You seem to neglect the fact Office users routinely experience problems with their own documents and programs. Who never had a Word document that, after some heavy editing, refused to load? I have, many times, since the first version of Word for Windows. I've abandoned Office between 2002 and 2008 and, to my surprise, I still had those problems with Word, Project and Outlook (when I had to clean PST files more than once).
At least with Outlook I solved the problem backing up via IMAP to my own server, who kept the mailbox in a very easy to manage maildir folder. The usual Office workaround - opening with OpenOffice and saving back to Office format - never worked for me after 2008 and backups had to be used.
When speaking from your experience its easy to say 'many' users have had problems, just like how I can say I've never had a problem with a word document therefore 'many' users have never had a problem with a word document. :) Not sure what kind of editing you do. haha
In 2008 I was creating a lot of PowerPoint presentations with embedded Excel spreed sheets, and either PowerPoint or Excel crashed on average about every 2 hours. Everyone else in the office had the same problem so it was a huge productivity black hole.
It's not that you could not get it to work, just there was a vary small 'happy path' and doing just about anything else caused something to crash. EX: Open Excel, if Excel is not opened PowerPoint will crash when you try and edit one of these slides.
PS: I suggested just using images and attaching the originals, but the client wanted to be able to resize things / change the graphs titles etc.
Hmm, i don't use many images for Microsoft Word. It's unfortunate that you had problems with it. Word crashing for me is very very rare, but most of what I do is typing and little bits of graphic art, but I think Office has gotten better lately. Just contact that Splines guy with your issues if they still persist.
Most are documents with inserted pictures, pieces of spreadsheets, Visio and Project charts. Insertion and deletion of the non-text elements appeared to significantly increase the chances of creating unreadable documents. Workarounds includes saving under different formats and removing history. I am counting my own problems as well as my closest coworkers.
As with Outlook's PSTs, there were no apparent cause for the corruption - it just happened.
I no longer use Word (back to Linux and LO for work), but I'll keep an eye on the Windows and Mac coworkers and reach you if I hear anyone experiencing these kinds of problems. We also have a consultancy working on a large project with lots of documentation and specs being generated as Word documents with Excel, Project and Visio elements embedded. I'll get in touch with them as I suspect they are the most likely to be hit by problems like the ones I had.
As for the other projects and teams, we have significantly reduced the use of Project as we moved our tracking to Jira and use Confluence to keep almost all project artifacts. Despite the fact we still use Exchange for e-mail, I dropped desktop software and moved completely to OWA, with Evolution doing backups over IMAP into a local maildir rsynced to a durable datastore.
At least with Outlook I solved the problem backing up via IMAP to my own server, who kept the mailbox in a very easy to manage maildir folder. The usual Office workaround - opening with OpenOffice and saving back to Office format - never worked for me after 2008 and backups had to be used.