Which proprietary software do you prefer over their open-source alternatives, and why?

mayflower@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 428 points –
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Microsoft Office. I write a lot of documents that require contant citation and updates of sources, comments, etc. I have to review documents, create tables of content etc etc. Even though MS Office is far from perfect in many of these, free alternatives such as Libre or Open Office are just terrible.

Learn to use latex

Yes and no. For stuff like citations: absolutely. For reviewing stuff, the mode to suggest edits in Office (or even Google Docs) is great and doesn't really have equivalent with a proper UI for LaTeX. Yes, you can use PDF comments, but then you need to change the LaTeX document manually.

But that's the whole point. I started exploring it and learning about it and realized that it will take more time than it's worth - by that time I completed it in Word and fixed it's own citation issues manually. I really, really want these to be better than MS Word...but they just aren't there yet.

Yeah, I was going to say Excel. I'm an accountant and I regularly use Excel to its limits. Honestly nothing else comes close, though I dearly wish it did. I run Linux on my desktop and I have both libreoffice and wps installed and will use them occasionally depending on what I'm doing, but if it's anything serious I go to a Windows machine with Excel.