With respect: you're a biologist, and your experience with backoffice software requirements is probably the same as my experience with biochemistry: near total ignorance.

There are exabytes of documents in Microsoft formats that can be at best "read" with a significant level of data corruption in other products (formatting errors). Writing them back out with shredding them is hit & miss at best. Entire MS products have no equivalent at all that can open their file formats, such as MS Access and Power BI.

Word isn't just paragraphs, italic, and bold.

Excel has features you probably have never even heard of, but people use at scale. Things like tabular data connections using OData. It's the front-end for SQL Server Analysis Services. It has the Mashup columnar engine from Power BI built in to it. Etc, etc, etc.

These things are massive products, with deep integrations across each other, third-party software, third-party plugins, cloud products, and on and on.

There's easily several million man-years of effort sunk into the Microsoft Office ecosystem.

Switching costs are not a matter of failing to "somehow convince" people to switch.

The switching costs are on the order of trillions of dollars, not a decision to be taken lightly.

Here's some critical points everybody normally ignores in these discussion:

1) Partial switching doesn't help, because now you have two problems!

2) Everyone else has to switch too. Google Workspace people were laughing during the Outlook outage, eeeeexcept... they couldn't send or receive emails either -- because their business partners, vendors, and customers likely used Outlook.

3) The alternative with the same features, same level of integration, same commercial support, etc... is the same thing, with the same problems, but just a different brand.

You can't escape the reality of this, it is what it is, there's no nirvana that we could all achieve if we "just" did something "simple".

Big tech is here to let us down