For trad pub, sadly, until the publishing industry moves off of Microsoft products, some version of Word will always be needed. Agents and publishing houses almost exclusively swap edit notes as tracked Word docs.
I do know (personally) a clutch of name-authors who have successfully moved track-change Word docs to flavours of Open Office (while drafting remains almost entirely Scrivener)
(Personal note: I really, really dislike Word. But I wrote my first five unpublished novel-length projects in Word, on Windows. Scrivener (Mac+iPad) changed my world when it came to writing. 10 projects later… I would not want draft anywhere else.)
I have to respectfully disagree with that. Pretty much every word processor out there can open a Word doc. Pretty much every spreadsheet programme out there can open Excel documents.
The organisation I work for switched from MS Office to Google Suite a while back, basically because our CTO had a beef with MS, and Google were on a discount-to-buy-market-presence kick at the time. They then had to reinstall MS Office on everyone’s machines (in addition to the Google Suite stuff they’d already bought licenses for) because the workforce was constantly complaining that pretty much everything other than MS Office is underpowered for professional work (they were right).
Yep. My co doesn’t use Microsoft anything, not single product (wellll… okay, Github & VScode - the former they bought, and the latter is OpenSource-ish). We are entirely GSuite + Notion based for our docs & formal stuff. We’ve never had a single issue dealing with, or maintaining, external DOCX etc…
For context, I should perhaps point out that the org I work in pretty much does EVERYTHING through 2-10 page briefing docs with strong formatting expectations, and a pervasive “collaborate in the document” culture[1]. If it’s not in a briefing document, it isn’t true. Sometimes even then.