I made the switch to libreoffice a few years back. For simple word documents, it works well.
It breaks down when you are using something like Excel with complex macros/calculations. This is why most companies continue to use Microsoft products.
It also becomes tricky when you need to interoperate or integrate with companies that have chosen to use either GSuite or LibreOffice rather than O365.
With that said, I'm glad these alternatives exist even though they're never going to work for me.
> It breaks down when you are using something like Excel with complex macros/calculations. This is why most companies continue to use Microsoft products.
It breaks down because you need some serious backup in your organization (for example from the owner) to switch to something like LibreOffice. People got enough on their plate and changing their tools for (from their perspective) no apparent reason will get a lot of push back. I think technically LibreOffice is perfectly up to the task. Sure if your a statistician then maybe Spreadsheet won't work as well for you as an Excel replacement. But other then that...
It doesn't matter how much backup you have in the organization if the product is missing essential functionality. LibreOffice just doesn't have everything that MS Office does. That doesn't matter for some businesses but for others it creates a total block.
Yes, I would imagine given how long Office has been around, there are some people who have delved quite deep into the feature set and become dependent on it. It's hard to let go of one feature that you have come to rely on.
I have some pretty complex spreadsheets from Excel that I now run under LibreOffice without any problems.
That said, while they do use some complex formulas, they don’t use any VBScript or other such madness.
Complaining that your custom MSFT/VBScript stuff doesn’t work, so you can’t migrate — it sounds to me a bit like “We’re stuck on Oracle and can’t move to PostgreSQL because we decided to use a lot of Oracle magic stuff that doesn’t work anywhere else”.
This is classic vendor lock-in, which I tend to view as a business risk best avoided. There really is no option except to recognize it as technical debt and find time to dig yourself out from it.
When your only option for “Business Function X” limits you to a single vendor, fix that first.
This sounds like an argument I would've made in my early twenties. I will now correct you in the way my elders corrected me:
Oracle and Microsoft Office are global standards. The world uses them. Our civilization relies on them. If alternatives such as PostgreSQL and LibreOffice are not 100% compatible with these standards, they are lacking in functionality.
They are de facto standards as an application. As data formats, governments and large companies required them to become available under formal standards. After doing a lot of outright sleazy things, Office format (which is basically xml files wrapped in a zip file) is now a formal standard. When companies like Microsoft step around interoperability, they should be severely chastized and then punished, which apparently only governments and large companies have the wherewithal to do.
I wouldn't compare Oracle and Office: office is a monopoly, with LibreOffice being David against Goliath. Oracle is big, but it's not at all a standard, it's one of the players of database market, which is quite competitive: there are open source alternatives(MySQL and postgres) which are widely used (not like LibreOffice), and also big corporate players (DB2 and SQLServer).
Oracle's definitely a standard in companies of a certain size and pedigree, but it's not even remotely as ubiquitous as Office, which is both a business and consumer product.
Everything has risks and tradeoffs. Excel means that you can communicate with clients and vendors in their preferred tool, it means you can onboard new hires more quickly, it means you need less internal support staff, etc. Switching from Excel adds those things back in as risks for your business.
Good business is about managing and understanding risks, and not about eliminating them at all costs.
This is a very sane approach, and I agree wholeheartedly.
But when the only thing holding you back and locking you in is your own company's internal vendor-specific tooling/infrastructure, the argument doesn't hold as much weight.
fwiw, I have never received an Excel spreadsheet from a vendor/partner/customer that I could not open and work with in LibreOffice, re-export to Excel and send back to them.
I did because a lot of our clients and partners were non technical people using complex excel spreadsheets with macros and vba.
And since Excel is the de facto standard, shouldn't Libre Office offer a 100% compatibility to whatever Excel has if it wants a piece of that market share? Also $150/year for something that does it all and just works it's really not much. The same reason why we don't ask how much Visual Studio Enterprise costs or IntelliJ products even if you have free alternatives.
there is an option though: accept what you’re calling technical debt (though honestly, calling vendor lock-in technical debt reduces that term to meaningless in my opinion)... there’s nothing technically wrong with it.. you can create something well designed in excel or it can be shitty.
Anyway, it’s a risk like any other, and it may often be worth it. The alternative of switching to libreoffice is not free, and can truly be more costly than some office licenses and the risk that Microsoft will drop or fuck up excel (which most consider low)...
Personally having earnestly tried to do some complex work in libreoffice calc and running into just bugs and poor polish (error handling anyone?), it is not an experience I elect to relive... I still feel locked in to Excel as my life is too short to waste on the inferior product.
>Sure if your a statistician then maybe Spreadsheet won't work as well for you as an Excel replacement.
We had a client send us a questionnaire in an Excel document with macros to compute various things based on our answers. You underestimate just how many things are done in Excel across companies (ie: you can't even force both side to switch to Libreoffice) that you would, probably, write a quick webpage for.
> It breaks down when you are using something like Excel with complex macros/calculations.
As in compatibility with MS Office breaks or as in it can't be done in libreoffice?
For example, if I understand it correctly libreoffice supports javascript, python, beanshell and libreoffice basic for scripting and additionally offers non-complete support for VBA.
Does MS Office "break" when you try to import "complex macros/calculations" done in python?
There are multiple avenues for supporting python macros and calculations in excel. As a matter of fact I believe Microsoft was considering adding python as the default scripting language for excel.
The megacorp I work for has 40k people. There’s probably more people who can write Macros for excel than know JavaScript or Python (or who are willing to learn either). I’ve met business people who are masters of excel who’ve been using it since the 90s. Asking a huge amount of non-tech people to switch is extremely hard, much harder to convince them to use a new scripting language.
Sure, that is a perfectly valid point. However, I think that "libreoffice breaks" says something quite different than "MS Office's VBA has bad compatibility with anything but MS Office and thus provides very strong lock-in".
Out of interest, is there any non-MS office suite with better VBA compatibility than libreoffice? For instance in view to the whole Adobe Venezuela story.
Excel macros are code, and they are very often production-critical code. The people who wrote them don't see themselves as coders, sure, and management often doesn't give the code the respect it deserves (e.g. Excel is often exempt from basic things like version control and code reviews), but it's still code that the business still depends on.
When someone proposes replacing MS Office with LibreOffice, what they're really proposing is to replace the runtime that a significant amount of production code runs on with something that's only compatible with part of your codebase.
"If we switch, we are going to have to rewrite a decent chunk of our production-critical code" is a non-starter, especially when coupled with the fact that the developers have no experience with the new runtime and are going to have to learn it as they port the code. And because they don't see themselves as coders, they don't have the theoretical background that makes it easier for experienced software engineers to pick up new languages.
Every spreadsheet I've used has managed to annoy me, but LibreOffice and Apple's Numbers both manage to do it even with simple spreadsheets with simple (or even no) calculations. Excel at least waits until I'm doing something slightly complicated before irritating me.
Example: create four rows of four cells each, like this:
1 2 3 4
2 4 6 8
3 6 9 12
4 8 12 16
Select rows 1 and 3 (but not 2), copy, and paste just below row 4.
In Excel, that pastes a copy of row 1 at row 5, and a copy of row 2 at row 6.
In Numbers, row 1 is copied to 5, and row 3 is copied to 7.
In LibreOffice, row 1 is copied to 5, and row 3 is not copied.
So we have three ways to handle copy/paste of a non-contiguous selection: make it contiguous on paste (Excel), past non-contiguously (Numbers), and just copy the topmost row (it's topmost, not first row selected--if you select row 3, then non-contiguously add row 1, it is row 1 that copy grabs) (LibreOffice).
I'm not sure which of these is actually the most right from a theoretical perspective, but I bet Excel is the one most likely to be based on data about which method best matches what users actually do with the spreadsheets.
Joel Spolsky has an article [1] where he talks about what they found when he was on the Excel team at Microsoft and they actually started visiting customers to see how they used Excel. A couple quotes:
> Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.
and
> What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.
Looking at my own spreadsheets...I find that most of them are indeed really just lists or tables with maybe a little calculation. The few that I would say are actually heavily calculation oriented would probably do just as well in LibreOffice or Numbers.
I've just tried that row copying activity myself in LibreOffice, and it's behaving the same as you describe for Excel - row 1 copied to 5, row 3 copied to 6.
I selected the rows by clicking the row numbers (while holding Ctrl for the second one), and the version is 6.3.3.2.0, FWIW (I'm on Arch Linux so I suppose this is right up to date).
I was selecting by just selecting the four columns in row 1 by clicking and holding on 1 while dragging to 4 and releasing, then doing the same thing with row 3 while holding the command key down which is how you do non-contiguous selection on Mac, then clicking on column 1 of row 5, and doing paste.
I just tried it with clicking the row number, to do whole row selection. So click the number for row 1, then command-click the number for row 3. Then I clicked the first cell in row 5 and hit paste. Same result as I got before...just row 1 copies.
I also tried it where I clicked the row number for 5, to select the whole row, before pasting, and no difference.
Good to see that it is working better on Linux. That probably suggests this is just a bug in their Mac port rather than intentional behavior.
Yeah, if I select the cells in the way you just described then I get both the rows copied, again. It does sound like something in the Mac port. Certainly I would find that an annoying behaviour if I saw it.
Tangentially, and perhaps weirdly, if the ranges I select don't span the same columns - eg. if I select A1:B1 and C3:D3, a dialog box pops up upon Copy which says "This function cannot be used with multiple selections". Even though the ranges are still the same size. That seems undesirable, to me.
As an aside I really feel like LibreOffice had a lot of momentum back in the day, but when the whole OpenOffice/LibreOffice debacle occurred due to the Oracle purchase, the confusion of the branch (into LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice) just pulled the rug out.
That combined with lack of innovative/unique features and a UI that is essentially unchanged since Office 95, and it is hard to argue why someone should use LO/OO instead of MSO. For example, what is the USP? Free is one, but is that the only one?
MSO has somewhat pivoted towards mobile (Office Online, mobile apps). It is unclear if LO or OO have an "answer" for mobile devices, or if that's even in the realm of things they'd want to tacke?
If it's not, there's not much future for them. It's not even about mobile devices, but cross-platform compatibility. That's the biggest driver of Google Docs. Not that it's mobile friendly (although that helps), not that it runs in a browser (although that helps), but that it runs basically anywhere, and offers the same experience basically anywhere.
Even in enterprises, BYOD, VDI, and mobile devices are becoming a lot more popular. All it takes is one exec who says "this doesn't work on my preferred machine" and that whole product is axed from the entire company.
Getting OO/LO working online/mobile would be a big challenge for an open source team to undertake but I'd hate to see them fade away and lose an open source option.
That's a good point, how have I never heard of it? When I search in this entire thread your comment is the only reference I see to it.
I just took a second to look it up, and it doesn't seem to be competing with Google Docs or Office Online, since it's self-hosted and there are warnings all over that page to not use this software for production and it should only be used for development or personal use.
So it's good to know they're working on it. By their own admission it's not ready to be used, but it's good to know it's in-progress.
Well, it is not perfect but actually quite usable. Unlike the competitors, it actually has the full power of a real LibreOffice under the hood, so the compatibility is much better what e.g. Google Docs can offer.
Office 365 feels like a cheap beta test even on the biannual channels.
If not for corp legacy apps that mostly interface with outlook through old, partly deprecated and arcane APIs, a switch to anything could occur.
At home I use LO exclusively, even though I have the licences for MSO.
And the interface doesn't even hold anything against LibreOffice. The categories are completely random. Excel has some nice pivot visualization functions, but that is the only positive thing I can come up with when thinking of MS office.
I don't need office software to be that innovative, because the problem space hasn't evolved since 20 years. And if autosave is one of those innovative features...
> I don't need office software to be that innovative, because the problem space hasn't evolved since 20 years.
Workflows evolve all the time. For example how many word processor competitors that target specific demographics are there (technical writing e.g. Markdown, authors e.g. Scrivener/Storyist, academics e.g. LaTeX, etc)? The problem space is evolving every day, LO/OO and even MSO haven't kept pace, but that doesn't mean things have remained static around them.
> Office 365 feels like a cheap beta test even on the biannual channels.
I’m in one or more Office 365 apps for most of my work-day. They work well and are stable, at least on macOS (which I assume gets less love than the Windows version).
In contrast, LO on macOS is a train wreck when it comes to stability and usability. It’s not competitive.
> As an aside I really feel like LibreOffice had a lot of momentum back in the day, but when the whole OpenOffice/LibreOffice debacle occurred due to the Oracle purchase, the confusion of the branch (into LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice) just pulled the rug out.
IMO, the concerted attack against the ODF format[1] was also a large contributing factor towards OpenOffice/LibreOffice loss in the format wars[2]
I posted about this in another thread and was down-voted for some reason[3], but I think it is important enough to not forget.
> a UI that is essentially unchanged since Office 95
Back when I read slashdot, I swear every thread about office had a top comment complaining about how office’s ribbon UI ruined their work flow. One of the biggest weaknesses in open source is that the people who contribute to these projects seem to love 90s style UI.
Ah, the good old "UI churn for the sake of it" argument, a.k.a. "It's $CURRENT_YEAR, people".
Office 97 was peak Office, UI-wise, for me and a whole lot of other users. If a UI works great, and newer UIs do not offer a clear, significant value add, why should it change? Why should not changing the UI count as a negative against the product?
I found the Ribbon a good evolution. Especially if you use plugins for Powerpoint and Excel. Once you have a few of those (and if you work in finance or management consulting it is easy to have 3 or 4 installed by default by your Company) the ribbon layout ensures a certain cleanliness of the toolbar.
> and a UI that is essentially unchanged since Office 95
How is that a drawback? That's a massive plus. The interface changes that we have seen in Office have been pointless time-consuming travesties with no real purpose but to make it look like the software is completely new. No productivity increases whatsoever. The LO interface hasn't changed since Office 95 because that's when it's peaked. The tasks are the same and the human that do them are the same, and so the interface (if it is already at its best version) should also stay the same. This a great advantage of the open source office suites, not a drawback.
In some regards, yes, but it's more than the structure of the UI. The menu-based interface should be perfectly suited to any task you want to accomplish, as it is in many other apps, but use LibreOffice for any amount of time and you begin to find the UI completely lacks any sort of consistency and tasks you'd expect to find under a certain hierarchy are not there, instead in a completely separate menu or toolbar that has nothing to do with it.
This is a problem with MSFT products as well, but to a lesser extent.
In addition, decades-old bugs have not been fixed. It's a showstopper.
It's essentially fail of Apache Foundation. OpenOffice is essentially dead now (check the commits rate and piling unfixed bugs). The best they can do is to declare its decease, and link/redirect to LibreOffice instead.
If the system resource use were comparable to early and mid 90s applications, too, I'd love it. Always felt too heavy, preferred Gnumeric and similar for personal use when on Linux as a result, when not having to try to inter-op with Microsoft Office. Now prefer Apple's office applications for similar reasons. I suppose (misuse of) Java's probably the main reason for it.
The developers of LibreOffice made a conscious decision to make their product look and feel like Office, since one of their goals is to help people learn these suites for functional skills, so their learning would then translate to the predominant package. I have this first hand from a conference.
Then of course Micorsoft created their ribbon UI and enforces protection against others copying it.
Personally, I don't find the ribbon intuitive, and others, perhaps a majority, feel the same way, but Microsoft has all that weight behind them.
Adopting Office's style is understandable. The problem is that they are struggling to match a 25 year old style. Forget the ribbon, Office 2003 level polish would be great. Instead LO presents a quirky and amateurish.
LibreOffice _does_ have a ribbon-like interface available (their NotebookBar). It's still officially experimental, but you might like it more than the _older_ interface. FreeOffice also has a ribbon.
(Really - does not using the MSO ribbon automatically make something out of date? I've never particularly liked the ribbon.)
I'm nice and deep in the Apple world (iPhone, iPad, Macbook) and I generally am very pro-Apple. However, I can whole heartedly say for anyone with an even semi-complex use case, Numbers is completely unsuitable and will actually drive you insane. Just Google "apple numbers pivot table" for an example.
+1 on this. Keynote is very good, but Numbers gets functionally useless very quickly, and Pages is.... rough for anything that isn't "school essay". So fidgety!
I ended up buying my own Office subscription when I was working at a startup as Numbers was so hell inducing (and CEO refused to buy any equipment to help with the work...).
Keynote is interesting and I've seen some consultants use it for sprint planning really effectively, but Numbers is an utter clusterf*ck.
Numbers is a toy. Pages is a page layout program, and Keynote is nice to use for doing presentations but not really capable of generating Office compatible documents
Underrated comment; Pages is a page-layout program. I've used Pages '09 for professional work (system architecture, audits, etc.) and it could do things that Word simply could not. Capabilities-wise, it felt closer to InDesign.
Then in the next version, Apple dumbed it all down with the "panel"-style UI so it had similar UX to the iOS and web versions. It lost features. It got many of them back over the years, but that design move really broke my workflow for a while. I just kept Pages '09 around until the new version had parity, more or less.
It really does work well. I got used to my Office-using colleagues asking, "how'd you do that?!" Downside is you are in a bubble and cannot round-trip documents without losing the really good layout stuff.
Any other show stopping bugs you have encountered? I'm thinking of making the switch myself, but I hear nothing but anecdotes of people having a bad time getting proprietary Microsoft Office .docx files to play nice in LibreOffice
For me, I can't use it on macOS because it freezes for several seconds any time I open a document, try to scroll, etc. Thankfully I don't need to open doc and xls files much.
Last time i tried to use LibreOffice (~2 years ago) on OSX it was super slow/hanged when opening large CSV files while Excel on a virtual machine (same host) had 0 problems.
I used LibreOffice at work for two years (on linux) and it was good for most things, I used the powerpoint equivalent and it's definitely under-powered compared to MS but probably fine for 95% of people.
I also did the MS 360 thing once about 3 years ago and will never do that again.
The main criticism I have is the requirement to create an 'account' and then having it 'phone home' every time one of the Office applications starts. This is totally unnecessary as annual licensing for desktop applications was worked out decades ago. The date for when the license expires is not displayed, unlike most annually licensed desktop applications so when it does expire is usually a surprise.
To make matters worse MS office applications always default to saving files to cloud based storage despite my always picking a local drive to save files. There is noticeable lag while the file explorer tries to access cloud storage despite it never being intentionally used.
My experience is that I’ve used libreoffice to convert unreadable .doc 2003 files to working .docx documents. In these (admittedly few) cases, (a more recent version of) word could not read the .doc files in a meaningful fashion.
I would strongly suggest prioritizing kerning. How text looks is the feature of a word processor, and I quit using LibreOffice a number of years ago because the text looked so hideous compared to anything else.
Yeah, there's something about the kerning that is just a little off. I agree that what happens on the page in the center of the screen has to be 100% perfect for any word processor.
I was thinking more about the printed page. I can deal with bad kerning on-screen if it prints out beautifully, although I won't be happy about it. But the whole point of the word processor is to print out text, so kerning is an essential requirement.
You're getting downvoted, but you have a point. Word processors are for writing documents; if you really care about typography in the final product, at some point you need to use a real typesetting tool. From what I can tell, most large companies and governments draft documents in Word and then send them to graphic designers to reformat in InDesign or something and publish as PDF. You can tell when a document has been typeset in Word; it feels unfinished and unprofessional, even if it looks better than a LibreOffice document.
A company paying millions for Microsoft Office would probably get better value if they paid some LibreOffice developers to fix the issues. Or just switched to use ODF format.
I'd just like to know why companies who have Macs still buy MS Office as well... because it's compatibility with Windows Office is about as good as LibreOffice.
For personal use, I don’t care which tool I’m using - my use cases are simple enough it just doesn’t matter.
When I worked in almostMegaCorp, though, I had the freedom to push through whatever tools I wanted. With the exception of adding R and Python to my machine, the Office provided everything I needed and did so better than the competition. I don’t care, in that context, about pricing, competition, OS ideaology, etc. Setting up an in-house software division to throw bug fixes at OpenOffice to try and transition to a tool that is equal to or inferior for almost all of our actual uses?
You can pry excel from my cold dead hands. I try to use LO regularly but it can't even come close to meeting my needs, for example handling very large tables. The only response I get from LO boosters is "You're using it wrong. Teach sql to all of your front line office workers, or don't do what you want to do." meanwhile excel does what I want it do do.
MS made a deal, to keep german headquarters in Munich. The price for that was to kill Limux. Sad story actually and doesn't put the responsible politicians in the best light. But in Bavaria the political party CSU is known to be susceptible to ideas from the industrial lobby.
> Here's a recent interview with Christian Ude[...]
This is a really interesting interview, unfortunately it is only available in German so I translated (with the help of deepl) the part about the situation right after the switch.
Linux-Magazin: How big was the pressure afterwards?
[...]
Christian Ude: The most intense thing I personally experienced was a visit from Steve Ballmer, after all Vice President of Microsoft. He interrupted his skiing holiday in Switzerland to visit me. With his well-known enthusiasm, with which he dynamically jumps around on stage at conferences, he jumped around in my office and first of all praised the beauty of Munich. But then he said that I was making a catastrophic decision that I could never justify to anyone, especially not to a taxpayer.
Funnily enough, he constantly made new financial offers during the conversation, he talked about what Microsoft would add for free, for the school department for example. On and on he reduced the price, one million and a another million and a another million and a dozen million cheaper than before. This is how important Munich - which is internationally perceived as an IT center - was to Microsoft as a symbol.
Would [Munich] walk a new path or repentantly return into Microsoft's lap? We have calculated that Ballmer has improved the financial offer by around 35 per cent. But since we wanted to make a strategic decision and not just make a price comparison, this was not important to us.
Linux-Magazin: Bill Gates also came to visit?
Christian Ude: He was in Munich because of a presentation of the "House of the Future", which inspired him insanely. With it, you could determine from your car how high the room temperature in each room is and whether the refrigerator should defrost a bit. On his way back to the airport I had the opportunity to talk to him. So I sat together with one of the richest men in the world in a camouflaged van, which was luxuriously equipped inside, but looked from the outside as if it belonged to a small craft business. Gates asked me stunned: "Why are you doing this? That's absurd! That's incomprehensible!
Now that I'm not the hard-boiled IT specialist who could stand up to a Bill Gates in every detail, I just said:
"Please note, we're all about independence. We don't want to be dependent."
Then he said, "That's nonsense, who do you depend on?"
"Now that you are here [I can tell you]: From you, of course!"
That really made him collapse, and he said: "It's incomprehensible to me, it's ideology".
Munich didn't fail, in fact they actually saved some 11 million Euros in the process.
It was just politics 101. Their politicians when facing the choice "keep using Linux => bye bye huge Munich MS Offices", didn't think twice and axed the penguin.
Admittedly, it wouldn't have been an easy pick even for FOSS enthusiasts as many of us are, if we were in Munich politicians shoes: letting one of the biggest corporations out there build their huge headquarters in your city doesn't just mean bribes but jobs (almost 2000 in the HQ alone). As long as you're being identified as the one who let all this happen, you have just won a huge PR boost for creating jobs, plus all those people -and their families- votes, not to mention strong ties with MS high profile execs which would be of use one day. Honestly, Linux would have lost no matter its convenience.
If I had to, I'd bet all my horses that we'll see finally one day Munich and other cities adopting Linux, although it will be Microsoft branded and mostly FOSS.
I made a slideshow in LibreOffice Impress for my grandfather's funeral last week. We ended up playing it via PowerPoint because of how the chapel's AV system was set up.
PowerPoint rendered the images in the ODP poorly, like it jacked the contrast up to 100. Saving the document as a PPTX within LibreOffice and then playing it on PowerPoint fixed the issue. From my naive perspective MS Office seems to have issues with ODF just like LibreOffice has with docx/pptx/xlsx/etc.
This to me is THE quintessential issue surrounding potential adoption of libre office. If formatting & commands remained 100% consistent between the two, I think you'd see a lot more people switch, out of the shear convenience of not having to whip out their wallet. Students would probably be first to adopt because they usually operate on a tight budget to begin with. That would filter out into the business world eventually.
But if you can't absolutely rely on it to be totally compatible, then it's a total non-starter. Not worth the risk.
Counterpoint: Google Docs. Its OOXML compatibility is for shit. Its adoption is HUGE.
Not one person mentions how amazingly shit its OOXML compatibility is, even for quite simple DOCX.
Almost nobody in an office uses the fancy bits of Excel. Spreadsheets are mostly used as flat-file data stores.
And Office is notoriously incompatible between different versions of itself.
In practice, I don't think the file compatibility objection to LibreOffice is real. It's just an excuse.
The actual competition is Google Docs, which is a shitty word processor and a shitty spreadsheet and a shitty presentation app, but absolutely brilliant at quick and convenient collaboration. That's why LibreOffice is working super-hard on the web-based online version.
I feel like that, with the exception of a few Excel spreadsheets that were getting pretty fancy, I haven't had any real compatibility issues opening up MS Office file in [Open|Libre]Office.
Nowadays I usually tell whomever is asking for something in a "Word" format that I don't own a copy of Word, but I can send them a PDF, and they're OK with that, but when I was first getting started as an engineer I used to have to work with recruiters a lot, where they'd ask for my resume in a Word format so that they could insert their ugly logo on the top and break all the formatting. No one ever said anything about my files that were initially made with LibreOffice. In fact, for all the essays I've had to write for school (that I started again semi-recently), I've done them with either Pandoc+Markdown or LibreOffice (depending on how much formatting is required), and no one has said anything about the MS Word export, or me potentially breaking the teachers' templates that they made in word.
I'll definitely give it to you for Excel though. For simple stuff LibreOffice's compatibility is fine, but if you do any kind of elaborate Excel function, you're going to have a bad time, and things are going to break.
I have an issue at my work right now where excel files generated by some Java libraries used by another team do not open in LibreOffice. To share them with members running linux and LO, someone with a real Excel installation has to open it up, and re-save the file, then it is compatible.
I think that's what they mean by external entity? I've also personally had problems with openpyxl in python
MS Office is around 150 USD per year (on Premium Plan, and it comes with 1TB/user of OneDrive: good luck beating that package), I would imagine it would be less for large corporations. This is really not much for a software platform that any white collar employee knows how to use at least at its basic level. Excel and Powerpoint are critical software for most large companies. Budgets, financial analyses, forecasts, quick calcs, presentations on factory shop floors and in board suites rely on them. I am a management consultant so I see a wide range of corporate tools: I have seen large companies use Google as their cloud, email and calendar platforms, dropbox for their shared drives, PowerBI or Tableau, SAP or Oracle or Salesforce for ERP, but not even once I saw a company not relying on Excel and Powerpoint for much of the daily activities. They wouldn't risk getting away from PPT and Excel (and, to a lesser extent, MS Word). The certainty that somebody in another country or organisation will open the file and it will appear as intended is essential to large (and small) companies. Plus there is almost no training needed for new hires, as both student and expert hires will have experience with it. Today MS Office for MacOS is quite good: some functionalities are missing, I think, but what is there is 100% compatible with Win platform - I wouldn't bet on this to be true for LibreOffice. If a company wants to save money on licenses it might be netter off reviewing how often certain software packages are utilised and prune based on this, rather than blanket-switching an almost universal software, used daily and that is not even that expensive.
ODF has its own issues. When I'm sharing a spreadsheet between libreoffice and gnumeric I use XLS, because the compatibility is much higher than using an ODF.
I'm an easydns customer and I've always been happy with their products and service. I can get in touch directly with the founder if I need that. I don't have to agree with everything they say to appreciate the offering.
I used to be a big fan of Open Office and Libretto Office but with Microsoft’s support of more open data formats, and their best deal ever of $99/year for a family plan for Office 365, I have switched sides. I write my books using markdown and LeanPub but everything else is Office 365.
You used to be able to buy Office for a one-time purchase and not have to pay yearly. So how is this their best deal ever? Tbf, if this includes OneDrive you are getting more than just an office suite.
Also would be interested in more details on why you like Microsoft Office better than the other two.
the "personal" edition lets you share with up to 6 people and those 6 people can install it up to 5 devices. Each person also gets 1tb of onedrive space and windows now has options to backup files.
And you can still buy a one time license if that suites your needs better.
I want a one time license for excel that works with windows 8.1 and does not install one drive spyware. I have 100 bucks. I am using libre office, calc in the meantime.
You can still buy a permanent/stand-alone license - and that product can optionally the 'cloud' apps if you want.
From my perspective its a huge cognitive burden for an organization to change Office apps that they use everyday. For a technical group like easydns its probably easier and most of the staff might even support it. In my organization we have some manufacturing folks that don't like computers and don't want to learn anything about them. Its hard to make this kind of change, there is a cost to retraining and effects on productivity and happiness.
Two weeks ago I searched to buy excel on premises install / own - and could only find it for Windows 10 and Mac (not compatible with windows 8, 8.1, 7.
Last time I bought the on prem off pack (few years ago) it auto installed spyware (one drive) - I did enjoy the multiple layers of phone support though, within an hour it was determined I needed to uninstall and return for refund, no way to run it without the spydrive addition.
open office and libre office have been installed on all systems since.
I understand some orgs can't new software, I think most just need to very basic formatting tools to be highlighted, open and save - which it does great now.
I have to search 3-4 times a year on how to do something with calc.. I see many devs search 4 or more times a day on how to do basic stuff with their daily tools.
Sounds like a couple UX templates would benefit the average company workers out there - one that is super basic, very few icons, and one that mimics word.
I was going to take classes on excel but can't run it.
Indeed the offering is more than an Office Suite. You + 5 family members each get
* Office Apps -- install wherever you want, including on web, iOS, Android and Android-capable Chromebooks to get native apps on Chromebook. You can install on as many devices as you want, around 5 per-person can be in use at the same time
* 1TB OneDrive storage (clients on Mac/Win/Web only sadly, no Linux client yet)
* 50GB Outlook ad-free email storage
* Bring your own custom domain to get @my-family.tld email for your family
* Priority phone support
All in all, for families it's a good offering that competes really well with Google One (one.google.com) -- quite irritating that Google One still doesn't offer that custom domain thing. The 50GB ad-free email per family member is a great offer for instance. All of this for about $100/yr, less with the revamped Home Use Program.
Not sure when they added it, but you do get it with[1] the $99/year plan. It's a more restricted version of a feature they used to support with Outlook Premium in the past, in that the domain has to be hosted with GoDaddy for now.
Good question. I pay the $99/year for a terabyte of cloud storage for everyone in my family, I use the web app versions of Office 365 on Linux, and everyone gets up to date Office apps for iOS, Android, and macOS. For me, that is a great deal. I especially like the Word app on my iPad Pro.
Not sure what open formats you're talking about, but their support for OpenDocument (.odf and .ods) has been and continues to be quite shitty. To their credit Google's Docs doesn't even have shitty support for OpenDocument, but that doesn't make MS Office better, not when LibreOffice exists.
$99 / year seems like a good deal, until you realize that it might as well be $0 / year if you don't use Office 365 and you're not missing much.
Office 365 sucks for collaborative editing, where Google Docs shines, or for note taking. It also sucks if you want to write highly technical documentation, for which I prefer Markdown, Org or Latex — I know it's not for everybody, but nothing beats pushing text files in Git.
Microsoft Excel is king for big spreadsheets filled with fancy formulas, but for my own purposes Google Sheets has been much more user friendly and I'm the kind of guy that creates sheets for monthly expenses, tracking my weight, etc. And I've seen this going on in our team too, where Google Sheets is much more convenient.
So you're paying $99 / year which is only useful when other people share MS Office formats with you. And I know this depends on the field you're in, but I can literally count the number of times that happened this year on the fingers of one hand.
And sure they give you OneDrive storage too. But you only use OneDrive when you don't care about your data, because their client is a piece of shit. I tried to use it repeatedly and I witnessed serious data conflicts and sync issues within hours of installing their client and this happened several times. Dropbox is more expensive, but Dropbox actually works for the intended purpose.
I did pay for Office 365 for about 2 years, until I realized that I'm not actually using it, wasted money.
I'd seriously consider the $99/year if I could install Office on linux. I get that I'm not exactly the average user, but my options as a linux user are rather limited.
SoftMaker Office (or the free version FreeOffice) is, in my opinion, better than LibreOffice.
Never liked LibreOffice/OpenOffice/StarOffice. I respect the work behind it, but as a product I don't like it.
And using MS Office just contributes to the de-facto monopoly problem. Corel used to have a nice Office suite for Linux but after MS bought them Linux support was dropped.
I don't understand why people keep comparing LibreOffice to Microsoft Office, or—God forbid—GIMP with Photoshop.
Sure, my mom will have a great time writing recipes on it and will save $10/mo., but can anyone do any real work that you'd do in Excel? Let's be realistic.
Also, does no one care about design? LibreOffice's interface looks awful on all platforms, and stuck in the 90s. Same with GIMP.
Fonts are so broken on Linux—which is the platform that would need this the most—that you can barely select dropdown options if you're on a hidpi monitor.
Well, I can't comment on how well things work on hidpi. While I don't have the best monitors on the market, I don't have any problems with fonts or dropdown options on neither my 104 nor on my 98 dpi monitor.
GIMP's UI consists of medium grey on slightly dark grey with occasional third shades of grey. It's low contrast and not particularly accessible.
GIMP's UI is spread across a huge pile of small windows with overlapping jurisdiction such that you're never sure where anything needs to go.
I've copied an image and would like to work on it. Let's go create a new image. Oh, it hasn't changed the size to match the clipboard - that's fine, let's pick something small and let it expand.
Oh, when I paste, it doesn't offer to expand the canvas. That's unfortunate. Let's expand it manually and paste......but it still tries to paste into the tiny rectangle I originally had rather than the whole larger viewport. I give up, I'll manually guess a few sizes until I get close.
OK, let's edit my picture. I click on the paintbrush tool in one window......then select a brush in the "Layers - Brushes" window, but it's too big. How do I fix that? I look for the "Brush Editor" window (different from "Layers - Brushes") and see a "Radius" selector. But it's read-only and I have no idea why. I have to go back to "Layers - Brushes" and find a tiny "Edit this Brush" button.....then go back to the "Brush Editor" window to make changes.
Let's add some text to my window....oh, the text properties window appears over my image, translucent (even less contrast!) and the font select window is.......a free-form text box? No dropdown to see the names of my fonts, much less a preview of them? I'm done. Time to go to Paint.NET or Photoshop or literally any other image editor.
> GIMP's UI consists of medium grey on slightly dark grey with occasional third shades of grey. It's low contrast and not particularly accessible.
I agree that's bad. It used to have colored icons. You can change the themes in preferences so it uses colored icons, again. The background color is also changeable. So, yeah, default theme got bad, but it can be fixed in less than a minute.
> GIMP's UI is spread across a huge pile of small windows with overlapping jurisdiction such that you're never sure where anything needs to go.
Configuration over convention, I guess. It does remember where you put said windows for the next time you launch it, so just put them whereever is best for you.
> Oh, when I paste, it doesn't offer to expand the canvas. That's unfortunate. Let's expand it manually and paste......but it still tries to paste into the tiny rectangle I originally had rather than the whole larger viewport. I give up, I'll manually guess a few sizes until I get close.
I think your expected behaviour is too ambiguous. Where should it expand to, the right, the left, up, down, all sides equally? You can "Paste as > New Image" (Ctrl+Shift+v) and you'll get an image the exact size of the image you're pasting. Does that help?
> OK, let's edit my picture. I click on the paintbrush tool in one window......then select a brush in the "Layers - Brushes" window, but it's too big. How do I fix that? I look for the "Brush Editor" window (different from "Layers - Brushes") and see a "Radius" selector. But it's read-only and I have no idea why. I have to go back to "Layers - Brushes" and find a tiny "Edit this Brush" button.....then go back to the "Brush Editor" window to make changes.
Where are you seeing "Radius"? I see "Size" and I can't get it to be read-only.
> Let's add some text to my window....oh, the text properties window appears over my image, translucent (even less contrast!) and the font select window is.......a free-form text box? No dropdown to see the names of my fonts, much less a preview of them?
If you start typing the name of fonts, you do get a dropdown with names and previews. I do agree it would be better to be able to make it drop down without requiring any text input, though.
Bye Bye LibreOffice. Hello Google Docs (or some other online service).
(1) Auto backup
(2) Accessible from all my devices with zero work.
(3) Can share with anyone with just a link
(4) Can allow anyone to edit with just a link
I'm sure HN will be "evil google" and you might be right. I don't believe they "spy" on google docs and I'm a paying g-suite customer.
I get different people have different needs. Google Docs meets mine. Been using it since soon after it shipped. Haven't looked back. I might be able to be convinced to move to another online service but I could never go back to a native app for documents or spreadsheets
Cost, certainly, is not better with Office 365.
And LibreOffice has versions for Linux.
It's also much easier to drag and drop cells in Calc than Excel (small advantage, but with my eyes, Excel is tricky)
Excel has far fewer file types it can handle (ClarisWorks, QuarkXPress anyone? Export as EPUB, and so on.)
LibreOffice has a much better configurable spellchecker, six different ribbon-like interfaces, can exports bits of your spreadsheet as a JPEG file, and is free.
And cost. Did I mention that? Why rent something that can be got for free?
(OK, if all you get is MS file formats, than O365 is fine, if expensive. I've been using LO for years at work in a MS shop, and had no issues for a couple of years.)
For me however it is thanks, but no thanks. Google and any other SAAS can go eff themselves. Do not like the way it works and not letting somebody else manage my data.
Has it been made at least as fast as office by now, or is it still slower at basically everything? Because the reason I gave up on it every time I tried it in the past is that sluggish tools turn what should be a "doing a thing" into a grind. Fine, if annoying, for incidental work, but impossible to not get angry with once it's a daily driver.
Not OP, but speed is an issue for me on a daily basis doing basic things. I am a keyboard junky, and find myself at times five steps ahead of the UI, even running Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows. From the keyboard, I can make a table, align general, turn off wrapping, delete the last row, insert a column, give it a heading, and format it as text. The UI is usually halfway done while I'm sitting waiting. Delay is jarring when I pay attention to it.
Do you have an SSD and a semi-recent machine? If so, this is an argument for LO. I use it on a three year old laptop on Linux. It is relatively snappy.
Even using the program with a blank document feels sluggish in Windows 10, I'm sorry. Opening the text formatting window takes a few seconds on a one page document (maybe I have too many fonts installed??). There's something seriously wrong with that software.
I'd switched first to whatever later became WPS Office and then to FreeOffice. So far no problems but then of course as a proper dumbo I am probably using 1% of the features available so it is hard for me to judge which tool is really superior for advanced public.
Used to do that on my mom's computer, but it was firefox with the ie icon. Never heard a word. Tried it with my grandpa's computer and he was furious, I asked him how he knew and he said it was completely different, everything had totally changed. Naturally I was wondering what he was talking about, since they seemed like a drop in replacement at the time, what could possibly be so different. Turns out it was the menu where you could increase the font size which he used multiple times a day. Things you don't think of.
side note: as soon as I showed him he didn't have to go into the menu at all any more and could just use the plus and minus keys on his keyboard he was thrilled with the change.
For my parents, I removed ie and replaced it with chrome. I told them its faster for gmail and works better in general. Plus that it auto updates (which are important to apply quickly due to malware) and I wouldn't have to be called as much. They totally bought into it and I didn't even need to tell any white lies.
My dad is actually pretty smart and is decent with computers for a guy in his 70s, but he refuses to move from IE to Chrome just because he's more comfortable with IE's bookmark system and he doesn't want to bother learning it in Chrome.
Stuff we care about, like better load times and a cleaner interface, doesn't matter to him.
Anecdotally, this seems to be a typical use case for LibreOffice.
Both my mom and my sister use LibreOffice for "everyday" office tasks like resume building and simple budget tracking, and it's what I recommend to all of my tech-indifferent friends who need to do light office work but don't want to pay for MS Office.
On my new PC I would often forget to install office. Then when I needed it all of a sudden in a rush, I used to stick the Office CD in, start the install process, get frustrated, download Open/LibreOffice, install it, use it, be done, and then watch the Office installer finally finish long after I needed it...
I used to blame LibreOffice for how mangled Word docs looked, but then I used Office365 and realized that there's no such things as the "right" way to display a word doc, since all of the machines I opened it on using Word365 showed it differently...
Unlike another commentator, Calc was way better than Excel for a long time, and much better about not trashing your work. Before like 2010 Excel would make it very easy to accidentally lose your work forever.
> I used to blame LibreOffice for how mangled Word docs looked, but then I used Office365 and realized that there's no such things as the "right" way to display a word doc, since all of the machines I opened it on using Word365 showed it differently...
Probably due to missing fonts being replaced by whatever's available on the machine. Different fonts can have wildly different sizes / metrics.
OnlyOffice are significantly incomparably worse in terms of compatibility. They're also being developed in the "throw over the wall" style, when the source code is being published at once months after the release and in a non-downstream-friendly way.
Excel is the most widely used domain-specific language -- maybe even widely used "programming language" (if I'm painting with a broad brush, though it is turing complete) used to date. Getting people off, when a company's livelihood is literally at stake, is no small ask. Solve this problem and you'd be a bajillionare (official title).
I scan the comments and see a few anecdotal comments about how life is just fine with LO. But as many other comments point out: it's not the one-offs that make this hard, it's the fact that excel is the de-facto information exchange between people, businesses, and boards. To be a broken record: it's too ingrained.
Is there an easy way to set LibreOffice Calc to the Excel keybindings? It might not help for things like macros but at least sheet navigation could be consistent.
Take all of this with a grain of salt: I'm an Excel and VBA developer. I'm a bit of a dinosaur and I'm looking to pivot to Java + JavaScript as I'm just a smidge underpaid.
However, I have this to say about Excel. MicroSoft is making a push to kill VBA with two prong. One, replace VBA with JavaScript through OfficeJS. Two, beef up Power Query and Power Pivot so that you can do enough ETL in Excel through a point and click interface.
But the nasty truth is that on the ground in offices worldwide, there are ETL flows that shouldn't exist, but middle managers do not possess the political capital, incentives, or technical skill to remove. And while Power Query, M, DAX and Power Pivot are excellent, in, let's say, 5% of workflows, you need some business logic in some language that is more flexible. And this is the real problem with VBA; it papers over dirty workflows, even if the data structures you are provided are not good.
What kind of software do you develop in VBA? I've used it a fair bit over the past few years to build spreadsheets and Access databases for people in locked-down enterprise environments who can't run arbitrary .exes. I wish I had just built web apps, despite the huge downsides of needing to trust a system administrator to secure user data, and being sandboxed into a browser.
Using VBA was much worse. I could manage with the VBA language alone, but the number of security controls and macro-related warnings I had to click through, the poor quality of free online documentation, the lack of version control support and the hacks I had to use to get things into Git, and the lack of decent libraries made the experience an overall nightmare. Have you found solutions to these problems? Or do you work in an environment where you control the users' computers?
I don't think a lot of businesses are really that dependent on the sophisticated Excel features. And if they are it's concentrated in certain areas. You can buy per seat licenses (honestly no idea how MS prices this) for whoever needs it and out the rest of the enterprise on something else for their documents.
But why should they do this? MS Office 365 is 150 USD per year per user. For the vast majority of companies, large and small, this is a very small price for a software that is so engrained in daily business processes and activities. If a company is at the point of deciding about cost cutting by cutting excel, it probably is beyond salvation (certainly in the developed world, but i dare say even in developing countries). And the productivity loss of the first year would probably negate any saving.
> But why should they do this? MS Office 365 is 150 USD per year per user.
As someone in the Linux/Debian/Ubuntu area of my organization, the main headache with licensing from what I can see as an 'outsider' is not so much the price as the auditing/compliance overhead.
We can spin up/down as many Deb/Ub/CentOS systems as we want and not care, which as much RAM and (v)CPU as needed.
Trying to do the same with Windows and/or VMware seems to be something else.
Absolutely. 150 USD is a trivial amount of money in most bureaucracies, but the time cost of getting that expense approved and accounted for could be weeks.
To add another anecdote, I've noticed that many educational institutions (including government departments with tens of thousands of staff and hundreds of thousands of students) use G Suite. I'm sure some corporate staff in these organisations have Microsoft Office too, but there are many people in large bureaucracies who use Google Docs and Google Sheets daily.
What exactly is the story of LO as regards Excel: do they want to emulate Excel's VBA, or do they have a different framework in place(for example using python)?
The CS industry doesn't understand that the rest of the non-CS world runs on tools the employees learn once and never look back.
Coming from engineering, CS people never seemed to understand why someone used Matlab at all, when python existed or even the utility of 'R'/'Stata'.
The effort needed to onboard onto a programming/mathematical/computational tool, when you don't have a strong coding background to go with it, is extremely high. The users will hold on to them till their dying breath, because the is tied to more than 50% of their own value proposition.
Excel is the epitome of this phenomenon.
Also, excel is straight up a good tool. The only advantage of Libre office is the price, which is a non-factor for any major corp. Google's collaboration suite is better, but they lag behind in every other area.
I can see windows being completely replaced by competitor, but Office will stay. It is MSFT's stickiest product.
i think 'onboard' might refer to the wider context of using a tool in say, a research group. it's not just you learning the tool, it's about how the group uses the tool and the historical developments in place.
It's just a tech business language mannerism. People use it for the same reasons they use "price point" instead of "price", or "usecase" instead of "use", or "form factor" instead of "size": to show that they belong to the tribe, and to sound clever while saying something that could be expressed more simply and elegantly. The jargon adds nothing, except cringe.
People who code for a living are used to regularly teaching themselves new things, but there are lots of folks in other corners of the organization that expect to be taught / onboarded, and it's not an entirely unreasonable expectation. I think the word "onboard" implies a cost will have to be paid (e.g. time, money, man-hours, hiring new talent, etc.), and that's what the parent poster wanted to emphasize.
worked with a lot of techs this way. They get mad if you show them what you're trying to teach them shows up with very good instructions on the first page of google. At least half of them get pissed off :)
the most solid way to handle it is to use data import from text file (handles csv) so you can configure the columns while looking at them
Which recent excel versions you can bring that data table directly into power query as well, which is useful if youve got multiple csv you are trying to look at that are related
You’re right about Office being sticky, but that is changing. Heaps of people are using Google Sheets for basic spreadsheets these days. Advanced users will stick to the tools they know, but I’ve reached the same conclusion as the author of this post. Licensing issues, nagging about cloud subscriptions, inconsistencies between Windows and macOS and the lack of Linux support have become so painful in recent versions of Office that using LibreOffice no longer feels like a greater inconvenience – just a different inconvenience.
In my experience anyone in CS who was doing enough work for which Matlab and R to be relevant definitely found them useful, at least in the correct situations.
Proprietary math software, to which I'd add Mathematica, has the specific non-value proposition that you cannot take home your precious research work from the university lab without expensive, hard to buy and impermanent licenses and subscriptions.
There are other areas like this, too. I'm part of a firm that does grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses (http://www.seliger.com for the curious). Word and Excel are standard, especially for any documents that may touch governments. All narratives are written in Word and budgets in Excel.
I like and approve of LibreOffice but it doesn't seamlessly transfer complex styles or tracked changes to and from Word. When an organization is working with people who bill in the hundreds of dollars per hour and a grant in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, cost of MS Office is a non-issue. I approve of and generally support OSS (I'm writing this in Firefox), but the level of integration into the MSO world is ill-understood.
I've also written novels and the whole publishing industry and infrastructure is based around Word.
..and people wonder why Google hasn't pulled the plug on Chrome OS and Chromebooks. It is essential for the next generation to prefer "Sheets" over "Excel".. only way to do that is to get in early.
That hasn't appeared to work. Students who are forced to use Chromebooks don't beg their parents to get them one for home. The ones who do care about laptops ask for PC's or to a much lesser extent Macs.
That also never really worked when Apple was much bigger in pre-college education.
Edit: Chromebooks in education are like Enterprise software. The end user never chooses to use it. The vendor is not incentivized to make a product that end user will like, only the corporate buyer.
How many teachers and administrators who do have a choice are using Chromebooks willingly?
Many. I’m on a K-8 school board and the #1 technology ask from the teachers is Chromebooks.
They like iPads up to around grade 2-3. After that, the keyboard makes the kids more productive.
Windows requires too much IT overhead and Mac is too difficult to do business with and expensive.
The real magic of Chrome is the management suite. It’s dirt cheap for .edu and works fantastic. Chrome devices on a cart are reconfigured by the time the cart is rolled into a different classroom.
It’s way too expensive for commercial customers though.
I agree. I'm not saying that Chromebooks aren't a good fit for education. I'm saying that using Chromebooks in schools aren't going to necessarily endear them to students to the point where the next generation is going to prefer either Chromebooks or GSuite when they have a choice at home or when they go to college or start working.
Teachers want Chromebook's for their students. When they have choice, they will use their own laptops for themselves.
Just like no one ever said they want to use Version One for their own personal projects. They would choose something like BaseCamp Personal or Trello.
G is making progress though - automation / building of tools is 100x better on google sheets than in excel.
I can make a g form, output to a g sheet, automatically email if an entry contains certain text, etc. All that takes ~20 minutes, 1 add on, and 0 lines of code. Excel simply cannot compete with that.
Edit - I still use excel all the time for heavy lifting though. They fill different use cases for me.
My initial post may have sounded more negative than I intended regarding the quality of Google Sheets. I have an Office365 subscription and Numbers is free and either could do the simple things I use a spreadsheet for, I still use Sheets.
The excel work I've seen finance gurus perform is absolutely programming. There's usually "that guy" who assembled it and understands how the massive 100 tab completely uncommented spaghetti mess works.
And then he retires or gets run over by a bus and I have to spend three months reverse engineering it only to find that it is really just an over complex UI hiding a bug ridden home made database management system. Which I then reimplement in SQL Server and C#/VB.Net in a week; and the new version is faster, properly multi-user, more reliable, and actually maintainable.
Nah thats when you hire a consultant to support the spreadsheet at twice the rate. You can even pay them to make a new spreadsheet and train the next unsuspecting victim.
That's in fact what I was hired to do. I told them the first day on the job that they really needed a database, even sketched the schema. But they were adamant that it had to be an Excel solution so I wasted three months trying to untangle the crap that was there all the while trying to persuade them that a DB and a simpler front end would be much better. Eventually they agreed.
Libre Office thinks its doing the world a favor but it's a pretty weak experience compared to what else is out there. Plus, fun fact, the markup language they use is quite verbose and weak compared to just html/css.
The only document format my beaurocracy accepts is .html.
>It’s not that I’m cheap either, I just want something that works according to my preferences, not Microsoft’s.
Well, except for lucky coincidence (of features/preference) there's no inherent reason a FOSS project would work more according to one's preferences though. FOSS projects also have leads, take decisions, do rewrites, change directions, etc, same as proprietary software...
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadIt breaks down when you are using something like Excel with complex macros/calculations. This is why most companies continue to use Microsoft products.
It also becomes tricky when you need to interoperate or integrate with companies that have chosen to use either GSuite or LibreOffice rather than O365.
With that said, I'm glad these alternatives exist even though they're never going to work for me.
It breaks down because you need some serious backup in your organization (for example from the owner) to switch to something like LibreOffice. People got enough on their plate and changing their tools for (from their perspective) no apparent reason will get a lot of push back. I think technically LibreOffice is perfectly up to the task. Sure if your a statistician then maybe Spreadsheet won't work as well for you as an Excel replacement. But other then that...
That said, while they do use some complex formulas, they don’t use any VBScript or other such madness.
Complaining that your custom MSFT/VBScript stuff doesn’t work, so you can’t migrate — it sounds to me a bit like “We’re stuck on Oracle and can’t move to PostgreSQL because we decided to use a lot of Oracle magic stuff that doesn’t work anywhere else”.
This is classic vendor lock-in, which I tend to view as a business risk best avoided. There really is no option except to recognize it as technical debt and find time to dig yourself out from it.
When your only option for “Business Function X” limits you to a single vendor, fix that first.
Oracle and Microsoft Office are global standards. The world uses them. Our civilization relies on them. If alternatives such as PostgreSQL and LibreOffice are not 100% compatible with these standards, they are lacking in functionality.
Oracle's definitely a standard in companies of a certain size and pedigree, but it's not even remotely as ubiquitous as Office, which is both a business and consumer product.
Good business is about managing and understanding risks, and not about eliminating them at all costs.
But when the only thing holding you back and locking you in is your own company's internal vendor-specific tooling/infrastructure, the argument doesn't hold as much weight.
fwiw, I have never received an Excel spreadsheet from a vendor/partner/customer that I could not open and work with in LibreOffice, re-export to Excel and send back to them.
And since Excel is the de facto standard, shouldn't Libre Office offer a 100% compatibility to whatever Excel has if it wants a piece of that market share? Also $150/year for something that does it all and just works it's really not much. The same reason why we don't ask how much Visual Studio Enterprise costs or IntelliJ products even if you have free alternatives.
Anyway, it’s a risk like any other, and it may often be worth it. The alternative of switching to libreoffice is not free, and can truly be more costly than some office licenses and the risk that Microsoft will drop or fuck up excel (which most consider low)...
Personally having earnestly tried to do some complex work in libreoffice calc and running into just bugs and poor polish (error handling anyone?), it is not an experience I elect to relive... I still feel locked in to Excel as my life is too short to waste on the inferior product.
We had a client send us a questionnaire in an Excel document with macros to compute various things based on our answers. You underestimate just how many things are done in Excel across companies (ie: you can't even force both side to switch to Libreoffice) that you would, probably, write a quick webpage for.
IT people really need to stop declaring this about FOSS products when it is regarding workflows they have no experience in.
As in compatibility with MS Office breaks or as in it can't be done in libreoffice?
For example, if I understand it correctly libreoffice supports javascript, python, beanshell and libreoffice basic for scripting and additionally offers non-complete support for VBA.
Does MS Office "break" when you try to import "complex macros/calculations" done in python?
https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-...
Out of interest, is there any non-MS office suite with better VBA compatibility than libreoffice? For instance in view to the whole Adobe Venezuela story.
If they don't work in libre then that's an automatic no-go for most managers/whoever makes that decision.
Excel macros are code, and they are very often production-critical code. The people who wrote them don't see themselves as coders, sure, and management often doesn't give the code the respect it deserves (e.g. Excel is often exempt from basic things like version control and code reviews), but it's still code that the business still depends on.
When someone proposes replacing MS Office with LibreOffice, what they're really proposing is to replace the runtime that a significant amount of production code runs on with something that's only compatible with part of your codebase.
"If we switch, we are going to have to rewrite a decent chunk of our production-critical code" is a non-starter, especially when coupled with the fact that the developers have no experience with the new runtime and are going to have to learn it as they port the code. And because they don't see themselves as coders, they don't have the theoretical background that makes it easier for experienced software engineers to pick up new languages.
Example: create four rows of four cells each, like this:
Select rows 1 and 3 (but not 2), copy, and paste just below row 4.In Excel, that pastes a copy of row 1 at row 5, and a copy of row 2 at row 6.
In Numbers, row 1 is copied to 5, and row 3 is copied to 7.
In LibreOffice, row 1 is copied to 5, and row 3 is not copied.
So we have three ways to handle copy/paste of a non-contiguous selection: make it contiguous on paste (Excel), past non-contiguously (Numbers), and just copy the topmost row (it's topmost, not first row selected--if you select row 3, then non-contiguously add row 1, it is row 1 that copy grabs) (LibreOffice).
I'm not sure which of these is actually the most right from a theoretical perspective, but I bet Excel is the one most likely to be based on data about which method best matches what users actually do with the spreadsheets.
Joel Spolsky has an article [1] where he talks about what they found when he was on the Excel team at Microsoft and they actually started visiting customers to see how they used Excel. A couple quotes:
> Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.
and
> What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.
Looking at my own spreadsheets...I find that most of them are indeed really just lists or tables with maybe a little calculation. The few that I would say are actually heavily calculation oriented would probably do just as well in LibreOffice or Numbers.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...
I selected the rows by clicking the row numbers (while holding Ctrl for the second one), and the version is 6.3.3.2.0, FWIW (I'm on Arch Linux so I suppose this is right up to date).
I was selecting by just selecting the four columns in row 1 by clicking and holding on 1 while dragging to 4 and releasing, then doing the same thing with row 3 while holding the command key down which is how you do non-contiguous selection on Mac, then clicking on column 1 of row 5, and doing paste.
I just tried it with clicking the row number, to do whole row selection. So click the number for row 1, then command-click the number for row 3. Then I clicked the first cell in row 5 and hit paste. Same result as I got before...just row 1 copies.
I also tried it where I clicked the row number for 5, to select the whole row, before pasting, and no difference.
Good to see that it is working better on Linux. That probably suggests this is just a bug in their Mac port rather than intentional behavior.
Tangentially, and perhaps weirdly, if the ranges I select don't span the same columns - eg. if I select A1:B1 and C3:D3, a dialog box pops up upon Copy which says "This function cannot be used with multiple selections". Even though the ranges are still the same size. That seems undesirable, to me.
That combined with lack of innovative/unique features and a UI that is essentially unchanged since Office 95, and it is hard to argue why someone should use LO/OO instead of MSO. For example, what is the USP? Free is one, but is that the only one?
MSO has somewhat pivoted towards mobile (Office Online, mobile apps). It is unclear if LO or OO have an "answer" for mobile devices, or if that's even in the realm of things they'd want to tacke?
Even in enterprises, BYOD, VDI, and mobile devices are becoming a lot more popular. All it takes is one exec who says "this doesn't work on my preferred machine" and that whole product is axed from the entire company.
Getting OO/LO working online/mobile would be a big challenge for an open source team to undertake but I'd hate to see them fade away and lose an open source option.
I just took a second to look it up, and it doesn't seem to be competing with Google Docs or Office Online, since it's self-hosted and there are warnings all over that page to not use this software for production and it should only be used for development or personal use.
So it's good to know they're working on it. By their own admission it's not ready to be used, but it's good to know it's in-progress.
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
If not for corp legacy apps that mostly interface with outlook through old, partly deprecated and arcane APIs, a switch to anything could occur.
At home I use LO exclusively, even though I have the licences for MSO.
And the interface doesn't even hold anything against LibreOffice. The categories are completely random. Excel has some nice pivot visualization functions, but that is the only positive thing I can come up with when thinking of MS office.
I don't need office software to be that innovative, because the problem space hasn't evolved since 20 years. And if autosave is one of those innovative features...
Workflows evolve all the time. For example how many word processor competitors that target specific demographics are there (technical writing e.g. Markdown, authors e.g. Scrivener/Storyist, academics e.g. LaTeX, etc)? The problem space is evolving every day, LO/OO and even MSO haven't kept pace, but that doesn't mean things have remained static around them.
I’m in one or more Office 365 apps for most of my work-day. They work well and are stable, at least on macOS (which I assume gets less love than the Windows version).
In contrast, LO on macOS is a train wreck when it comes to stability and usability. It’s not competitive.
IMO, the concerted attack against the ODF format[1] was also a large contributing factor towards OpenOffice/LibreOffice loss in the format wars[2]
I posted about this in another thread and was down-voted for some reason[3], but I think it is important enough to not forget.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...
[2] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2639468/odf-vs--openxml.ht...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596347
Back when I read slashdot, I swear every thread about office had a top comment complaining about how office’s ribbon UI ruined their work flow. One of the biggest weaknesses in open source is that the people who contribute to these projects seem to love 90s style UI.
Office 97 was peak Office, UI-wise, for me and a whole lot of other users. If a UI works great, and newer UIs do not offer a clear, significant value add, why should it change? Why should not changing the UI count as a negative against the product?
How is that a drawback? That's a massive plus. The interface changes that we have seen in Office have been pointless time-consuming travesties with no real purpose but to make it look like the software is completely new. No productivity increases whatsoever. The LO interface hasn't changed since Office 95 because that's when it's peaked. The tasks are the same and the human that do them are the same, and so the interface (if it is already at its best version) should also stay the same. This a great advantage of the open source office suites, not a drawback.
This is a problem with MSFT products as well, but to a lesser extent.
In addition, decades-old bugs have not been fixed. It's a showstopper.
Then of course Micorsoft created their ribbon UI and enforces protection against others copying it.
Personally, I don't find the ribbon intuitive, and others, perhaps a majority, feel the same way, but Microsoft has all that weight behind them.
(Really - does not using the MSO ribbon automatically make something out of date? I've never particularly liked the ribbon.)
Turns out word processing is hard.
Keynote is interesting and I've seen some consultants use it for sprint planning really effectively, but Numbers is an utter clusterf*ck.
Then in the next version, Apple dumbed it all down with the "panel"-style UI so it had similar UX to the iOS and web versions. It lost features. It got many of them back over the years, but that design move really broke my workflow for a while. I just kept Pages '09 around until the new version had parity, more or less.
It really does work well. I got used to my Office-using colleagues asking, "how'd you do that?!" Downside is you are in a bubble and cannot round-trip documents without losing the really good layout stuff.
I also did the MS 360 thing once about 3 years ago and will never do that again.
What happened or was the key issue?
To make matters worse MS office applications always default to saving files to cloud based storage despite my always picking a local drive to save files. There is noticeable lag while the file explorer tries to access cloud storage despite it never being intentionally used.
And I don't regret it at all.
For personal use, I don’t care which tool I’m using - my use cases are simple enough it just doesn’t matter.
When I worked in almostMegaCorp, though, I had the freedom to push through whatever tools I wanted. With the exception of adding R and Python to my machine, the Office provided everything I needed and did so better than the competition. I don’t care, in that context, about pricing, competition, OS ideaology, etc. Setting up an in-house software division to throw bug fixes at OpenOffice to try and transition to a tool that is equal to or inferior for almost all of our actual uses?
Jfc why?!
Here's a recent interview with Christian Ude who was mayor when LiMux was introduced (german): https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck...
This is a really interesting interview, unfortunately it is only available in German so I translated (with the help of deepl) the part about the situation right after the switch.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Linux-Magazin: How big was the pressure afterwards?
[...]
Christian Ude: The most intense thing I personally experienced was a visit from Steve Ballmer, after all Vice President of Microsoft. He interrupted his skiing holiday in Switzerland to visit me. With his well-known enthusiasm, with which he dynamically jumps around on stage at conferences, he jumped around in my office and first of all praised the beauty of Munich. But then he said that I was making a catastrophic decision that I could never justify to anyone, especially not to a taxpayer.
Funnily enough, he constantly made new financial offers during the conversation, he talked about what Microsoft would add for free, for the school department for example. On and on he reduced the price, one million and a another million and a another million and a dozen million cheaper than before. This is how important Munich - which is internationally perceived as an IT center - was to Microsoft as a symbol.
Would [Munich] walk a new path or repentantly return into Microsoft's lap? We have calculated that Ballmer has improved the financial offer by around 35 per cent. But since we wanted to make a strategic decision and not just make a price comparison, this was not important to us.
Linux-Magazin: Bill Gates also came to visit?
Christian Ude: He was in Munich because of a presentation of the "House of the Future", which inspired him insanely. With it, you could determine from your car how high the room temperature in each room is and whether the refrigerator should defrost a bit. On his way back to the airport I had the opportunity to talk to him. So I sat together with one of the richest men in the world in a camouflaged van, which was luxuriously equipped inside, but looked from the outside as if it belonged to a small craft business. Gates asked me stunned: "Why are you doing this? That's absurd! That's incomprehensible!
Now that I'm not the hard-boiled IT specialist who could stand up to a Bill Gates in every detail, I just said:
"Please note, we're all about independence. We don't want to be dependent."
Then he said, "That's nonsense, who do you depend on?"
"Now that you are here [I can tell you]: From you, of course!"
That really made him collapse, and he said: "It's incomprehensible to me, it's ideology".
It was just politics 101. Their politicians when facing the choice "keep using Linux => bye bye huge Munich MS Offices", didn't think twice and axed the penguin. Admittedly, it wouldn't have been an easy pick even for FOSS enthusiasts as many of us are, if we were in Munich politicians shoes: letting one of the biggest corporations out there build their huge headquarters in your city doesn't just mean bribes but jobs (almost 2000 in the HQ alone). As long as you're being identified as the one who let all this happen, you have just won a huge PR boost for creating jobs, plus all those people -and their families- votes, not to mention strong ties with MS high profile execs which would be of use one day. Honestly, Linux would have lost no matter its convenience.
If I had to, I'd bet all my horses that we'll see finally one day Munich and other cities adopting Linux, although it will be Microsoft branded and mostly FOSS.
PowerPoint rendered the images in the ODP poorly, like it jacked the contrast up to 100. Saving the document as a PPTX within LibreOffice and then playing it on PowerPoint fixed the issue. From my naive perspective MS Office seems to have issues with ODF just like LibreOffice has with docx/pptx/xlsx/etc.
But if you can't absolutely rely on it to be totally compatible, then it's a total non-starter. Not worth the risk.
Counterpoint: Google Docs. Its OOXML compatibility is for shit. Its adoption is HUGE.
Not one person mentions how amazingly shit its OOXML compatibility is, even for quite simple DOCX.
Almost nobody in an office uses the fancy bits of Excel. Spreadsheets are mostly used as flat-file data stores.
And Office is notoriously incompatible between different versions of itself.
In practice, I don't think the file compatibility objection to LibreOffice is real. It's just an excuse.
The actual competition is Google Docs, which is a shitty word processor and a shitty spreadsheet and a shitty presentation app, but absolutely brilliant at quick and convenient collaboration. That's why LibreOffice is working super-hard on the web-based online version.
This has never been my experience. Even if there's a more robust DB based system, someone will do everything in Excel.
Nowadays I usually tell whomever is asking for something in a "Word" format that I don't own a copy of Word, but I can send them a PDF, and they're OK with that, but when I was first getting started as an engineer I used to have to work with recruiters a lot, where they'd ask for my resume in a Word format so that they could insert their ugly logo on the top and break all the formatting. No one ever said anything about my files that were initially made with LibreOffice. In fact, for all the essays I've had to write for school (that I started again semi-recently), I've done them with either Pandoc+Markdown or LibreOffice (depending on how much formatting is required), and no one has said anything about the MS Word export, or me potentially breaking the teachers' templates that they made in word.
I'll definitely give it to you for Excel though. For simple stuff LibreOffice's compatibility is fine, but if you do any kind of elaborate Excel function, you're going to have a bad time, and things are going to break.
I think that's what they mean by external entity? I've also personally had problems with openpyxl in python
If easydns is writing shallow blog fodder like this, should I expect the same thing from thier actual product line?
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites
Also would be interested in more details on why you like Microsoft Office better than the other two.
And you can still buy a one time license if that suites your needs better.
From my perspective its a huge cognitive burden for an organization to change Office apps that they use everyday. For a technical group like easydns its probably easier and most of the staff might even support it. In my organization we have some manufacturing folks that don't like computers and don't want to learn anything about them. Its hard to make this kind of change, there is a cost to retraining and effects on productivity and happiness.
Last time I bought the on prem off pack (few years ago) it auto installed spyware (one drive) - I did enjoy the multiple layers of phone support though, within an hour it was determined I needed to uninstall and return for refund, no way to run it without the spydrive addition.
open office and libre office have been installed on all systems since.
I understand some orgs can't new software, I think most just need to very basic formatting tools to be highlighted, open and save - which it does great now.
I have to search 3-4 times a year on how to do something with calc.. I see many devs search 4 or more times a day on how to do basic stuff with their daily tools.
Sounds like a couple UX templates would benefit the average company workers out there - one that is super basic, very few icons, and one that mimics word.
I was going to take classes on excel but can't run it.
That makes it easily the best deal in cloud storage for personal use, if you have multiple members in your family and want to use Office.
* Office Apps -- install wherever you want, including on web, iOS, Android and Android-capable Chromebooks to get native apps on Chromebook. You can install on as many devices as you want, around 5 per-person can be in use at the same time
* 1TB OneDrive storage (clients on Mac/Win/Web only sadly, no Linux client yet)
* 50GB Outlook ad-free email storage
* Bring your own custom domain to get @my-family.tld email for your family
* Priority phone support
All in all, for families it's a good offering that competes really well with Google One (one.google.com) -- quite irritating that Google One still doesn't offer that custom domain thing. The 50GB ad-free email per family member is a great offer for instance. All of this for about $100/yr, less with the revamped Home Use Program.
[1] https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/get-a-personalized-...
$99 / year seems like a good deal, until you realize that it might as well be $0 / year if you don't use Office 365 and you're not missing much.
Office 365 sucks for collaborative editing, where Google Docs shines, or for note taking. It also sucks if you want to write highly technical documentation, for which I prefer Markdown, Org or Latex — I know it's not for everybody, but nothing beats pushing text files in Git.
Microsoft Excel is king for big spreadsheets filled with fancy formulas, but for my own purposes Google Sheets has been much more user friendly and I'm the kind of guy that creates sheets for monthly expenses, tracking my weight, etc. And I've seen this going on in our team too, where Google Sheets is much more convenient.
So you're paying $99 / year which is only useful when other people share MS Office formats with you. And I know this depends on the field you're in, but I can literally count the number of times that happened this year on the fingers of one hand.
And sure they give you OneDrive storage too. But you only use OneDrive when you don't care about your data, because their client is a piece of shit. I tried to use it repeatedly and I witnessed serious data conflicts and sync issues within hours of installing their client and this happened several times. Dropbox is more expensive, but Dropbox actually works for the intended purpose.
I did pay for Office 365 for about 2 years, until I realized that I'm not actually using it, wasted money.
I agree, for collaborative editing, I also use Google docs.
Anyway, we have several good choices.
Most folks I know that run linux on the desktop run a Windows VM to use Office.
Never liked LibreOffice/OpenOffice/StarOffice. I respect the work behind it, but as a product I don't like it.
And using MS Office just contributes to the de-facto monopoly problem. Corel used to have a nice Office suite for Linux but after MS bought them Linux support was dropped.
Wut?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel#History
Sure, my mom will have a great time writing recipes on it and will save $10/mo., but can anyone do any real work that you'd do in Excel? Let's be realistic.
Also, does no one care about design? LibreOffice's interface looks awful on all platforms, and stuck in the 90s. Same with GIMP.
At my company, they do. They're not particularly tech-savvy users either.
> does no one care about design? LibreOffice's interface looks awful
Design isn't about looking pretty; it's about being usable. What's wrong with LibreOffice's and Gimp's design?
Fonts are so broken on Linux—which is the platform that would need this the most—that you can barely select dropdown options if you're on a hidpi monitor.
GIMP's UI is spread across a huge pile of small windows with overlapping jurisdiction such that you're never sure where anything needs to go.
I've copied an image and would like to work on it. Let's go create a new image. Oh, it hasn't changed the size to match the clipboard - that's fine, let's pick something small and let it expand.
Oh, when I paste, it doesn't offer to expand the canvas. That's unfortunate. Let's expand it manually and paste......but it still tries to paste into the tiny rectangle I originally had rather than the whole larger viewport. I give up, I'll manually guess a few sizes until I get close.
OK, let's edit my picture. I click on the paintbrush tool in one window......then select a brush in the "Layers - Brushes" window, but it's too big. How do I fix that? I look for the "Brush Editor" window (different from "Layers - Brushes") and see a "Radius" selector. But it's read-only and I have no idea why. I have to go back to "Layers - Brushes" and find a tiny "Edit this Brush" button.....then go back to the "Brush Editor" window to make changes.
Let's add some text to my window....oh, the text properties window appears over my image, translucent (even less contrast!) and the font select window is.......a free-form text box? No dropdown to see the names of my fonts, much less a preview of them? I'm done. Time to go to Paint.NET or Photoshop or literally any other image editor.
I agree that's bad. It used to have colored icons. You can change the themes in preferences so it uses colored icons, again. The background color is also changeable. So, yeah, default theme got bad, but it can be fixed in less than a minute.
> GIMP's UI is spread across a huge pile of small windows with overlapping jurisdiction such that you're never sure where anything needs to go.
Configuration over convention, I guess. It does remember where you put said windows for the next time you launch it, so just put them whereever is best for you.
> Oh, when I paste, it doesn't offer to expand the canvas. That's unfortunate. Let's expand it manually and paste......but it still tries to paste into the tiny rectangle I originally had rather than the whole larger viewport. I give up, I'll manually guess a few sizes until I get close.
I think your expected behaviour is too ambiguous. Where should it expand to, the right, the left, up, down, all sides equally? You can "Paste as > New Image" (Ctrl+Shift+v) and you'll get an image the exact size of the image you're pasting. Does that help?
> OK, let's edit my picture. I click on the paintbrush tool in one window......then select a brush in the "Layers - Brushes" window, but it's too big. How do I fix that? I look for the "Brush Editor" window (different from "Layers - Brushes") and see a "Radius" selector. But it's read-only and I have no idea why. I have to go back to "Layers - Brushes" and find a tiny "Edit this Brush" button.....then go back to the "Brush Editor" window to make changes.
Where are you seeing "Radius"? I see "Size" and I can't get it to be read-only.
> Let's add some text to my window....oh, the text properties window appears over my image, translucent (even less contrast!) and the font select window is.......a free-form text box? No dropdown to see the names of my fonts, much less a preview of them?
If you start typing the name of fonts, you do get a dropdown with names and previews. I do agree it would be better to be able to make it drop down without requiring any text input, though.
(1) Auto backup
(2) Accessible from all my devices with zero work.
(3) Can share with anyone with just a link
(4) Can allow anyone to edit with just a link
I'm sure HN will be "evil google" and you might be right. I don't believe they "spy" on google docs and I'm a paying g-suite customer.
I get different people have different needs. Google Docs meets mine. Been using it since soon after it shipped. Haven't looked back. I might be able to be convinced to move to another online service but I could never go back to a native app for documents or spreadsheets
(OK, if all you get is MS file formats, than O365 is fine, if expensive. I've been using LO for years at work in a MS shop, and had no issues for a couple of years.)
The author is _deeply_ distrusting of SaaS, and for good reasons.
For me however it is thanks, but no thanks. Google and any other SAAS can go eff themselves. Do not like the way it works and not letting somebody else manage my data.
No calls yet...
side note: as soon as I showed him he didn't have to go into the menu at all any more and could just use the plus and minus keys on his keyboard he was thrilled with the change.
Stuff we care about, like better load times and a cleaner interface, doesn't matter to him.
How ??????
Both my mom and my sister use LibreOffice for "everyday" office tasks like resume building and simple budget tracking, and it's what I recommend to all of my tech-indifferent friends who need to do light office work but don't want to pay for MS Office.
I used to blame LibreOffice for how mangled Word docs looked, but then I used Office365 and realized that there's no such things as the "right" way to display a word doc, since all of the machines I opened it on using Word365 showed it differently...
Unlike another commentator, Calc was way better than Excel for a long time, and much better about not trashing your work. Before like 2010 Excel would make it very easy to accidentally lose your work forever.
Probably due to missing fonts being replaced by whatever's available on the machine. Different fonts can have wildly different sizes / metrics.
I scan the comments and see a few anecdotal comments about how life is just fine with LO. But as many other comments point out: it's not the one-offs that make this hard, it's the fact that excel is the de-facto information exchange between people, businesses, and boards. To be a broken record: it's too ingrained.
However, I have this to say about Excel. MicroSoft is making a push to kill VBA with two prong. One, replace VBA with JavaScript through OfficeJS. Two, beef up Power Query and Power Pivot so that you can do enough ETL in Excel through a point and click interface.
But the nasty truth is that on the ground in offices worldwide, there are ETL flows that shouldn't exist, but middle managers do not possess the political capital, incentives, or technical skill to remove. And while Power Query, M, DAX and Power Pivot are excellent, in, let's say, 5% of workflows, you need some business logic in some language that is more flexible. And this is the real problem with VBA; it papers over dirty workflows, even if the data structures you are provided are not good.
Using VBA was much worse. I could manage with the VBA language alone, but the number of security controls and macro-related warnings I had to click through, the poor quality of free online documentation, the lack of version control support and the hacks I had to use to get things into Git, and the lack of decent libraries made the experience an overall nightmare. Have you found solutions to these problems? Or do you work in an environment where you control the users' computers?
As someone in the Linux/Debian/Ubuntu area of my organization, the main headache with licensing from what I can see as an 'outsider' is not so much the price as the auditing/compliance overhead.
We can spin up/down as many Deb/Ub/CentOS systems as we want and not care, which as much RAM and (v)CPU as needed.
Trying to do the same with Windows and/or VMware seems to be something else.
The parents point seems to still stand -- a significant proportion of companies use Office internally, and Excel is bundled as a part of O365.
As someone who started in Windows 97 and .NET at the 1.1 Framework release: VBA is a gateway drug to a career in MS languages.
Coming from engineering, CS people never seemed to understand why someone used Matlab at all, when python existed or even the utility of 'R'/'Stata'.
The effort needed to onboard onto a programming/mathematical/computational tool, when you don't have a strong coding background to go with it, is extremely high. The users will hold on to them till their dying breath, because the is tied to more than 50% of their own value proposition.
Excel is the epitome of this phenomenon.
Also, excel is straight up a good tool. The only advantage of Libre office is the price, which is a non-factor for any major corp. Google's collaboration suite is better, but they lag behind in every other area.
I can see windows being completely replaced by competitor, but Office will stay. It is MSFT's stickiest product.
Another way to say this is: "learn".
People who code for a living are used to regularly teaching themselves new things, but there are lots of folks in other corners of the organization that expect to be taught / onboarded, and it's not an entirely unreasonable expectation. I think the word "onboard" implies a cost will have to be paid (e.g. time, money, man-hours, hiring new talent, etc.), and that's what the parent poster wanted to emphasize.
Another one: Excels stubborn insistence on mangling anything that can be somehow construed into a date into one :-/
Which recent excel versions you can bring that data table directly into power query as well, which is useful if youve got multiple csv you are trying to look at that are related
Can’t replace Excel in many finance roles without those.
I like and approve of LibreOffice but it doesn't seamlessly transfer complex styles or tracked changes to and from Word. When an organization is working with people who bill in the hundreds of dollars per hour and a grant in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, cost of MS Office is a non-issue. I approve of and generally support OSS (I'm writing this in Firefox), but the level of integration into the MSO world is ill-understood.
I've also written novels and the whole publishing industry and infrastructure is based around Word.
That also never really worked when Apple was much bigger in pre-college education.
Edit: Chromebooks in education are like Enterprise software. The end user never chooses to use it. The vendor is not incentivized to make a product that end user will like, only the corporate buyer.
How many teachers and administrators who do have a choice are using Chromebooks willingly?
They like iPads up to around grade 2-3. After that, the keyboard makes the kids more productive.
Windows requires too much IT overhead and Mac is too difficult to do business with and expensive.
The real magic of Chrome is the management suite. It’s dirt cheap for .edu and works fantastic. Chrome devices on a cart are reconfigured by the time the cart is rolled into a different classroom.
It’s way too expensive for commercial customers though.
Teachers want Chromebook's for their students. When they have choice, they will use their own laptops for themselves.
Just like no one ever said they want to use Version One for their own personal projects. They would choose something like BaseCamp Personal or Trello.
I can make a g form, output to a g sheet, automatically email if an entry contains certain text, etc. All that takes ~20 minutes, 1 add on, and 0 lines of code. Excel simply cannot compete with that.
Edit - I still use excel all the time for heavy lifting though. They fill different use cases for me.
The only document format my beaurocracy accepts is .html.
Well, except for lucky coincidence (of features/preference) there's no inherent reason a FOSS project would work more according to one's preferences though. FOSS projects also have leads, take decisions, do rewrites, change directions, etc, same as proprietary software...
It sounds like Open Source Especulation to me.