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Firstly, I would like to thank you for your work. Open office has served me very well during my school and university days. Since joining the world of work, I'

by osrec 8y ago

Firstly, I would like to thank you for your work. Open office has served me very well during my school and university days. Since joining the world of work, I've struggled with the following: - Random crashes every couple of hours when files become large. Especially in Impress and Calc. - I do a lot of diagrams in OODraw. Sometimes I'll reopen the file to find arrows and connectors have moved. - The interface could be more intuitive. For example, the colour selector is limited and clunky, as is the gradients widget. Why can't we add any colour we like without going to the options menu? - Application speed is slow when files get large, especially Calc. I've even tried increasing memory per object. - Filtering and sorting in Calc not as fully featured or easy to use as Excel. - Conditional formatting not as easy to use. - Calc shortcuts not as easy to use as Excel (eg, I don't think there's an easy way to select a column without a mouse, or transpose a selection, or remove blanks etc etc). With Excel, I can pretty much achieve most things without touching a mouse (I'm an ex investment banker, and we get pretty familiar with the keys). OO seems to lack these critical shortcuts. - Poor documentation of OO scripting environment. It's tough to figure out how to automate simple things in Calc. This is not an exhaustive list, but it's all I can think of currently. Again, I am very supportive of the AOO/LO effort, but I wished it would start giving Microsoft more competition in the power user category. Thanks!

mindcrime 8y ago
- I do a lot of diagrams in OODraw. Sometimes I'll reopen the file to find arrows and connectors have moved. Interesting. I use Draw a lot and haven't had that hit me yet. Any chance I could convince you to post something about this to the AOO mailing list, or open an issue in Jira about it? (that is, assuming there isn't already an issue for this). Poor documentation of OO scripting environment. It's tough to figure out how to automate simple things in Calc. Agreed. I just went through that exercise myself, when I was working on a thing at work to use the Jira API to query stories, and pull stuff into a spreadsheet for analysis. I was able to figure it out, but it wasn't easy. From what I've seen, the information is all there, but it's not necessarily organized / accessible enough. There's also not enough tutorial format stuff. Hopefully I can write up some stuff based on my recent experience and get it out there. but I wished it would start giving Microsoft more competition in the power user category. Same here. I have a laundry list of things I'd like to try and add to Calc to make it more powerful for complex analytics and what-not, but I am so busy on other projects I haven't had time to pursue those ideas much.
antt 8y ago
> investment banker As someone who was a software engineer in a brokerage and had to deal with clients excel sheets: open/libre office not letting you do that is a feature. We would be given excel sheet that would depend on a specific version of Excel. We had sheets in the hundreds of megabytes. We had sheets that would take overnight to run. We had sheets with sheet dependencies. We had sheets that needed to be run in a specific order manually. We had sheets with 13,000 manually entered rows, each with 53 columns. These things, and I use the term thing since eldritch abominations does not convey the horror of using them, were responsible for investing hundreds of millions of dollars. The day excel dies is a day I will celebrate.
- osrec 8y ago
  Yes, I too have seen those spreadsheets, but it's not Excel that's at fault, it's the users. I've taken XLS behemoths and trimmed them down to a fraction of their size and optimised sheets that ran overnight, to recalculate in seconds. I get what you're saying about Excel giving too much power in incapable hands, but I feel, for certain use cases, OO is too little power in even the most capable hands.
- watersb 8y ago
  Before Python, before Perl, before I grew up and got a real job, I worked in a lab that relied upon the Ingres spreadsheet application to reduce experimental data. At the time, it was a Macintosh-only application, and its scripting support was actually very good, but validating the dsta was a very slow process and ran overnight. I re-wrote the process in AWK, and was able to complete the data-reduction task in about 60 seconds on a DEC 5000 workstation. But my numbers did not match the spreadsheet results, and finding out why was an interesting process. I then encountered small, remote offices of big international firms -- usually real-estate, insurance companies -- that had limited local IT support. It was Excel macros all the way down. And then a large biotech firm, where it took KPMG analysts a few months to determine that our entire business relied upon this one guy's spreadsheet. So yeah. But: Excel dies, let us suppose... What will these people come up with? Alexa queries? I have preferences other than Python, but mostly I csn read code written by the scientists who wrote them. They may be abominations, like global state variables and magic numbers, but they are readable. Is Python any reason to hope for a better world? (Hmm. Off-topic, perhaps. Your story woke some memories of tough IT experiences.)
hjek 8y ago
For the last few years most of the work has been happing in the LibreOffice fork. If OO crashes on you, try LO. https://lwn.net/Articles/699755/ https://lwn.net/Articles/699755/

by osrec 8y ago

mindcrime 8y ago

- I do a lot of diagrams in OODraw. Sometimes I'll reopen the file to find arrows and connectors have moved. Interesting. I use Draw a lot and haven't had that hit me yet. Any chance I could convince you to post something about this to the AOO mailing list, or open an issue in Jira about it? (that is, assuming there isn't already an issue for this). Poor documentation of OO scripting environment. It's tough to figure out how to automate simple things in Calc. Agreed. I just went through that exercise myself, when I was working on a thing at work to use the Jira API to query stories, and pull stuff into a spreadsheet for analysis. I was able to figure it out, but it wasn't easy. From what I've seen, the information is all there, but it's not necessarily organized / accessible enough. There's also not enough tutorial format stuff. Hopefully I can write up some stuff based on my recent experience and get it out there. but I wished it would start giving Microsoft more competition in the power user category. Same here. I have a laundry list of things I'd like to try and add to Calc to make it more powerful for complex analytics and what-not, but I am so busy on other projects I haven't had time to pursue those ideas much.

antt 8y ago

> investment banker As someone who was a software engineer in a brokerage and had to deal with clients excel sheets: open/libre office not letting you do that is a feature. We would be given excel sheet that would depend on a specific version of Excel. We had sheets in the hundreds of megabytes. We had sheets that would take overnight to run. We had sheets with sheet dependencies. We had sheets that needed to be run in a specific order manually. We had sheets with 13,000 manually entered rows, each with 53 columns. These things, and I use the term thing since eldritch abominations does not convey the horror of using them, were responsible for investing hundreds of millions of dollars. The day excel dies is a day I will celebrate.

osrec 8y ago
Yes, I too have seen those spreadsheets, but it's not Excel that's at fault, it's the users. I've taken XLS behemoths and trimmed them down to a fraction of their size and optimised sheets that ran overnight, to recalculate in seconds. I get what you're saying about Excel giving too much power in incapable hands, but I feel, for certain use cases, OO is too little power in even the most capable hands.
watersb 8y ago
Before Python, before Perl, before I grew up and got a real job, I worked in a lab that relied upon the Ingres spreadsheet application to reduce experimental data. At the time, it was a Macintosh-only application, and its scripting support was actually very good, but validating the dsta was a very slow process and ran overnight. I re-wrote the process in AWK, and was able to complete the data-reduction task in about 60 seconds on a DEC 5000 workstation. But my numbers did not match the spreadsheet results, and finding out why was an interesting process. I then encountered small, remote offices of big international firms -- usually real-estate, insurance companies -- that had limited local IT support. It was Excel macros all the way down. And then a large biotech firm, where it took KPMG analysts a few months to determine that our entire business relied upon this one guy's spreadsheet. So yeah. But: Excel dies, let us suppose... What will these people come up with? Alexa queries? I have preferences other than Python, but mostly I csn read code written by the scientists who wrote them. They may be abominations, like global state variables and magic numbers, but they are readable. Is Python any reason to hope for a better world? (Hmm. Off-topic, perhaps. Your story woke some memories of tough IT experiences.)

hjek 8y ago

For the last few years most of the work has been happing in the LibreOffice fork. If OO crashes on you, try LO. https://lwn.net/Articles/699755/ https://lwn.net/Articles/699755/