I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to bet that there are sophisticated mail merge features in Office that don't exist in LibreOffice. The other major killer feature that I'm aware of in Office is the track changes feature. There are work flows that absolutely depend on that for cooperative editing and sign-off.
You can do these things other ways, but once the workflow is entrenched it would be really hard to move people to something else. If you've never seen some of the insane mail merges that people do, you might think it would be trivial to implement, but alas it is not.
Having said those things, it's been quite a while since I touched a word processor (5 years or so). When I last used Libre Office there were some other obscure bugs/features that made me want to throw it out the window. The main one was the way it formats multi-lingual text. If you try to write text that switches between roman and asian fonts, good luck in keeping the baseline in place. I made an attempt to convince people to change the idiotic way it is done (by shrinking the font size!) but had no luck.
I'm not a fan of Office either for the record, but I can see why some people do not want to change.
Curious about the font issue... I've never tried to use Asian and Roman glyphs on one line before. But multilayout is a bit of a mess and is constantly being worked on.
> The other major killer feature that I'm aware of in Office is the track changes feature.
This is by far the worst "feature", it's a plague that management enforces on its employees mainly not knowing any better or just being plain ignorant. As you said this comes down to unwillingness to change and learn something new. In most cases using plain text format like asciidoc/asciidoctor with some version control system would be enormous improvement.
I am a government attorney by day and a hobby programmer at night. There is absoloutely no way you are going to get any significant number of office workers to use asciidoc and a VCS.
It's hard to even get a lot of people trained in Word. The agency has training classes when a new version is installed--which is once every few years. People struggle with stuff like the ribbon. To use asciidoc and a VCS people would have to start from scratch training wise. Not gonna happen.
I routinely format sizable documents and have to collaborate on them. Word is an abomination and I hate it. From a technical standpoint other tools are far superior. But a bunch of office workers are not going to learn anything else. It would not be worth the effort. Since MS has no incentive to improve Word I grit my teeth and accept that I will have to deal with its garbage.
