4 ms·

I know everyone is suggesting Libreoffice (and it has honestly gotten a lot better recently) but I remember once when my laptop died and all I had was a shitty

I know everyone is suggesting Libreoffice (and it has honestly gotten a lot better recently) but I remember once when my laptop died and all I had was a shitty old Centrino someone lent me, I ended up using the Microsoft online powerpoint tool to make a presentation that was due. The web versions of MS Office tools are actually pretty well build and feel pretty close to their desktop counterparts.

swiley 8y ago
The web version of word lacks an equation editor (someone told me this is partly due to MS loosing the source code for the one in word.) If you have to write papers with a lot of math in them libreoffice's equation editor is way better anyway. It rarely crashes and uses it's own simple markup language instead of the finicky WYSIWYG editor in word.
- msaharia 8y ago
  The killer features missing for me 1. Word - track changes 2. PowerPoint - equation editor
msaharia 8y ago
Libre office is not even 10% MS Office. Don't know why people recommend it. It messes up my word formatting.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Current versions are pretty good - and while MS Office is a veritable power tool (I know no real equivalent to MS Access), most users use ~10% of the functionality; sufficient for many, esp. at the price. As for the formatting - yeah, MS doesn't seem to follow its own document formatting standards, even for the newer documents. That puts other suites in a hard spot: a) follow standards and present imperfect documents, or b) invest immense resources into bug-for-bug compatibility?
  - mcny 8y ago
    Joel Spolsky is obviously not neutral having been an Excel manager but he wrote that while everyone uses less than 20% of Excel, not everyone uses the same 20% of Excel. I don't know Excel but I know there are people running entire departments on Excel spreadsheets.
    - Piskvorrr 8y ago
      Indeed. I do not see a contradiction between that and what I have written. (Having seen many Excel spreadsheets, 80% of the work is done by rudimentary means: pivot tables are Advanced Magic in this regard)

swiley 8y ago

The web version of word lacks an equation editor (someone told me this is partly due to MS loosing the source code for the one in word.) If you have to write papers with a lot of math in them libreoffice's equation editor is way better anyway. It rarely crashes and uses it's own simple markup language instead of the finicky WYSIWYG editor in word.

msaharia 8y ago
The killer features missing for me 1. Word - track changes 2. PowerPoint - equation editor

msaharia 8y ago

Libre office is not even 10% MS Office. Don't know why people recommend it. It messes up my word formatting.

Piskvorrr 8y ago
Current versions are pretty good - and while MS Office is a veritable power tool (I know no real equivalent to MS Access), most users use ~10% of the functionality; sufficient for many, esp. at the price. As for the formatting - yeah, MS doesn't seem to follow its own document formatting standards, even for the newer documents. That puts other suites in a hard spot: a) follow standards and present imperfect documents, or b) invest immense resources into bug-for-bug compatibility?
- mcny 8y ago
  Joel Spolsky is obviously not neutral having been an Excel manager but he wrote that while everyone uses less than 20% of Excel, not everyone uses the same 20% of Excel. I don't know Excel but I know there are people running entire departments on Excel spreadsheets.
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Indeed. I do not see a contradiction between that and what I have written. (Having seen many Excel spreadsheets, 80% of the work is done by rudimentary means: pivot tables are Advanced Magic in this regard)