> For basic things yes. For more advanced features, I can't think of any competitor.
For features above the basic level, Microsoft Office is far from being an alternative as well. For example, try to reformat the figure numbering scheme, or add an appendix to an Microsoft Word document. Very basic stuff, and yet Microsoft Word fails to offer a sane option to do so.
Microsoft's offerings are only perceived as being above adequate because people don't know better.
Most of my troubles with word have to do with most of the properties of the items on the document being invisible. You are dealing with invisible page breaks, invisible margins, invisible objects, etc.
What would be really powerfull is a dual markup/WYSIWYG UI, like WPF in visual studio. Editing xml attributes on a markup is way more efficient than trying to guess on what you clicked and then going to menus and nested sub menus. But typing raw xml is not fun, you want to be able to type in the document directly. And you don't want to expose the markup to unsophisticated users. The markup should be way more defensive than a text editor. It should not allow you to place a node where that type of node is illegal. It should make autocomplete adds the mandatory features when typing a new node (like the closing tag, the mandatory attributes, etc). Otherwise we will spend our time dealing with corrupted documents.
Same for powerpoint, which in my opinion has pretty much converged with word. Most decks created are not on screen presentation but rather rich visual text documents, just text document with a page orientation that fits modern screens.
What would be really powerfull is a dual markup/WYSIWYG UI, like WPF in visual studio
WordPerfect had this in the '80s. It's a conventional word processor, but you could press the "Reveal Codes" function key and get a split-screen. The lower half would show all the markup. You could see and delete a tag explictly, and its matching one would also go away. Though of course, the markup was not indented.
My mother, -- a secretary -- used it all the time. But when she met other secretaries who came from an MS-Word backround, they hated the very existence of the feature. I think the last few editions of WP removed it (in order to cargo cult Word?).
Word has had that for a long time. In modern ribbon-interface Word versions, it's in the Home-Paragraph section, top right icon ("paragraph mark"). Additionally you can/should toggle field code display with Alt-F9.
This has been in Word since, I think, Word for Windows 2.0 (circa 1992, for Windows 2.11). It might have also been in the previous DOS-based Word versions that co-existed with DOS-based WP (but since I used both, I can't always tell which features were in which).
Maybe not markup language, but the idea is to show the markup. To get a paragraph break, you still hit Return and don't try to type that end-of-paragraph marker.
The field codes are more like an actual language; you can insert a field and then type the content in it.
> Most of my troubles with word have to do with most of the properties of the items on the document being invisible. You are dealing with invisible page breaks, invisible margins, invisible objects, etc.
"The Reveal Codes feature, imperfectly imitated much later in Microsoft Word, is a second editing screen that can be toggled open and closed at the bottom of the main editing screen. It was especially beloved of those who were faced with Microsoft Word, which had at the time no similar feature. The codes for formatting and locating text are displayed, interspersed with tags and the occasional objects, with the tags and objects represented by named tokens. The scheme makes it far easier to untangle problems than with styles-based word processors, and object tokens can be clicked with a pointing device to directly open the configuration editor for the particular object type, e.g. clicking on a style token brings up the style editor with the particular style type displayed."
Still, in the corporate world most people do not have LibreOffice, but they do have Microsoft Word.
And in very many cases they can't even install software themselves, as the computer is managed by the IT/IM organisation. The cost of license is negligible in this context; the actual cost comes from managing something non-standard.
Yes, you or me don't like it but it's the fact in many corporations, government organisations and even educational institutions.
For features above the basic level, Microsoft Office is far from being an alternative as well. For example, try to reformat the figure numbering scheme, or add an appendix to an Microsoft Word document. Very basic stuff, and yet Microsoft Word fails to offer a sane option to do so.
Microsoft's offerings are only perceived as being above adequate because people don't know better.