5 ms·

I don't really care about apple's influence or ragging on the new mac book pro. But I will say that linux has come miles and miles. My transition from Windows

I don't really care about apple's influence or ragging on the new mac book pro. But I will say that linux has come miles and miles. My transition from Windows to full time linux by way of Ubuntu was incredibly seamless. The only thing I really miss is Excel.

TAForObvReasons 10y ago
> The only thing I really miss is Excel. Sadly Excel for Mac is the main thing keeping me from switching to Linux. OpenOffice/LO are ok for very basic documents but I routinely deal with files that they can't handle.
- csdreamer7 10y ago
  Can you give some examples? (Or even better, some example files to test.)
  - ColanR 10y ago
    I remember working in an office environment with some very large powerpoint files (50-100 slides with large images), and the rule of thumb was that 'openoffice is free, but MS can handle the big stuff'. Don't know if that's still true, haven't tried OO in a while.
    - saghm 10y ago
      OpenOffice is basically dead in terms of development nowadays. If you're looking for a desktop office suite on Linux, LibreOffice (a fork of OpenOffice) is still actively maintained.
    - willtim 10y ago
      I tried Libreoffice writer briefly recently. I imported some large pictures onto a single page and it became unusably slow. It seemed to be redoing an expensive computation (likely the pictures) with every character I typed. So yes, clearly not as optimised as Word. I had to reluctantly ask to borrow my wife's computer with MS Office for this particular task.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Some people that use Office really push it hard, they've got macros, indexes, all sorts of junk that's edge-case. The converters do not always pick up on this stuff, or if they do they subtly mangle the formatting enough it's all wrong. For example, if you have an index then a tiny kerning shift can bump an item to a new page and screw up your numbering. It really depends on the types of documents you're dealing with. Some are hell, others are a no-brainer.
    - buovjaga 10y ago
      We would love to have your bug reports: http://bugs.documentfoundation.org/ http://bugs.documentfoundation.org/ It's good to search for duplicates first or see this filterable list of the most popular dupes: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/duplicates.cgi https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/duplicates.cgi
- snambi 10y ago
  Have you tried the google docs sheet? A lot of Excel lovers seem to like it.
  - abhimskywalker 10y ago
    Yep. It's almost there. Used to use excel a lot earlier (on Windows) in data science job. Now have excel on Mac, but google spreadsheets mostly gets the job done on most occasions. (Now I am mostly a programmer/product guy) A few problems I have encountered with google spreadsheet: 1. Sharing some stuff with third parties who exclusively use Windows and just want an excel. 2. Speed of working with all the keyboard shortcuts still seems better in desktop excel as compared to google spreadsheet (but I am happy with the progress of how many of those same shortcuts now work on google spreadsheets).
  - TAForObvReasons 10y ago
    Many of the files are XLSB, which is like XLSX except it stores sheets in a binary format. For reasonably large files, opening XLSB is much faster than XLSX. Google Sheets straight up fails if you try to upload files in that format. No preview available and no option to work around. So I would have to open the file in Excel anyway. Relatively new versions of LibreOffice are capable of opening simple files, but once you get into features like named ranges LO fails. So even if the UI is acceptable, failures on data import force me to keep a copy of Excel around. Keep a VM with Excel for Windows around just in case files don't work in Excel for Mac, but I've used it maybe once in the last 6 months.
- AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
  Surely, you could run it with Wine?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- bocajuniors 10y ago
  how you tried gnumeric?
- hedora 10y ago
  I find gnumeric to be superior to excel for my workflow: create csv, import it, do math, make N similar graphs, tweak for publication, export to high quality PDF, embed in latex. You could try office's web app thing if you are mostly a read only excel user.
- phyalow 10y ago
  Pretty easy to get Excel + Word + PPT windows versions running under WINE. I have had the 2010 editions working no problems on Ubuntu & Arch.
  - dijit 10y ago
    Do you have a guide? I'd be interested in trying this out as the last time I did anything I needed 2 versions of wine (32/64bit) but I'm hoping office is compiled to 64bit now.
    - phyalow 10y ago
      I dont want to be snarky but its literally just using a gui wrapper for WINE called "Play on Linux", google it and just click through a bunch of dialogues its very very easy (and stable!).
- jhasse 10y ago
  Have you tried ONLYOFFICE [1]? I heard that their Office compatibility is better than LibreOffice. [1] http://www.onlyoffice.com/de/download-desktop.aspx http://www.onlyoffice.com/de/download-desktop.aspx
progman 10y ago
> The only thing I really miss is Excel. You could try SoftMaker Office. Quote: "No other spreadsheet is as compatible with Microsoft Excel as PlanMaker 2016. Both the old .xls files (Microsoft Excel 5.0 and higher) and the modern .xlsx files from Excel 2007 to 2016 are displayed true to the original and saved reliably. This guarantees trouble-free data exchange with Excel users." http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office-linux http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office-linux

TAForObvReasons 10y ago

> The only thing I really miss is Excel. Sadly Excel for Mac is the main thing keeping me from switching to Linux. OpenOffice/LO are ok for very basic documents but I routinely deal with files that they can't handle.

csdreamer7 10y ago
Can you give some examples? (Or even better, some example files to test.)
- ColanR 10y ago
  I remember working in an office environment with some very large powerpoint files (50-100 slides with large images), and the rule of thumb was that 'openoffice is free, but MS can handle the big stuff'. Don't know if that's still true, haven't tried OO in a while.
  - saghm 10y ago
    OpenOffice is basically dead in terms of development nowadays. If you're looking for a desktop office suite on Linux, LibreOffice (a fork of OpenOffice) is still actively maintained.
  - willtim 10y ago
    I tried Libreoffice writer briefly recently. I imported some large pictures onto a single page and it became unusably slow. It seemed to be redoing an expensive computation (likely the pictures) with every character I typed. So yes, clearly not as optimised as Word. I had to reluctantly ask to borrow my wife's computer with MS Office for this particular task.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Some people that use Office really push it hard, they've got macros, indexes, all sorts of junk that's edge-case. The converters do not always pick up on this stuff, or if they do they subtly mangle the formatting enough it's all wrong. For example, if you have an index then a tiny kerning shift can bump an item to a new page and screw up your numbering. It really depends on the types of documents you're dealing with. Some are hell, others are a no-brainer.
  - buovjaga 10y ago
    We would love to have your bug reports: http://bugs.documentfoundation.org/ http://bugs.documentfoundation.org/ It's good to search for duplicates first or see this filterable list of the most popular dupes: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/duplicates.cgi https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/duplicates.cgi
snambi 10y ago
Have you tried the google docs sheet? A lot of Excel lovers seem to like it.
- abhimskywalker 10y ago
  Yep. It's almost there. Used to use excel a lot earlier (on Windows) in data science job. Now have excel on Mac, but google spreadsheets mostly gets the job done on most occasions. (Now I am mostly a programmer/product guy) A few problems I have encountered with google spreadsheet: 1. Sharing some stuff with third parties who exclusively use Windows and just want an excel. 2. Speed of working with all the keyboard shortcuts still seems better in desktop excel as compared to google spreadsheet (but I am happy with the progress of how many of those same shortcuts now work on google spreadsheets).
- TAForObvReasons 10y ago
  Many of the files are XLSB, which is like XLSX except it stores sheets in a binary format. For reasonably large files, opening XLSB is much faster than XLSX. Google Sheets straight up fails if you try to upload files in that format. No preview available and no option to work around. So I would have to open the file in Excel anyway. Relatively new versions of LibreOffice are capable of opening simple files, but once you get into features like named ranges LO fails. So even if the UI is acceptable, failures on data import force me to keep a copy of Excel around. Keep a VM with Excel for Windows around just in case files don't work in Excel for Mac, but I've used it maybe once in the last 6 months.
AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
Surely, you could run it with Wine?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
bocajuniors 10y ago
how you tried gnumeric?
hedora 10y ago
I find gnumeric to be superior to excel for my workflow: create csv, import it, do math, make N similar graphs, tweak for publication, export to high quality PDF, embed in latex. You could try office's web app thing if you are mostly a read only excel user.
phyalow 10y ago
Pretty easy to get Excel + Word + PPT windows versions running under WINE. I have had the 2010 editions working no problems on Ubuntu & Arch.
- dijit 10y ago
  Do you have a guide? I'd be interested in trying this out as the last time I did anything I needed 2 versions of wine (32/64bit) but I'm hoping office is compiled to 64bit now.
  - phyalow 10y ago
    I dont want to be snarky but its literally just using a gui wrapper for WINE called "Play on Linux", google it and just click through a bunch of dialogues its very very easy (and stable!).
jhasse 10y ago
Have you tried ONLYOFFICE [1]? I heard that their Office compatibility is better than LibreOffice. [1] http://www.onlyoffice.com/de/download-desktop.aspx http://www.onlyoffice.com/de/download-desktop.aspx

progman 10y ago

> The only thing I really miss is Excel. You could try SoftMaker Office. Quote: "No other spreadsheet is as compatible with Microsoft Excel as PlanMaker 2016. Both the old .xls files (Microsoft Excel 5.0 and higher) and the modern .xlsx files from Excel 2007 to 2016 are displayed true to the original and saved reliably. This guarantees trouble-free data exchange with Excel users." http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office-linux http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office-linux