Sadly I can’t. The only approved software I can use is Office on Windows.

I only use LibreOffice and don’t tell anyone. It has only been a problem once when a client wanted me to use Word so she could keep track of changes. As a freelancer I wasn’t about to go and use Word for one client. I just submitted the work as a PDF and they never brought it up again.

I haven’t really looked into it, but what are the options for VBA macro writing in excel alternatives?

Most of the time I use MarkDown and export as PDF, if I need more complex layouts I’ll use Libre Office

I don’t owe my co-workers any explanation.

“Ewww, Windowsssss!”

Pinch my nose, spray my fingers with hand sanitizer, then walk away from their desk.

Thanks to the behaviour of the American Government the past year, it has become really easy. Everybody suddenly understand and respect the argument of boycotting american products and software.

I practically never need to. I’ll find a way to make things work one way or another.

I don’t. I just export to PDF if I need them to see formatting the same.

I will use whatever they will provide me. If i am to use Microsoft products, so be it. Not only that, but I don’t give a flying fuck for the company’s data i work for. They asked for it 🙃

I teach, so trying to adjust old ppts for lecture got a little weird because it turned the bulletpoints into mailboxes, and equation formulas are done completely differently so libre just makes them uneditable (a picture?).

When things got wonky in lecture though I managed just fine. My students are much worse, they open shit in non-MS apps all the time (.notes for takehome exams, or like, keynote, whatever) and fuck up formatting all the time, often without even realizing it. (I do provide PDF alternatives at least). Explaining I use libre really easy in that case, lol.

The better question asked is:

How do they explain to you that they don’t?

I don’t.

Depends on how long you’ve been working. After some amount of time like a year or two you can drop it into a conversation when helping a person “oh, I actually use libre office so I’m not sure where MS put that, let me check” and if they want more info they’ll ask. Sometimes they might be surprised that you can actually do this stuff on Linux.

I would never tell them how I do stuff unprompted. If they ask I’ll vaguely tell them because I suck at lying but no specifics.