Microsoft Office is Still Bad (For Collaboration)

This is going to be a little less thought out than my usual writing, more of my in the moment thoughts. The past few weeks I've been giving some presentations for uni classes. Usually I'd take the initiative and set-up a Google Slides or Canva project for my group, but in the most recent one I left it to the others, who created a shared PowerPoint. It'd been a few years since I've used Microsoft Office so I thought it'd be interesting to see if it had improved, and the short answer is not much.

For a bit of context, I grew up using almost exclusively Microsoft Office. Not unusual, as back when I had my first IT classes at school and started using office software at home there weren't any well-known alternatives. Everybody used Office; nobody thought much of it. But near the end of my secondary education my school introduced us to Google Workplace. At first I was pretty skeptical. I also didn't know much about it, I don't think I even realised at that point what it really was. But after a few months of trying it out I was convinced. It wasn't perfect, it did have drawbacks, but the advantages were such that by the start of 2021 I'd moved everything over and more or less stopped using Office and Onedrive.

Fast forward to now, and Powerpoint web/online. First of it, it's laggy: really laggy. Undo and redo feels borderline unusable, and presenting is equally unreliable. Something which I notice a lot is that while it usually has a fast initial load time - opening the editor, starting a presentation - loading is still going on in the background and so parts are non-interactive for quite a while after. It also feels highly prone to breaking. I had some weird cases of text randomly displaying upside before fixing itself, bullet point indenting being broken by adjusting line-spacing, text rendering incorrectly, many flashes of unstyled content, inconsistent keyboard shortcuts/inputs and text justifying, and slide previews not loading properly. Oh, and the save buttons in version history just didn't work. I should stress that most of my experience of using it is in Firefox. I'm acutely aware that Microsoft's apps tend to work significantly worse in non Chromium-browsers - quite a lot more so than Google's - and some, but not all, of these issues were better when I tried it on Vivaldi (especially the lag). But this in and of itself is another pretty significant issue.

But, you might be thinking: "Why not use the desktop app? It doesn't have any of the aforementioned problems". Two reasons, two of the main ones which led me to move away from Office in the first place. Firstly, Office desktop, and more generally Office, is not universal. It only has full support on Windows and Mac, and is only available for those who pay¹ (a subscription, if you want to be on the latest version). This has caused me some serious headaches in the past with features which are partially or not at all implemented on the non-desktop versions. I primarily use desktop Linux nowadays, and a significant and growing number of people also use it, ChromeOS, or even Android or iOS instead of Windows or Mac. If you want to make a universal app (rather important for collaboration), you either need to ship fully-functioning native apps to at least all of these platforms, or (preferably) make a fully-featured web app - which has the significant advantage of working without any additional installing and set-up. Microsoft does neither. But even if you do use the desktop app, it sucks for collaboration. Changes from others are synced sporadically (you have to manually click to download them while editing), and serious issues with conflicts and re-adding old/changed parts can occur. Web-first tools like Google Workplace are typically available everywhere (I have on occasion used the desktop web app on my phone for things not supported in the mobile apps), fully-featured (while it doesn't support absolutely everything that other office suites do, there's nothing which only works, or only works well, on some operating systems/devices), and have near-perfect frictionless collaboration.

To be fair to Office web, there are a couple things it does do well. It works properly offline, for example. Google Workplace only does if you have their Chrome web store extension installed, which only works on (some) Chromium browsers. Office online just uses standard web technologies, ironically in this case largely created by people at Google. And as mentioned, Office online is also quite a lot faster to start-up, it feels more responsive in that sense, whereas Google Workplace definitely takes a beat. And honestly, despite what it sounds like, I'm not trying to advocate for Google. They pioneered (or more accurately bought other companies who pioneered) real-time collaboration, and they make (almost) everything free and available to everyone, and that's amazing. But I don't think we should move over from one big tech monopoly to another. As with any critically-important tool, we should all try and be familiar with a few different options, and generally try to prefer those which are free/open-source and less likely to be enshittified and degraded in the future. I personally use LibreOffice sometimes if I don't need collaboration, and while it's certainly got a dated UI, it does work well for offline use (and it's incredible fast and lightweight), and at some point I'd love to try some of its collaborative Web-based derivatives such as Cordova Office. A lot of students nowadays like Canva, which is quite good and an interesting take on presentation software. As is Prezi. Cryptee's document editor is pretty neat. Or any number of others. Go out there and give them a go: you don't have to, and probably shouldn't, stick to the same old Microsoft monopoly.

As for me, I'll probably return to Office again in a few years to see if it's improved, but I'm doubtful it'll have changed much. Until such a point that it does, I'll be returning to my previous stance of strongly encouraging group collaborative projects to use other tools.