Excel is a piece of software that I would absolutely not hesitate to pay for... but I'm unfortunately stuck with LibreOffice.
I used to work in an insurance company on an actuarial pricing team where the preferred tool was Excel (the modelling was pretty simple). Needless to say, I became very accustomed to and adept with using Excel. We definitely pushed the limits... but what was nice was being able to grab 600K records (maybe 20 cols) from a DB, throw it in Excel and get some results in a matter of minutes. You might have to wait a few seconds based on what you were trying to do, but Excel could handle it.
At home I run Linux... where there is no Excel, so I use LibreOffice instead. Just a few days ago I was poking around the Himalayan Database[1] and one of the tables has about 50K records. LibreOffice absolutely chokes when I try to do any filtering or calculations. As well, the pivot tables in Excel are in a totally different league than LibreOffice in terms performance and flexibility. It's unfortunate because I try to support OSS as much as possible... but LibreOffice is just so painful.
You could argue that I'm using the wrong tool for the job. Ultimately, I do throw it in SQLite or Pandas, but Excel is just so nice for ad hocs if it fits in memory.
> You could argue that I'm using the wrong tool for the job.
Without comparing Excel vs LibreOffice vs etc, I've found the category of spreadsheet software to be immensely helpful for analyzing, aggregating, visualizing and reducing small datasets.
You do have to end up falling back to python scripts using pandas or whatever if you need to run jobs that need to take data from one DB and put it into another DB or something like that.
But if my output is basically a reduced set of tables, series or graphs for presentation, spreadsheets are an immensely useful tool.
What I've specifically done is have one sheet of the spreadsheet represent the "raw, unreduced data", and write up formulae for aggregation in other sheets, based on the raw data and intermediate aggregations. Starts becoming less ideal when you have 10 or more sheets, but for simple cases, it's very much underrated by us engineering folks.
I always found that excel can be as simple and as complex as you need it to be. You can use it to write your shopping list (ok, not ideal), or a small budget, and you can ramp it up for really complex simulations. Once you know vlookup, indirect/match, sumif/countif and very few other formulas (for example text manipulation to clean and harmonise data inputs), you can do really interesting stuff even with datasets of thousands of lines.
I found that often in excel the most difficult stuff is not the back-end (data analysis and simulation) but the front end (i.e. giving the user a clear interface for inputing data and conditions in the model, and visualising outputs, for example with buttons, constrained inputs, conditional formatting etc.).
>What I've specifically done is have one sheet of the spreadsheet represent the "raw, unreduced data", and write up formulae for aggregation in other sheets, based on the raw data and intermediate aggregations
This is exactly what I do. When it works, it is just way too fast for ad-hoc reporting to consider doing anything else. Pretty much all of my first draft reporting is built this way, so i can cut through the back-and-forth of management change requests before going through the trouble of setting up a full thing.
It is amazing how much you can accomplish with appending a couple columns to your raw data for categorization and then pivoting.
when im in a rush and need another layer (pivottable of a pivot table), I even set up formulas to reference a produced pivottable and then pivot on the formulas. You can extend the formulas far beyond expected use-cases and filter out the irrelevant rows later
I wish this comment was banned from HN. Every time someone says that some free software is in any way flawed there's always the completely useless reply "well did you file a bug?" or even worse "it's open source - why didn't you fix it?"
I'd hope it's obvious why these comments are bad, but I guess not so:
* Not everyone has time to fix a bug or even file one.
* The ability to fix or file bugs doesn't mean that the bugs don't exist!
* The ability to fix or file bugs doesn't mean that one shouldn't talk about the bugs.
* The possibility of fixing a bug doesn't help if you don't have the time or ability to fix it and actually want to use the software.
* Not everyone is able to fix all bugs
* It's not nearly as easy for people outside a project to fix bugs as it is for people familiar with the code.
* Everyone already knows it is possible to file and fix bugs in open source software so you're not adding anything to the conversation.
Copy and paste on linux when using multiple apps and remote vms/vnc/rdp etc, is a pain. Depending on what app you use, its looking for which clipboard buffer and what commands to copy/paste. Mixing Os's and apps, is a clusterfuck on a multiheaded desktop with excel in a windows rdp session and libre office in another, then throw google sheet in because work decided to switch to google office at 1/2 the price of office 365 per user.
I absolutely hate type detection in Excel. It's at least comparable to type coercion in Javascript, maybe even more capricious. I know the type thank you very much.
I have been using https://openrefine.org/ for interacting with large csv files, and it has been amazing. It supports the normal filtering / transformation and other import / export actions. Plus it's open source.
I run LO on this laptop under Linux. I've just opened the member's table which has 74,853 records in it. It's a 54.8MiB FoxPro database and took about 10 seconds to import. I've put an auto filter on the whole thing and a search for France took blink. I created a pivot table in seconds showing counts of sex by citizenship (roughly 10% of UK climbers are women.)
This is a fairly beefy machine but over two years old so nothing particularly special nowadays.
>You could argue that I'm using the wrong tool for the job.
For ad hoc filtering, calculations, merging, analyzing tabular datasets a dedicated tool such as our EasyMorph (https://easymorph.com) would do a better job than Excel in the vast majority of cases. It can handle millions of rows, keeps data in memory, has a wide range of available transforms and built-in charting. We target heavy Excel users and it works quite well. Disclaimer: I work for EasyMorph.
I think both Excel and Libre Office have their place. Excel has the power and refinement for professional users such as accounting, actuarial, and the commenter's data analysis.
Libre Office is for home use: tax prep, budgeting, graphing science projects. That's what I use it for, and it's perfect and free. That might be unfair to all the hard work that's been put into it, but if you don't push its limits, it works great.
So I guess I am arguing it's the wrong tool for data heavy jobs.
Always felt it was a shame that scheme in a grid was abandoned (and last I tried getting it up and running I gave up;I believe the only viable option is to change the gui library - and that didn't seem trivial at the time. I suppose these days one might rustle up an ancient version of Slackware in a docker container...).
> Excel is a piece of software that I would absolutely not hesitate to pay for... but I'm unfortunately stuck with LibreOffice.
But... according to the rest of your post, you _did_ hesitate to pay for it and are finding that LibreOffice doesn't fit your needs. So why not buy Excel?
You can run it in a VM, but at that point you're already settling for a sub-optimal experience, so why not try a alternative that's free and packaged for your OS?
I had the same issue with LibreOffice choking with big datasets so I've started using SoftMaker PlanMaker for loading anything with more than a few hundred records. It's works just fine with documents with tens of thousands of rows and it allows me to do the - admittedly very simple - calculations and charting I need.
The whole SoftMaker Office suite is pretty nice. Not sure where it's on feature parity with Microsoft Office, but the price isn't terrible (something like $20 a year for the paid version, or free if you don't care about the paid features) and it does a great job of reading Office files.
* You could argue that I'm using the wrong tool for the job.*
You are. You could try this reporting tool instead: http://pebblereports.com it has an Office like interface, works really well with databases and has performant crosstabs.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
..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?
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.
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)?
Software engineers opining on Excel vs LibreOffice strikes me as pretty funny. Imagine someone who programs sporadically asking why anyone would pay for intelliJ or Visual Studio.
Even if Excel is just marginally better than LibreOffice, if you use it day after day to do your job, the $150/year cost is basically nothing (especially when enterprise software that does a lot less can routinely charge $1000/user/year). Meanwhile, It Just Works™. Plus, it's a huge pain to learn something new or deal with the aggravation of compatibility issues. Any LibreOffice document will tend to open up nicely in Word or Excel because otherwise, it's worthless if you want to share it with others. But the opposite definitely isn't true.
> if you use it day after day to do your job, the $150/year cost is basically nothing [...] [Excel] Just Works™.
From the post:
> It’s not that I’m cheap either, I just want something that works according to my preferences, not Microsoft’s.
See the post for details about what's wrong with Microsoft's Office offering.
The author even goes on to say:
> I took the $319 I was about to spend on an Office license and I donated it to the LibreOffice project, and will just continue to do so every time I have to go through this process.
I really don't think they're as cheap as you make them out to be.
And I agree with the sentiment. I'd also be fine to pay for it, but I don't want to have to struggle with emulation layers to get Microsoft's crap to work on a non-Microsoft supported operating system (it's not as if I can compile it myself), when there is a perfectly fine alternative that does not rely on being a monopoly. If someone has a layout issue with my document, the solution is very simple. If someone has a layout issue with Microsoft-made documents, they expect the other party to pay over a hundred bucks just to open one document (it doesn't happen more than once a year to me, so they're asking me to pay that for one document). This scheme only works if there is a monopoly because those people wouldn't actually themselves pay for two or three licenses just to open other people's documents.
For me, LibreOffice also works better (ever tried opening a CSV in Excel? It comes out wrong 90% of the time and I don't know how, or if, you can change it; LibreOffice Calc just gives you a dialog with the csv settings and a preview of the result), in part because I'm used to it and no longer used to newer Office versions, it aligns with my ideology more, and on top of all that it's free.
"Even if [one] is just marginally better than [the other], if you use it day after day to do your job" then indeed it's a no-brainer to use LibreOffice instead of pay money for an inferior product.
> Word and Outlook are toxic waste as far as I am concerned: they frustrate me more than they serve me.
This opinion is largely shared even in the non technical world.
Outlook is a lot better than Lotus but it suffers from the comparaison with Gmail. Powerful search was a game changer for me and I miss it dearly since my company decided to switch to Office 365.
Excel and Powerpoint really are the two gems of Microsoft Office.
Work wanted a cloud office provider, Went to M$ and they quoted 35 dollars per user. Thinking they own the market they price gouged us. Google gave us 15. This is for 20K+ users, guess what email solution we went with. 9 months later, M$ Came back and offered to match the price of google, after we already deployed to google office.
3 years later, Work is now thinking about switching the mobile iron (google phone management) piece to microsoft, since we are finished our windows10 upgrades, and switching from wsus to sccm with microsoft security/patching on azure. Fixes our remote laptop patching issue this way, since sales folks dont vpn in.
Dont get me started on the ssl cert authentication installed on every laptop for gmail, with no password for gmail, just the oauth just the ssl cert password.
Perhaps the examples were too specific, and outside your particular area of expertise? In other words, do you program primarily in Java or C# / .NET applications?
I've seen (a little) of both sides. While I use mostly free tools now (like VS Code!) to program Node, etc., when I was programming .NET / MVC applications with C#, Visual Studio was essential and excellent. I still have a few odd projects geared up for those environments, and while can poke around clumsily with VS Code, for deep dives and local builds, I'll fire up Visual Studio.
Of course, all that being said, the Community version, which is free, is sufficient for me. But it doesn't take much to find scenarios where professionals have to pay for tools to gain specific efficiencies.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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I used to work in an insurance company on an actuarial pricing team where the preferred tool was Excel (the modelling was pretty simple). Needless to say, I became very accustomed to and adept with using Excel. We definitely pushed the limits... but what was nice was being able to grab 600K records (maybe 20 cols) from a DB, throw it in Excel and get some results in a matter of minutes. You might have to wait a few seconds based on what you were trying to do, but Excel could handle it.
At home I run Linux... where there is no Excel, so I use LibreOffice instead. Just a few days ago I was poking around the Himalayan Database[1] and one of the tables has about 50K records. LibreOffice absolutely chokes when I try to do any filtering or calculations. As well, the pivot tables in Excel are in a totally different league than LibreOffice in terms performance and flexibility. It's unfortunate because I try to support OSS as much as possible... but LibreOffice is just so painful.
You could argue that I'm using the wrong tool for the job. Ultimately, I do throw it in SQLite or Pandas, but Excel is just so nice for ad hocs if it fits in memory.
[1] https://www.himalayandatabase.com/
Without comparing Excel vs LibreOffice vs etc, I've found the category of spreadsheet software to be immensely helpful for analyzing, aggregating, visualizing and reducing small datasets.
You do have to end up falling back to python scripts using pandas or whatever if you need to run jobs that need to take data from one DB and put it into another DB or something like that.
But if my output is basically a reduced set of tables, series or graphs for presentation, spreadsheets are an immensely useful tool.
What I've specifically done is have one sheet of the spreadsheet represent the "raw, unreduced data", and write up formulae for aggregation in other sheets, based on the raw data and intermediate aggregations. Starts becoming less ideal when you have 10 or more sheets, but for simple cases, it's very much underrated by us engineering folks.
This is exactly what I do. When it works, it is just way too fast for ad-hoc reporting to consider doing anything else. Pretty much all of my first draft reporting is built this way, so i can cut through the back-and-forth of management change requests before going through the trouble of setting up a full thing.
It is amazing how much you can accomplish with appending a couple columns to your raw data for categorization and then pivoting.
when im in a rush and need another layer (pivottable of a pivot table), I even set up formulas to reference a produced pivottable and then pivot on the formulas. You can extend the formulas far beyond expected use-cases and filter out the irrelevant rows later
File a bug. https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/
It's easy to complain in an HN comment, but a clear description of the test case would certainly help with getting the issue resolved.
I'd hope it's obvious why these comments are bad, but I guess not so:
* Not everyone has time to fix a bug or even file one.
* The ability to fix or file bugs doesn't mean that the bugs don't exist!
* The ability to fix or file bugs doesn't mean that one shouldn't talk about the bugs.
* The possibility of fixing a bug doesn't help if you don't have the time or ability to fix it and actually want to use the software.
* Not everyone is able to fix all bugs
* It's not nearly as easy for people outside a project to fix bugs as it is for people familiar with the code.
* Everyone already knows it is possible to file and fix bugs in open source software so you're not adding anything to the conversation.
Do we need a list of missing features? I would also add:
* Copy paste from Writer does not work
* Summing a column (not a range) isn't possible
* Type detection is not as good
* Auto-update doesn't work at all
Could you elaborate on your column summation problem please. =sum(E:E) works as does the summation button.
Don't understand your third point but if it is text vs numbers and dates etc then I've had plenty of fun with this in Excel as well over the decades.
Auto-update - please elaborate where it fails
Sigh.
This is a fairly beefy machine but over two years old so nothing particularly special nowadays.
For ad hoc filtering, calculations, merging, analyzing tabular datasets a dedicated tool such as our EasyMorph (https://easymorph.com) would do a better job than Excel in the vast majority of cases. It can handle millions of rows, keeps data in memory, has a wide range of available transforms and built-in charting. We target heavy Excel users and it works quite well. Disclaimer: I work for EasyMorph.
Libre Office is for home use: tax prep, budgeting, graphing science projects. That's what I use it for, and it's perfect and free. That might be unfair to all the hard work that's been put into it, but if you don't push its limits, it works great.
So I guess I am arguing it's the wrong tool for data heavy jobs.
http://siag.nu/siag/
Anyone know of something similar, but more up to date?
But... according to the rest of your post, you _did_ hesitate to pay for it and are finding that LibreOffice doesn't fit your needs. So why not buy Excel?
> At home I run Linux... where there is no Excel
You can run it in a VM, but at that point you're already settling for a sub-optimal experience, so why not try a alternative that's free and packaged for your OS?
The whole SoftMaker Office suite is pretty nice. Not sure where it's on feature parity with Microsoft Office, but the price isn't terrible (something like $20 a year for the paid version, or free if you don't care about the paid features) and it does a great job of reading Office files.
I would be very curious about your experience as you certainly tax the software much more than I do.
You are. You could try this reporting tool instead: http://pebblereports.com it has an Office like interface, works really well with databases and has performant crosstabs.
If they were using Windows, they could save a couple hundred bucks and just use Excel.
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.
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 one: Excels stubborn insistence on mangling anything that can be somehow construed into a date into one :-/
Another way to say this is: "learn".
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?
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.
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.
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?
Can’t replace Excel in many finance roles without those.
Even if Excel is just marginally better than LibreOffice, if you use it day after day to do your job, the $150/year cost is basically nothing (especially when enterprise software that does a lot less can routinely charge $1000/user/year). Meanwhile, It Just Works™. Plus, it's a huge pain to learn something new or deal with the aggravation of compatibility issues. Any LibreOffice document will tend to open up nicely in Word or Excel because otherwise, it's worthless if you want to share it with others. But the opposite definitely isn't true.
> if you use it day after day to do your job, the $150/year cost is basically nothing [...] [Excel] Just Works™.
From the post:
> It’s not that I’m cheap either, I just want something that works according to my preferences, not Microsoft’s.
See the post for details about what's wrong with Microsoft's Office offering.
The author even goes on to say:
> I took the $319 I was about to spend on an Office license and I donated it to the LibreOffice project, and will just continue to do so every time I have to go through this process.
I really don't think they're as cheap as you make them out to be.
And I agree with the sentiment. I'd also be fine to pay for it, but I don't want to have to struggle with emulation layers to get Microsoft's crap to work on a non-Microsoft supported operating system (it's not as if I can compile it myself), when there is a perfectly fine alternative that does not rely on being a monopoly. If someone has a layout issue with my document, the solution is very simple. If someone has a layout issue with Microsoft-made documents, they expect the other party to pay over a hundred bucks just to open one document (it doesn't happen more than once a year to me, so they're asking me to pay that for one document). This scheme only works if there is a monopoly because those people wouldn't actually themselves pay for two or three licenses just to open other people's documents.
For me, LibreOffice also works better (ever tried opening a CSV in Excel? It comes out wrong 90% of the time and I don't know how, or if, you can change it; LibreOffice Calc just gives you a dialog with the csv settings and a preview of the result), in part because I'm used to it and no longer used to newer Office versions, it aligns with my ideology more, and on top of all that it's free.
"Even if [one] is just marginally better than [the other], if you use it day after day to do your job" then indeed it's a no-brainer to use LibreOffice instead of pay money for an inferior product.
The cost is a lot higher for Linux developers - you also need a Windows licence and to spend significant time managing a VM (I did that, no more).
I boot Linux for my dev machine (because Windows costs me more time).
I actually like Excel.
(Word and Outlook are toxic waste as far as I am concerned: they frustrate me more than they serve me).
This opinion is largely shared even in the non technical world.
Outlook is a lot better than Lotus but it suffers from the comparaison with Gmail. Powerful search was a game changer for me and I miss it dearly since my company decided to switch to Office 365.
Excel and Powerpoint really are the two gems of Microsoft Office.
3 years later, Work is now thinking about switching the mobile iron (google phone management) piece to microsoft, since we are finished our windows10 upgrades, and switching from wsus to sccm with microsoft security/patching on azure. Fixes our remote laptop patching issue this way, since sales folks dont vpn in.
Dont get me started on the ssl cert authentication installed on every laptop for gmail, with no password for gmail, just the oauth just the ssl cert password.
Microsoft costs do come in play.
I've seen (a little) of both sides. While I use mostly free tools now (like VS Code!) to program Node, etc., when I was programming .NET / MVC applications with C#, Visual Studio was essential and excellent. I still have a few odd projects geared up for those environments, and while can poke around clumsily with VS Code, for deep dives and local builds, I'll fire up Visual Studio.
Of course, all that being said, the Community version, which is free, is sufficient for me. But it doesn't take much to find scenarios where professionals have to pay for tools to gain specific efficiencies.
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And I don't regret it at all.
I also did the MS 360 thing once about 3 years ago and will never do that again.
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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?!
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.
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.
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.
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...
It breaks down when you are using something like Excel with complex macros/calculations. This is why most companies continue to use Microsoft products.
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?
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.
If they don't work in libre then that's an automatic no-go for most managers/whoever makes that decision.
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 people really need to stop declaring this about FOSS products when it is regarding workflows they have no experience in.
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 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.
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).
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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?