Since I have set up OnlyOffice atop of NextCloud a few weeks ago, I have been testing it's features, functionality, stability and overall performance and today I can say I am pretty pleased with what I have found.
The collaborative functions of spreadsheets works pretty well. It serves as a drop-in replacement for the members of team that is used to a desktop type spreadsheets application like Excel, but with collaboration. Sensing a file as an attachment when anyone makes changes is tedious and there is no version history and generally no easy way to solve branching conflicts.
I have not tested anything related to editing documents yet, because for text, there is markdown on my Gitea server, but I could guess it could work at least as good as the spreadsheets, given the fact that the document editing is less complex of the two.
What motivated me today to write this post was the use of the slides
application of OnlyOffice. Especially it's ability to work with .pptx
files made with PowerPoint. Opening .pptx file renders the file pretty
close, if not exactly like the PowerPoint application. Saving the
presentation in .pptx makes no problems either - the other side using
PowerPoint repeatedly reported no problems.
What strikes me the most is how unknown among the general population this
product is. Everyone knows the main desktop contenders I have already
mentioned, then some people know G-Suite products, some other know
applications shipped with MacOS. Then even less people know
OpenOffice/LibreOffice (these tend to have more problems with the .pptx,
but their performance is still pretty impressive). Almost no one knows WPS
office, and somewhere at the tail of this list is the OnlyOffice. It is a
shame because it is very well made. Hopefully it gets more traction and
coverage.