[msravi]

Apart from Excel, isn't google docs or libreoffice a viable alternative?

[alex989]

Depends on what you do. You lose like 85% of the features but I bet most users never touch any on them.

[leshenka]

Lots of documents have to be styled in a very particular way. These rules aren’t laws of physics, they’re made by humans to make other people’s lives more miserable than it’s necessary

Absolute most of the time what is offered by markdown is enough.

When doing my thesis I was asking myself “is it really that important to use 16pt font or 14pt one or this is a made up rule because someone said so many years ago”