.
Open Office (these days most will probably go with the Libreoffice fork that the sale of Sun Microsystems to Oracle caused to happen) slowly got the ball rolling and was heavily sold on cross compatibility with Microsoft formats, today, and for quite a while already, it might even be better at older MS office versions/formats than current MS office is. Similarly WINE (the program most use to run Windows software on Linux) and the ability thereof to handle MS office.
Both Gnome and KDE (the big two Linux full fat desktop environments kind of then and sort of to this day) had their own desktop office setups, not sure anything really ever used them while libre/open office was a thing, though gnumeric had a measure of popularity in some circles (it was quite easy to get standalone where libreoffice/openoffice were geared more towards full installs clocking several hundred megs that bothered really lightweight things that might want to boot from CD or even business card CD).
Throughout most of that then kids that were taught IT, often aided by "generous" donations from Microsoft themselves, were often taught MS office for complete cretins and not how to properly use it, never mind something actually useful like programming; it has been said the greatest failure of the education system from at the latest 1990 onwards has been that not every kid knows programming, at least to basic levels, like they might know maths. I don't necessarily disagree (related http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ ) and it will be something future generations look back on in shock and awe over, possibly up there with people not knowing how to feed themselves.
Google came out with an online only office program that famously featured collaboration a bit later than some of the things above, at this point its gmail email service was no longer invite only and while maybe not the juggernaut it is today was definitely a major player. Its MS compatibility was worse than the Libreoffice and while collaboration was a thing for many years before then this was sign in with gmail and go from there (give me convenience or give me death as a great album title once read). However the ability to keep it within the google ecosystem means it has clawed its way to prominence, to the point MS came out with a counter offer (several years too late for some) in the form of office 365 that is MS office but online, and more than once have I heard of high end IT jobs going to the one that did a google docs access grant to a CV/resume over the conventional email it and hope approach as it shows IT savvy apparently (and to be fair it is better than the utter mangling that I have seen from job agencies and probably handily dodges the oxygen thieves that are HR departments). They have also since added support in the same sorts of UI and whatnot for their website hosting features, which in addition to the email thing actually makes it a complete setup if you trust your data to google/alphabet.
Today I don't even have a cracked version on my many computers, most of my clients don't have it (or only have a single install "just in case"), I have used libreoffice for years at this point, and most of my big documents are written in LyX which is frontend for the latex programming/markup language that most big publishers and science journals go in for where possible.
If I am asked a question more than any other it is usually "can you edit this PDF" (PDF printers also being a popular thing for me to install during that, and de facto method of dodging MS incompatibility between systems).
The few clients that get me to do anything with MS office are usually people that really came to depend upon it in its heyday, and might be the remaining examples of one of the truisms of MS office -- "nobody uses more than 10% of the functionality of MS office, however uses a different 10%". In my case a client does a mail merge as a foundational part of their business once a year that I get dragged in to help oversee. I have helped a few kids with the learning from home thing as well and a lot of those are not even using it.
At lot of things that once were custom programs, or expensive custom templates for things, are today rendered as websites as well which is nice (even more so now web java and flash seemed to have died a death, activex being a distant memory).
To that end I am back to the premise of/main question of the thread -- how essential is MS office to you these days? Any observations you wish to add are also welcome.