38 ms·

Bye Bye Microsoft Office, Hello LibreOffice

349 points by StuntPope 7y ago

bernierocks 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ozguroz 7y ago
  I have been using open office quite a while and it just perfectly works for me
- bartread 7y ago
  Agreed. 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.
- jsiepkes 7y ago
  > 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...
  - nradov 7y ago
    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.
    - abnry 7y ago
      Yes, I would imagine given how long Office has been around, there are some people who have delved quite deep into the feature set and become dependent on it. It's hard to let go of one feature that you have come to rely on.
    - cobbzilla 7y ago
      I have some pretty complex spreadsheets from Excel that I now run under LibreOffice without any problems. That said, while they do use some complex formulas, they don’t use any VBScript or other such madness. Complaining that your custom MSFT/VBScript stuff doesn’t work, so you can’t migrate — it sounds to me a bit like “We’re stuck on Oracle and can’t move to PostgreSQL because we decided to use a lot of Oracle magic stuff that doesn’t work anywhere else”. This is classic vendor lock-in, which I tend to view as a business risk best avoided. There really is no option except to recognize it as technical debt and find time to dig yourself out from it. When your only option for “Business Function X” limits you to a single vendor, fix that first.
      - marcinzm 7y ago
        Everything has risks and tradeoffs. Excel means that you can communicate with clients and vendors in their preferred tool, it means you can onboard new hires more quickly, it means you need less internal support staff, etc. Switching from Excel adds those things back in as risks for your business. Good business is about managing and understanding risks, and not about eliminating them at all costs.
        cobbzilla 7y ago
        This is a very sane approach, and I agree wholeheartedly. But when the only thing holding you back and locking you in is your own company's internal vendor-specific tooling/infrastructure, the argument doesn't hold as much weight. fwiw, I have never received an Excel spreadsheet from a vendor/partner/customer that I could not open and work with in LibreOffice, re-export to Excel and send back to them.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  > 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?
  - wayneftw 7y ago
    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.
    - alteria 7y ago
      It's the top voted suggestion on their UserVoice, but no updates from the devs in a while https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/10549005-python-as-an-excel-scripting-language https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-...
  - wil421 7y ago
    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.
    - diffeomorphism 7y ago
      Sure, that is a perfectly valid point. However, I think that "libreoffice breaks" says something quite different than "MS Office's VBA has bad compatibility with anything but MS Office and thus provides very strong lock-in". Out of interest, is there any non-MS office suite with better VBA compatibility than libreoffice? For instance in view to the whole Adobe Venezuela story.
- ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
  My company fixed that by requiring anything data or calculation related to be done in R
- tzs 7y ago
  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. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-different/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...
  - CmdrKrool 7y ago
    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).
Someone1234 7y ago
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?
- bitwize 7y ago
  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?
  - gpresot 7y ago
    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.
- ma2rten 7y ago
  Also Google Docs became more viable as a free (as in beer) alternative.
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    Agreed, free, and easy to use/cross platform. 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?
    - 7y ago
MaupitiBlue 7y ago
The UI of Libreoffice is comparable to 1991 Word 6.
- shantly 7y ago
  If the system resource use were comparable to early and mid 90s applications, too, I'd love it. Always felt too heavy, preferred Gnumeric and similar for personal use when on Linux as a result, when not having to try to inter-op with Microsoft Office. Now prefer Apple's office applications for similar reasons. I suppose (misuse of) Java's probably the main reason for it.
- Endy 7y ago
  Yes, you're right. That fact is, to a certain segment of users - like my senior citizen mother - a strong positive.
- davidy123 7y ago
  The developers of LibreOffice made a conscious decision to make their product look and feel like Office, since one of their goals is to help people learn these suites for functional skills, so their learning would then translate to the predominant package. I have this first hand from a conference. Then of course Micorsoft created their ribbon UI and enforces protection against others copying it. Personally, I don't find the ribbon intuitive, and others, perhaps a majority, feel the same way, but Microsoft has all that weight behind them.
  - MaupitiBlue 7y ago
    Adopting Office's style is understandable. The problem is that they are struggling to match a 25 year old style. Forget the ribbon, Office 2003 level polish would be great. Instead LO presents a quirky and amateurish.
  - gcthomas 7y ago
    LibreOffice _does_ have a ribbon-like interface available (their NotebookBar). It's still officially experimental, but you might like it more than the _older_ interface. FreeOffice also has a ribbon. (Really - does not using the MSO ribbon automatically make something out of date? I've never particularly liked the ribbon.)
OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
Wouldn't his new Macbook come with Apple's office suite?
- ExBritNStuff 7y ago
  I'm nice and deep in the Apple world (iPhone, iPad, Macbook) and I generally am very pro-Apple. However, I can whole heartedly say for anyone with an even semi-complex use case, Numbers is completely unsuitable and will actually drive you insane. Just Google "apple numbers pivot table" for an example.
  - rtpg 7y ago
    +1 on this. Keynote is very good, but Numbers gets functionally useless very quickly, and Pages is.... rough for anything that isn't "school essay". So fidgety! Turns out word processing is hard.
  - beckingz 7y ago
    As a windows user moving towards Apple, it astounds me how immature numbers is. Keynote is okay, unless you want to export to any other format.
  - wastedhours 7y ago
    I ended up buying my own Office subscription when I was working at a startup as Numbers was so hell inducing (and CEO refused to buy any equipment to help with the work...). Keynote is interesting and I've seen some consultants use it for sprint planning really effectively, but Numbers is an utter clusterf*ck.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    Looks like some people put up with it :P - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JN4RI7nkes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JN4RI7nkes
- jki275 7y ago
  Numbers is a toy. Pages is a page layout program, and Keynote is nice to use for doing presentations but not really capable of generating Office compatible documents
sproketboy 7y ago
Not using a product named for a Mexican Wrestler.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
One of the reasons why I don't use LibreOffice is completely broken kerning: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103322 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103322
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dopylitty 7y ago
  The keming is terrible too.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- octosphere 7y ago
  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
  - laurent123456 7y ago
    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.
  - tooop 7y ago
    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.
  - itronitron 7y ago
    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.
ape4 7y ago
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.
- phkahler 7y ago
  The challenge with switching is all the custom VBA code and Excel stuff people have come to rely on.
  - olyjohn 7y ago
    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.
- exhilaration 7y ago
  The problem is that we have to share documents with other companies, and all those companies send us Office files.
- arkades 7y ago
  Would they? 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?!
- Bombthecat 7y ago
  Munich tried that and failed. To many plug-ins, addins, macros etc etc etc...
  - fghtr 7y ago
wyck 7y ago
What a ridiculous article. Nothing comparing the actual feature set and differant professional use cases. If easydns is writing shallow blog fodder like this, should I expect the same thing from thier actual product line?
- annoyingnoob 7y ago
  I'm an easydns customer and I've always been happy with their products and service. I can get in touch directly with the founder if I need that. I don't have to agree with everything they say to appreciate the offering.
- fghtr 7y ago
  >> comparing the actual feature set Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites
  - wyck 7y ago
    That's not the point, I was commenting on the article.
    - fghtr 7y ago
      My point is that you do not need to write again what is written in Wikipedia. You better go improve the latter.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I used to be a big fan of Open Office and Libretto Office but with Microsoft’s support of more open data formats, and their best deal ever of $99/year for a family plan for Office 365, I have switched sides. I write my books using markdown and LeanPub but everything else is Office 365.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  Hmm.... $99/yr for proprietary spyware or free forever and respects you as a user?
  - ilikehurdles 7y ago
    And if you're already going to pay for proprietary spyware for your home, a basic G Suite subscription is about half that price.
    - linuxftw 7y ago
      You can even use google docs for free if you want, at least they have the decency of working in Firefox on Linux.
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  You used to be able to buy Office for a one-time purchase and not have to pay yearly. So how is this their best deal ever? Tbf, if this includes OneDrive you are getting more than just an office suite. Also would be interested in more details on why you like Microsoft Office better than the other two.
  - signal11 7y ago
    Indeed the offering is more than an Office Suite. You + 5 family members each get * Office Apps -- install wherever you want, including on web, iOS, Android and Android-capable Chromebooks to get native apps on Chromebook. You can install on as many devices as you want, around 5 per-person can be in use at the same time * 1TB OneDrive storage (clients on Mac/Win/Web only sadly, no Linux client yet) * 50GB Outlook ad-free email storage * Bring your own custom domain to get @my-family.tld email for your family * Priority phone support All in all, for families it's a good offering that competes really well with Google One (one.google.com) -- quite irritating that Google One still doesn't offer that custom domain thing. The 50GB ad-free email per family member is a great offer for instance. All of this for about $100/yr, less with the revamped Home Use Program.
29athrowaway 7y ago
SoftMaker Office (or the free version FreeOffice) is, in my opinion, better than LibreOffice. Never liked LibreOffice/OpenOffice/StarOffice. I respect the work behind it, but as a product I don't like it. And using MS Office just contributes to the de-facto monopoly problem. Corel used to have a nice Office suite for Linux but after MS bought them Linux support was dropped.
- Proven 7y ago
  > Corel used to have a nice Office suite for Linux but after MS bought them Wut? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel#History
cubob 7y ago
Try to open all your old MS WORD document into libre office and then tell us if you still want to switch...
nkkollaw 7y ago
I don't understand why people keep comparing LibreOffice to Microsoft Office, or—God forbid—GIMP with Photoshop. Sure, my mom will have a great time writing recipes on it and will save $10/mo., but can anyone do any real work that you'd do in Excel? Let's be realistic. Also, does no one care about design? LibreOffice's interface looks awful on all platforms, and stuck in the 90s. Same with GIMP.
- jolmg 7y ago
  > but can anyone do any real work that you'd do in Excel? Let's be realistic At my company, they do. They're not particularly tech-savvy users either. > does no one care about design? LibreOffice's interface looks awful Design isn't about looking pretty; it's about being usable. What's wrong with LibreOffice's and Gimp's design?
  - nkkollaw 7y ago
    Gimp and LibreOffice are usable? Fonts are so broken on Linux—which is the platform that would need this the most—that you can barely select dropdown options if you're on a hidpi monitor.
    - jolmg 7y ago
      Well, I can't comment on how well things work on hidpi. While I don't have the best monitors on the market, I don't have any problems with fonts or dropdown options on neither my 104 nor on my 98 dpi monitor.
    - nulbyte 7y ago
      Daily Linux user, here, on a run-of-the-mill laptop, no hidpi display. Fonts are fully functional, as are dropdown widgets, GIMP, and LibreOffice.
    - chungy 7y ago
      HiDPI working fine for me with LibreOffice on Linux.
  - 7y ago
greggman2 7y ago
Bye Bye LibreOffice. Hello Google Docs (or some other online service). (1) Auto backup (2) Accessible from all my devices with zero work. (3) Can share with anyone with just a link (4) Can allow anyone to edit with just a link I'm sure HN will be "evil google" and you might be right. I don't believe they "spy" on google docs and I'm a paying g-suite customer. I get different people have different needs. Google Docs meets mine. Been using it since soon after it shipped. Haven't looked back. I might be able to be convinced to move to another online service but I could never go back to a native app for documents or spreadsheets
- anewguy9000 7y ago
  (5) slow af
  - twic 7y ago
    Sometimes i copy and paste from LibreOffice into some other app, and it locks up for tens of seconds. Google doesn't have a monpoly on slowness.
- juped 7y ago
  Office 365 is embarassingly better in every way
  - dleslie 7y ago
    Is there a way to restore the classic UI and ditch the ribbon?
    - valley-green 7y ago
      Yeah if you go back in time.
  - gcthomas 7y ago
    Cost, certainly, is not better with Office 365. And LibreOffice has versions for Linux. It's also much easier to drag and drop cells in Calc than Excel (small advantage, but with my eyes, Excel is tricky) Excel has far fewer file types it can handle (ClarisWorks, QuarkXPress anyone? Export as EPUB, and so on.) LibreOffice has a much better configurable spellchecker, six different ribbon-like interfaces, can exports bits of your spreadsheet as a JPEG file, and is free. And cost. Did I mention that? Why rent something that can be got for free? (OK, if all you get is MS file formats, than O365 is fine, if expensive. I've been using LO for years at work in a MS shop, and had no issues for a couple of years.)
jlelse 7y ago
I like LibreOffice a lot and it's my office suite of choice. The only thing I'm missing is an alternative to OneNote.
TheRealPomax 7y ago
Has it been made at least as fast as office by now, or is it still slower at basically everything? Because the reason I gave up on it every time I tried it in the past is that sluggish tools turn what should be a "doing a thing" into a grind. Fine, if annoying, for incidental work, but impossible to not get angry with once it's a daily driver.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  What are you doing in office apps where speed is an issue?
  - nulbyte 7y ago
    Not OP, but speed is an issue for me on a daily basis doing basic things. I am a keyboard junky, and find myself at times five steps ahead of the UI, even running Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows. From the keyboard, I can make a table, align general, turn off wrapping, delete the last row, insert a column, give it a heading, and format it as text. The UI is usually halfway done while I'm sitting waiting. Delay is jarring when I pay attention to it.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      Do you have an SSD and a semi-recent machine? If so, this is an argument for LO. I use it on a three year old laptop on Linux. It is relatively snappy.
  - emsign 7y ago
    Even using the program with a blank document feels sluggish in Windows 10, I'm sorry. Opening the text formatting window takes a few seconds on a one page document (maybe I have too many fonts installed??). There's something seriously wrong with that software.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      Sounds like an argument for LO and removing all the startup programs, disabling extra services, SSD etc.
valley-green 7y ago
I use Pages on Mac. Bye Bye garbage Windows software.
FpUser 7y ago
I'd switched first to whatever later became WPS Office and then to FreeOffice. So far no problems but then of course as a proper dumbo I am probably using 1% of the features available so it is hard for me to judge which tool is really superior for advanced public.
izzydata 7y ago
I once failed an assignment in university for submitting in ODF instead of DOC.
Scoundreller 7y ago
I setup LibreOffice on my mother-in-law’s new computer and gave it the MS Word icon. No calls yet...
- soperj 7y ago
  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.
  - chapium 7y ago
    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.
    - jenscow 7y ago
      When I do similar, I just shrug and say "yeh, they're always changing things...".
  - asdfman123 7y ago
    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.
larrik 7y ago
On my new PC I would often forget to install office. Then when I needed it all of a sudden in a rush, I used to stick the Office CD in, start the install process, get frustrated, download Open/LibreOffice, install it, use it, be done, and then watch the Office installer finally finish long after I needed it... I used to blame LibreOffice for how mangled Word docs looked, but then I used Office365 and realized that there's no such things as the "right" way to display a word doc, since all of the machines I opened it on using Word365 showed it differently... Unlike another commentator, Calc was way better than Excel for a long time, and much better about not trashing your work. Before like 2010 Excel would make it very easy to accidentally lose your work forever.
- Joeboy 7y ago
  > I used to blame LibreOffice for how mangled Word docs looked, but then I used Office365 and realized that there's no such things as the "right" way to display a word doc, since all of the machines I opened it on using Word365 showed it differently... Probably due to missing fonts being replaced by whatever's available on the machine. Different fonts can have wildly different sizes / metrics.
- davidgerard 7y ago
  Yeah. MS Word is notoriously incompatible with itself.
fonosip 7y ago
Another option is OnlyOffice + Nexcloud. We have installed it for quite a few customers at https://ba.net/private-cloud-office https://ba.net/private-cloud-office
- andrewshadura 7y ago
  OnlyOffice are significantly incomparably worse in terms of compatibility. They're also being developed in the "throw over the wall" style, when the source code is being published at once months after the release and in a non-downstream-friendly way.
lilott8 7y ago
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.
- bitlax 7y ago
  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.
- willhslade 7y ago
  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.
  - sjy 7y ago
    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?
Animats 7y ago
Well, yes. The last Microsoft Office product I bought was Word 97. Since then, OpenOffice -> LibreOffice.
pizzaparty2 7y ago
Libre Office thinks its doing the world a favor but it's a pretty weak experience compared to what else is out there. Plus, fun fact, the markup language they use is quite verbose and weak compared to just html/css. The only document format my beaurocracy accepts is .html.
coldtea 7y ago
>It’s not that I’m cheap either, I just want something that works according to my preferences, not Microsoft’s. Well, except for lucky coincidence (of features/preference) there's no inherent reason a FOSS project would work more according to one's preferences though. FOSS projects also have leads, take decisions, do rewrites, change directions, etc, same as proprietary software...
otikik 7y ago
> BitCoin is Open Source Money It sounds like Open Source Especulation to me.
tomaszs 7y ago
Am using Open Office and Libre Office for 8 years after i switched from MS Office. Enjoying everything is in the same place and works fast. No regrets
xioxox 7y ago
I wish I could use LibreOffice, but as a scientist the PowerPoint clone is awful. Editing and importing PowerPoint is very buggy and clunky. For example, sometimes bits of slides become uneditable. Also, the default kerning and anti aliasing is pretty poor.
- JasonFruit 7y ago
  I agree: the PowerPoint clone is a terrible scientist.
- gcthomas 7y ago
  I thought that Latex/Beamer was a default amongst certain scientific disciplines?
  - na85 7y ago
    Perhaps in comp sci but my experience in the mechanical/aerospace engineering field has been that most people have never even heard of latex or beamer.
chadash 7y ago
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.
- shmerl 7y ago
  Indeed, why would they? Lots of developers work fine full time without using them.
  - neogodless 7y ago
    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.
    - shmerl 7y ago
      Yes, indeed, I'm not working with C# or Java. My point is, it's far from a given that Visual Studio or IntelliJ are required in general case.
    - sjy 7y ago
      During the few months I spent as a C# developer, I found that Visual Studio was indeed essential but not excellent. It was a slow and incredibly complicated build-time dependency that I'm glad to be free of.
woldrich 7y ago
The LibreOffice Draw app is capable and has become stable in the past year or so. I built a little papercraft Outside-In TDD training tool with it: https://github.com/Nike-Inc/tdd-training-cube https://github.com/Nike-Inc/tdd-training-cube
deeweebee 7y ago
Lol libre office is plainly bad. No matter how hard I try I can’t be productive with it. It irks me to the point that I’d rather use office365 suite. The author might have to get back to Microsoft Office in no time
Spearchucker 7y ago
This blog post addresses two issues - cost and support. There are a few more that are more important to me and why I won't move to LO. Which I was forced to use for almost a year a year ago - In order of importance (to me) : ● Document format ● Keyboard shortcuts ● Stability ● The ribbon ● Screen layout ● Power Point. Just... all of it. Libre Office feels like Notepad.exe with a VB6 UI.
galkk 7y ago
On my work I use Linux as a desktop and LibreOffice Calc just plain sucks. I needed to do process some CSVs and it crashed several times on simple operations such as delete column, reorder, filter. Assuming that LibreOffice can compete with MS Office is just wishful thinking of someone who doesn't try to do anything remotely complex.
trthatcher 7y ago
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. [1] https://www.himalayandatabase.com/ https://www.himalayandatabase.com/
- nullspace 7y ago
  > 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.
  - gpresot 7y ago
    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.).
xvilka 7y ago
Most of the corporate jobs on top of Excel/Word can be automated away, I suppose. Not everything, obviously, but most.
scarface74 7y ago
On a personal level. I hardly ever use MS Office, maybe a few times a year. But $99 a year for Office 365 and I can have an account for myself, my wife, my son, a cousin in school, and my mom and 1TB of storage apiece plus 1TB of storage is a good deal. Just OneDrive alone is worth the price -- The entire Office 365 suite is the same cost as Dropbox. They work on my Mac, Windows PC, iPad, and phone.
johnminter 7y ago
I have a current Office 365 license. I ran into a problem trying to open some old Excel files from a project I did in 1999 and 2000. These workbooks contained some valid VBA modules I had written. Excel's security model would not let me open the files, nor was I able to overide even though I knew they were fine. Finally, I opened them in Libre Office and saved in the current format. I have migrated the vast majority of my computational work to use R with RStudio. In a Rmarkdown document I can embed R and Pyhon code and generate plots. These documents play well with version control.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ratiolat 7y ago
I've used OpenOffice in the past (since 2005-ish), switched to Libreoffice when it came out. During the same time I used Microsoft Office at work. About a year ago I changed my job and now I get to use macOS. Some huuuge surprises: 1. libreoffice unfortunately is really slow on macos with retina display. 2. The web version of excel does not hold a candle to Google sheets. 3. Excel for windows is not interoperable with macos. Eg: have data in one sheet in excel, create a separate sheet with pivotable from first sheet. Open the file on macos's excel and it will complain that this usage of data sources is not availabale on macos. I thought it was a funky excel file but no. Easily repeatable with very simple cases. Also, styles management in libreoffice writer is many times easier and understandable than in microsoft word.
jenscow 7y ago
> 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. This. Generally, I get much more value from OSS than commercial. I donate - not mostly because it's the "right thing", but because I want it to continue. If you write OSS, and would like something in return, consider this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863901
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
emsign 7y ago
The Document Foundation should stop chasing the idea that LibreOffice can be a replacement for MS Office. They will never achieve that goal. Apart from home users and maybe small NGOs, every business and major organization in the entire world uses Office. So it makes no sense to develop a software for people who will never use it anyway, instead make it nice make it perfect for the home users' use cases. All the advanced feature like DB integration, scripting, etc. probably have so many underreported bugs because nobody uses them. I would love to use an office suite that is FOSS and does what I need perfectly. Yet, I don't need most of LibreOffice's functionality at home, and the functionality I do need it does poorly compared to MS Office at work.
- gpresot 7y ago
  I agree. A simple to use software, that does very well the things you need for personal / home ( & very small businesses) use (family/personal business budget, lists, calendars, small inventories...). With a large library of well designed, elegant templates. For LibreOffice ( and many other FOSS packages, really) many more contributors should focus on how things look and feel, rather than how many things the software can do... More Airtable than Excel.
- chopin 7y ago
  On the first read I was inclined to agree. However I would like to see an alternative for use in public services at least. I am not very comfortable with the fact that citizens data gets uploaded to Microsofts servers.
vpmpaul 7y ago
All fine and well but at the end of the day I've tried to convert real world (non SV) companies and issues like people finding a 10yo macro that won't work on libreoffice is just too much in the cost column to outweigh the benefit of paying for MS office.
doggydogs94 7y ago
A coworker of mine refused to use Microsoft Office. One day, he had to give a presentation in an environment where he could not bring in his own laptop; he had to bring in his non -MS “PowerPoint” on a DVD. For whatever reason, MS PowerPoint could not open his non-MS presentation. He had to do his presentation without benefit of his slides; his project lost funding.
- away_throw 7y ago
  This is why I always use PDFs as the slides. Even if there is no PDF viewer, the web browser is capable of opening it.
boring_twenties 7y ago
I haven't used any non-free software on any of my computers (except phones) in something like 20 years. But, if Microsoft made a version of Excel for Linux, I'd buy it immediately. LibreOffice Calc is so bad it's embarassing, and it has barely gotten any better over the last decade or so.
dvh 7y ago
How do you open spreadsheet with more than 1024 columns?
mickotron 7y ago
I have been using LO exclusively on my personal machines for years now. I have somewhat limited use cases, I wouldn't be a "Power" productivity app user, but it has been refreshing. Sure there are differences, and quirks, but overall I find I am fighting with the software far less and just getting work done. Once you know the little issues you work around them, easy. They aren't a deal-breaker for me. For me it was also the transition from paid version to subscription that made me switch full time to LO. It seemed like a negative value proposition to me. Plus Open Source advocates need to practice what we preach. If you want others to use it, you better damn well be using it too, and be ready to recommend it from experience and not ideology. Because we are biased with our ideology toward open source, while users just want convenience and features. Completely different requirements.
Markoff 7y ago
tried it for few months, it could not even open linked image from folder and had heavy toll on my productivity, returned back to excel which just works and there were other major issues (copypaste from other apps). as much I support OSS I can't waste hours per week on it
haileris 7y ago
Beautiful article explaining the downsides of cloud infrastructure but as a sysadmin I'd never dare to think of replacing that sales lady's M$ Office suite with LibreOffice.
fencepost 7y ago
I'm confused about what he was actually trying to purchase for $319. Office Home and Business which includes Mac support lists at $249, and the other Office Products like Standard and Professional / Professional Plus I think are only available through volume license agreements which has its own whole separate set of issues. Update: Office Mac Standard is more, though it's not entirely clear to me why you'd be buying it - does it contain features not in H&B? H&B is licensed for business use. The other thing that you're paying for with a lot of the Office 365 subscription plans is online storage and added services. On the Windows side for personal use Office 365 gets you a terabyte (or up to five terabytes) for about the same cost as Dropbox and you got a free office suite with it.
Paraesthetic 7y ago
Libre office? What is this? Use trash when there is a much better paid option day?
gls2ro 7y ago
In case someone from LibreOffice reads comments here (or someone with enough knowledge/time to contribute), I would write here a little bit of feedback about the first time experience of the website. This is because I interacted a lot with open source projects and I really think that they should quit the concept: "Use us because we are open source" when addressing general public. Seems to me that in open source there is an aversion against product marketing, but if we want more people to use open source then we should try to convince them to use it because of the value they offer and not because of the group who is building the tools. It is a good starting point to ask people to use one's software because of your group value. But then, when wanting to get after a wider market adoption, one should try to talk about the value it brings to users lives. So here are some points: - There are no screenshots of how the apps look like when opening the website. After a couple of tries, I finally saw Screenshots in the Discovery menu. But really coming from Office and Apple's iWork I was really trying to see how LibreOffice looks like. - There are no texts trying to explain to me, the user, why I should use LibreOffice in my own life, to solve my own problems. There is a small paragraph saying "Do more - easier, quicker, smarter" but that is hardly believable as almost every product wants me to do more, easier, quicker and smarter. Also it is not clear _how_ LibreOffice is doing that. - The only point in the whole homepage which could bring value to an end user is about "Free" but for the wide market "free" is not enough. It is just the starting point. - The look and feel of the website suggests old tools. This is not a bad or good thing per se. But I think to attract new users the website should be redesigned so that the product transmit the idea of polished or ready to be used. Please do not take this a a critique. It is because I care that I feel to say what I think and hope that someone will pick it up.
- htietze 7y ago
  Thanks a lot. We started to redesign the website and you input is very much appreciated and will be implemented, hopefully. Would be good to join one of the mailing lists for those discussions...
Fnoord 7y ago
The post is quite ironically talking about freedom, yet the author sticks with Amazon Kindle (DRM and big brother). I don't have the problem of 32 bit software on Catalina. Kobo software runs on it. Calibre works on it. If authors don't publish in an open format, I just grab the ePub from Usenet or BitTorrent.
JohnClark1337 7y ago
I like libreoffice, but this article was basically just someone complaining about microsoft office and then saying they were switching to libreoffice.

349 points by StuntPope 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ozguroz 7y ago
I have been using open office quite a while and it just perfectly works for me
bartread 7y ago
Agreed. 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.
jsiepkes 7y ago
> 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...
- nradov 7y ago
  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.
  - abnry 7y ago
    Yes, I would imagine given how long Office has been around, there are some people who have delved quite deep into the feature set and become dependent on it. It's hard to let go of one feature that you have come to rely on.
  - cobbzilla 7y ago
    I have some pretty complex spreadsheets from Excel that I now run under LibreOffice without any problems. That said, while they do use some complex formulas, they don’t use any VBScript or other such madness. Complaining that your custom MSFT/VBScript stuff doesn’t work, so you can’t migrate — it sounds to me a bit like “We’re stuck on Oracle and can’t move to PostgreSQL because we decided to use a lot of Oracle magic stuff that doesn’t work anywhere else”. This is classic vendor lock-in, which I tend to view as a business risk best avoided. There really is no option except to recognize it as technical debt and find time to dig yourself out from it. When your only option for “Business Function X” limits you to a single vendor, fix that first.
    - marcinzm 7y ago
      Everything has risks and tradeoffs. Excel means that you can communicate with clients and vendors in their preferred tool, it means you can onboard new hires more quickly, it means you need less internal support staff, etc. Switching from Excel adds those things back in as risks for your business. Good business is about managing and understanding risks, and not about eliminating them at all costs.
      - cobbzilla 7y ago
        This is a very sane approach, and I agree wholeheartedly. But when the only thing holding you back and locking you in is your own company's internal vendor-specific tooling/infrastructure, the argument doesn't hold as much weight. fwiw, I have never received an Excel spreadsheet from a vendor/partner/customer that I could not open and work with in LibreOffice, re-export to Excel and send back to them.
diffeomorphism 7y ago
> 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?
- wayneftw 7y ago
  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.
  - alteria 7y ago
    It's the top voted suggestion on their UserVoice, but no updates from the devs in a while https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/10549005-python-as-an-excel-scripting-language https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-...
- wil421 7y ago
  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.
  - diffeomorphism 7y ago
    Sure, that is a perfectly valid point. However, I think that "libreoffice breaks" says something quite different than "MS Office's VBA has bad compatibility with anything but MS Office and thus provides very strong lock-in". Out of interest, is there any non-MS office suite with better VBA compatibility than libreoffice? For instance in view to the whole Adobe Venezuela story.
ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
My company fixed that by requiring anything data or calculation related to be done in R
tzs 7y ago
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. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-different/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...
- CmdrKrool 7y ago
  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).

Someone1234 7y ago

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?

bitwize 7y ago
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?
- gpresot 7y ago
  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.
ma2rten 7y ago
Also Google Docs became more viable as a free (as in beer) alternative.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  Agreed, free, and easy to use/cross platform. 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?
  - 7y ago

MaupitiBlue 7y ago

The UI of Libreoffice is comparable to 1991 Word 6.

shantly 7y ago
If the system resource use were comparable to early and mid 90s applications, too, I'd love it. Always felt too heavy, preferred Gnumeric and similar for personal use when on Linux as a result, when not having to try to inter-op with Microsoft Office. Now prefer Apple's office applications for similar reasons. I suppose (misuse of) Java's probably the main reason for it.
Endy 7y ago
Yes, you're right. That fact is, to a certain segment of users - like my senior citizen mother - a strong positive.
davidy123 7y ago
The developers of LibreOffice made a conscious decision to make their product look and feel like Office, since one of their goals is to help people learn these suites for functional skills, so their learning would then translate to the predominant package. I have this first hand from a conference. Then of course Micorsoft created their ribbon UI and enforces protection against others copying it. Personally, I don't find the ribbon intuitive, and others, perhaps a majority, feel the same way, but Microsoft has all that weight behind them.
- MaupitiBlue 7y ago
  Adopting Office's style is understandable. The problem is that they are struggling to match a 25 year old style. Forget the ribbon, Office 2003 level polish would be great. Instead LO presents a quirky and amateurish.
- gcthomas 7y ago
  LibreOffice _does_ have a ribbon-like interface available (their NotebookBar). It's still officially experimental, but you might like it more than the _older_ interface. FreeOffice also has a ribbon. (Really - does not using the MSO ribbon automatically make something out of date? I've never particularly liked the ribbon.)

OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago

Wouldn't his new Macbook come with Apple's office suite?

ExBritNStuff 7y ago
I'm nice and deep in the Apple world (iPhone, iPad, Macbook) and I generally am very pro-Apple. However, I can whole heartedly say for anyone with an even semi-complex use case, Numbers is completely unsuitable and will actually drive you insane. Just Google "apple numbers pivot table" for an example.
- rtpg 7y ago
  +1 on this. Keynote is very good, but Numbers gets functionally useless very quickly, and Pages is.... rough for anything that isn't "school essay". So fidgety! Turns out word processing is hard.
- beckingz 7y ago
  As a windows user moving towards Apple, it astounds me how immature numbers is. Keynote is okay, unless you want to export to any other format.
- wastedhours 7y ago
  I ended up buying my own Office subscription when I was working at a startup as Numbers was so hell inducing (and CEO refused to buy any equipment to help with the work...). Keynote is interesting and I've seen some consultants use it for sprint planning really effectively, but Numbers is an utter clusterf*ck.
- judge2020 7y ago
  Looks like some people put up with it :P - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JN4RI7nkes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JN4RI7nkes
jki275 7y ago
Numbers is a toy. Pages is a page layout program, and Keynote is nice to use for doing presentations but not really capable of generating Office compatible documents

sproketboy 7y ago

Not using a product named for a Mexican Wrestler.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago

One of the reasons why I don't use LibreOffice is completely broken kerning: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103322 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103322

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dopylitty 7y ago
The keming is terrible too.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
octosphere 7y ago
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
- laurent123456 7y ago
  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.
- tooop 7y ago
  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.
- itronitron 7y ago
  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.

ape4 7y ago

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.

phkahler 7y ago
The challenge with switching is all the custom VBA code and Excel stuff people have come to rely on.
- olyjohn 7y ago
  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.
exhilaration 7y ago
The problem is that we have to share documents with other companies, and all those companies send us Office files.
arkades 7y ago
Would they? 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?!
Bombthecat 7y ago
Munich tried that and failed. To many plug-ins, addins, macros etc etc etc...
- fghtr 7y ago

wyck 7y ago

What a ridiculous article. Nothing comparing the actual feature set and differant professional use cases. If easydns is writing shallow blog fodder like this, should I expect the same thing from thier actual product line?

annoyingnoob 7y ago
I'm an easydns customer and I've always been happy with their products and service. I can get in touch directly with the founder if I need that. I don't have to agree with everything they say to appreciate the offering.
fghtr 7y ago
>> comparing the actual feature set Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites
- wyck 7y ago
  That's not the point, I was commenting on the article.
  - fghtr 7y ago
    My point is that you do not need to write again what is written in Wikipedia. You better go improve the latter.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

I used to be a big fan of Open Office and Libretto Office but with Microsoft’s support of more open data formats, and their best deal ever of $99/year for a family plan for Office 365, I have switched sides. I write my books using markdown and LeanPub but everything else is Office 365.

linuxftw 7y ago
Hmm.... $99/yr for proprietary spyware or free forever and respects you as a user?
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  And if you're already going to pay for proprietary spyware for your home, a basic G Suite subscription is about half that price.
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    You can even use google docs for free if you want, at least they have the decency of working in Firefox on Linux.
tenebrisalietum 7y ago
You used to be able to buy Office for a one-time purchase and not have to pay yearly. So how is this their best deal ever? Tbf, if this includes OneDrive you are getting more than just an office suite. Also would be interested in more details on why you like Microsoft Office better than the other two.
- signal11 7y ago
  Indeed the offering is more than an Office Suite. You + 5 family members each get * Office Apps -- install wherever you want, including on web, iOS, Android and Android-capable Chromebooks to get native apps on Chromebook. You can install on as many devices as you want, around 5 per-person can be in use at the same time * 1TB OneDrive storage (clients on Mac/Win/Web only sadly, no Linux client yet) * 50GB Outlook ad-free email storage * Bring your own custom domain to get @my-family.tld email for your family * Priority phone support All in all, for families it's a good offering that competes really well with Google One (one.google.com) -- quite irritating that Google One still doesn't offer that custom domain thing. The 50GB ad-free email per family member is a great offer for instance. All of this for about $100/yr, less with the revamped Home Use Program.

29athrowaway 7y ago

SoftMaker Office (or the free version FreeOffice) is, in my opinion, better than LibreOffice. Never liked LibreOffice/OpenOffice/StarOffice. I respect the work behind it, but as a product I don't like it. And using MS Office just contributes to the de-facto monopoly problem. Corel used to have a nice Office suite for Linux but after MS bought them Linux support was dropped.

Proven 7y ago
> Corel used to have a nice Office suite for Linux but after MS bought them Wut? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel#History

cubob 7y ago

Try to open all your old MS WORD document into libre office and then tell us if you still want to switch...

nkkollaw 7y ago

I don't understand why people keep comparing LibreOffice to Microsoft Office, or—God forbid—GIMP with Photoshop. Sure, my mom will have a great time writing recipes on it and will save $10/mo., but can anyone do any real work that you'd do in Excel? Let's be realistic. Also, does no one care about design? LibreOffice's interface looks awful on all platforms, and stuck in the 90s. Same with GIMP.

jolmg 7y ago
> but can anyone do any real work that you'd do in Excel? Let's be realistic At my company, they do. They're not particularly tech-savvy users either. > does no one care about design? LibreOffice's interface looks awful Design isn't about looking pretty; it's about being usable. What's wrong with LibreOffice's and Gimp's design?
- nkkollaw 7y ago
  Gimp and LibreOffice are usable? Fonts are so broken on Linux—which is the platform that would need this the most—that you can barely select dropdown options if you're on a hidpi monitor.
  - jolmg 7y ago
    Well, I can't comment on how well things work on hidpi. While I don't have the best monitors on the market, I don't have any problems with fonts or dropdown options on neither my 104 nor on my 98 dpi monitor.
  - nulbyte 7y ago
    Daily Linux user, here, on a run-of-the-mill laptop, no hidpi display. Fonts are fully functional, as are dropdown widgets, GIMP, and LibreOffice.
  - chungy 7y ago
    HiDPI working fine for me with LibreOffice on Linux.
- 7y ago

greggman2 7y ago

Bye Bye LibreOffice. Hello Google Docs (or some other online service). (1) Auto backup (2) Accessible from all my devices with zero work. (3) Can share with anyone with just a link (4) Can allow anyone to edit with just a link I'm sure HN will be "evil google" and you might be right. I don't believe they "spy" on google docs and I'm a paying g-suite customer. I get different people have different needs. Google Docs meets mine. Been using it since soon after it shipped. Haven't looked back. I might be able to be convinced to move to another online service but I could never go back to a native app for documents or spreadsheets

anewguy9000 7y ago
(5) slow af
- twic 7y ago
  Sometimes i copy and paste from LibreOffice into some other app, and it locks up for tens of seconds. Google doesn't have a monpoly on slowness.
juped 7y ago
Office 365 is embarassingly better in every way
- dleslie 7y ago
  Is there a way to restore the classic UI and ditch the ribbon?
  - valley-green 7y ago
    Yeah if you go back in time.
- gcthomas 7y ago
  Cost, certainly, is not better with Office 365. And LibreOffice has versions for Linux. It's also much easier to drag and drop cells in Calc than Excel (small advantage, but with my eyes, Excel is tricky) Excel has far fewer file types it can handle (ClarisWorks, QuarkXPress anyone? Export as EPUB, and so on.) LibreOffice has a much better configurable spellchecker, six different ribbon-like interfaces, can exports bits of your spreadsheet as a JPEG file, and is free. And cost. Did I mention that? Why rent something that can be got for free? (OK, if all you get is MS file formats, than O365 is fine, if expensive. I've been using LO for years at work in a MS shop, and had no issues for a couple of years.)

jlelse 7y ago

I like LibreOffice a lot and it's my office suite of choice. The only thing I'm missing is an alternative to OneNote.

TheRealPomax 7y ago

Has it been made at least as fast as office by now, or is it still slower at basically everything? Because the reason I gave up on it every time I tried it in the past is that sluggish tools turn what should be a "doing a thing" into a grind. Fine, if annoying, for incidental work, but impossible to not get angry with once it's a daily driver.

mixmastamyk 7y ago
What are you doing in office apps where speed is an issue?
- nulbyte 7y ago
  Not OP, but speed is an issue for me on a daily basis doing basic things. I am a keyboard junky, and find myself at times five steps ahead of the UI, even running Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows. From the keyboard, I can make a table, align general, turn off wrapping, delete the last row, insert a column, give it a heading, and format it as text. The UI is usually halfway done while I'm sitting waiting. Delay is jarring when I pay attention to it.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Do you have an SSD and a semi-recent machine? If so, this is an argument for LO. I use it on a three year old laptop on Linux. It is relatively snappy.
- emsign 7y ago
  Even using the program with a blank document feels sluggish in Windows 10, I'm sorry. Opening the text formatting window takes a few seconds on a one page document (maybe I have too many fonts installed??). There's something seriously wrong with that software.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Sounds like an argument for LO and removing all the startup programs, disabling extra services, SSD etc.

valley-green 7y ago

I use Pages on Mac. Bye Bye garbage Windows software.

FpUser 7y ago

I'd switched first to whatever later became WPS Office and then to FreeOffice. So far no problems but then of course as a proper dumbo I am probably using 1% of the features available so it is hard for me to judge which tool is really superior for advanced public.

izzydata 7y ago

I once failed an assignment in university for submitting in ODF instead of DOC.

Scoundreller 7y ago

I setup LibreOffice on my mother-in-law’s new computer and gave it the MS Word icon. No calls yet...

soperj 7y ago
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.
- chapium 7y ago
  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.
  - jenscow 7y ago
    When I do similar, I just shrug and say "yeh, they're always changing things...".
- asdfman123 7y ago
  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.

larrik 7y ago

On my new PC I would often forget to install office. Then when I needed it all of a sudden in a rush, I used to stick the Office CD in, start the install process, get frustrated, download Open/LibreOffice, install it, use it, be done, and then watch the Office installer finally finish long after I needed it... I used to blame LibreOffice for how mangled Word docs looked, but then I used Office365 and realized that there's no such things as the "right" way to display a word doc, since all of the machines I opened it on using Word365 showed it differently... Unlike another commentator, Calc was way better than Excel for a long time, and much better about not trashing your work. Before like 2010 Excel would make it very easy to accidentally lose your work forever.

Joeboy 7y ago
> I used to blame LibreOffice for how mangled Word docs looked, but then I used Office365 and realized that there's no such things as the "right" way to display a word doc, since all of the machines I opened it on using Word365 showed it differently... Probably due to missing fonts being replaced by whatever's available on the machine. Different fonts can have wildly different sizes / metrics.
davidgerard 7y ago
Yeah. MS Word is notoriously incompatible with itself.

fonosip 7y ago

Another option is OnlyOffice + Nexcloud. We have installed it for quite a few customers at https://ba.net/private-cloud-office https://ba.net/private-cloud-office

andrewshadura 7y ago
OnlyOffice are significantly incomparably worse in terms of compatibility. They're also being developed in the "throw over the wall" style, when the source code is being published at once months after the release and in a non-downstream-friendly way.

lilott8 7y ago

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.

bitlax 7y ago
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.
willhslade 7y ago
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.
- sjy 7y ago
  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?

Animats 7y ago

Well, yes. The last Microsoft Office product I bought was Word 97. Since then, OpenOffice -> LibreOffice.

pizzaparty2 7y ago

Libre Office thinks its doing the world a favor but it's a pretty weak experience compared to what else is out there. Plus, fun fact, the markup language they use is quite verbose and weak compared to just html/css. The only document format my beaurocracy accepts is .html.

coldtea 7y ago

>It’s not that I’m cheap either, I just want something that works according to my preferences, not Microsoft’s. Well, except for lucky coincidence (of features/preference) there's no inherent reason a FOSS project would work more according to one's preferences though. FOSS projects also have leads, take decisions, do rewrites, change directions, etc, same as proprietary software...

otikik 7y ago

> BitCoin is Open Source Money It sounds like Open Source Especulation to me.

tomaszs 7y ago

Am using Open Office and Libre Office for 8 years after i switched from MS Office. Enjoying everything is in the same place and works fast. No regrets

xioxox 7y ago

I wish I could use LibreOffice, but as a scientist the PowerPoint clone is awful. Editing and importing PowerPoint is very buggy and clunky. For example, sometimes bits of slides become uneditable. Also, the default kerning and anti aliasing is pretty poor.

JasonFruit 7y ago
I agree: the PowerPoint clone is a terrible scientist.
gcthomas 7y ago
I thought that Latex/Beamer was a default amongst certain scientific disciplines?
- na85 7y ago
  Perhaps in comp sci but my experience in the mechanical/aerospace engineering field has been that most people have never even heard of latex or beamer.

chadash 7y ago

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.

shmerl 7y ago
Indeed, why would they? Lots of developers work fine full time without using them.
- neogodless 7y ago
  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.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    Yes, indeed, I'm not working with C# or Java. My point is, it's far from a given that Visual Studio or IntelliJ are required in general case.
  - sjy 7y ago
    During the few months I spent as a C# developer, I found that Visual Studio was indeed essential but not excellent. It was a slow and incredibly complicated build-time dependency that I'm glad to be free of.

woldrich 7y ago

The LibreOffice Draw app is capable and has become stable in the past year or so. I built a little papercraft Outside-In TDD training tool with it: https://github.com/Nike-Inc/tdd-training-cube https://github.com/Nike-Inc/tdd-training-cube

deeweebee 7y ago

Lol libre office is plainly bad. No matter how hard I try I can’t be productive with it. It irks me to the point that I’d rather use office365 suite. The author might have to get back to Microsoft Office in no time

Spearchucker 7y ago

This blog post addresses two issues - cost and support. There are a few more that are more important to me and why I won't move to LO. Which I was forced to use for almost a year a year ago - In order of importance (to me) : ● Document format ● Keyboard shortcuts ● Stability ● The ribbon ● Screen layout ● Power Point. Just... all of it. Libre Office feels like Notepad.exe with a VB6 UI.

galkk 7y ago

On my work I use Linux as a desktop and LibreOffice Calc just plain sucks. I needed to do process some CSVs and it crashed several times on simple operations such as delete column, reorder, filter. Assuming that LibreOffice can compete with MS Office is just wishful thinking of someone who doesn't try to do anything remotely complex.

trthatcher 7y ago

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. [1] https://www.himalayandatabase.com/ https://www.himalayandatabase.com/

nullspace 7y ago
> 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.
- gpresot 7y ago
  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.).

xvilka 7y ago

Most of the corporate jobs on top of Excel/Word can be automated away, I suppose. Not everything, obviously, but most.

scarface74 7y ago

On a personal level. I hardly ever use MS Office, maybe a few times a year. But $99 a year for Office 365 and I can have an account for myself, my wife, my son, a cousin in school, and my mom and 1TB of storage apiece plus 1TB of storage is a good deal. Just OneDrive alone is worth the price -- The entire Office 365 suite is the same cost as Dropbox. They work on my Mac, Windows PC, iPad, and phone.

johnminter 7y ago

I have a current Office 365 license. I ran into a problem trying to open some old Excel files from a project I did in 1999 and 2000. These workbooks contained some valid VBA modules I had written. Excel's security model would not let me open the files, nor was I able to overide even though I knew they were fine. Finally, I opened them in Libre Office and saved in the current format. I have migrated the vast majority of my computational work to use R with RStudio. In a Rmarkdown document I can embed R and Pyhon code and generate plots. These documents play well with version control.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ratiolat 7y ago

I've used OpenOffice in the past (since 2005-ish), switched to Libreoffice when it came out. During the same time I used Microsoft Office at work. About a year ago I changed my job and now I get to use macOS. Some huuuge surprises: 1. libreoffice unfortunately is really slow on macos with retina display. 2. The web version of excel does not hold a candle to Google sheets. 3. Excel for windows is not interoperable with macos. Eg: have data in one sheet in excel, create a separate sheet with pivotable from first sheet. Open the file on macos's excel and it will complain that this usage of data sources is not availabale on macos. I thought it was a funky excel file but no. Easily repeatable with very simple cases. Also, styles management in libreoffice writer is many times easier and understandable than in microsoft word.

jenscow 7y ago

> 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. This. Generally, I get much more value from OSS than commercial. I donate - not mostly because it's the "right thing", but because I want it to continue. If you write OSS, and would like something in return, consider this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863901

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

emsign 7y ago

The Document Foundation should stop chasing the idea that LibreOffice can be a replacement for MS Office. They will never achieve that goal. Apart from home users and maybe small NGOs, every business and major organization in the entire world uses Office. So it makes no sense to develop a software for people who will never use it anyway, instead make it nice make it perfect for the home users' use cases. All the advanced feature like DB integration, scripting, etc. probably have so many underreported bugs because nobody uses them. I would love to use an office suite that is FOSS and does what I need perfectly. Yet, I don't need most of LibreOffice's functionality at home, and the functionality I do need it does poorly compared to MS Office at work.

gpresot 7y ago
I agree. A simple to use software, that does very well the things you need for personal / home ( & very small businesses) use (family/personal business budget, lists, calendars, small inventories...). With a large library of well designed, elegant templates. For LibreOffice ( and many other FOSS packages, really) many more contributors should focus on how things look and feel, rather than how many things the software can do... More Airtable than Excel.
chopin 7y ago
On the first read I was inclined to agree. However I would like to see an alternative for use in public services at least. I am not very comfortable with the fact that citizens data gets uploaded to Microsofts servers.

vpmpaul 7y ago

All fine and well but at the end of the day I've tried to convert real world (non SV) companies and issues like people finding a 10yo macro that won't work on libreoffice is just too much in the cost column to outweigh the benefit of paying for MS office.

doggydogs94 7y ago

A coworker of mine refused to use Microsoft Office. One day, he had to give a presentation in an environment where he could not bring in his own laptop; he had to bring in his non -MS “PowerPoint” on a DVD. For whatever reason, MS PowerPoint could not open his non-MS presentation. He had to do his presentation without benefit of his slides; his project lost funding.

away_throw 7y ago
This is why I always use PDFs as the slides. Even if there is no PDF viewer, the web browser is capable of opening it.

boring_twenties 7y ago

I haven't used any non-free software on any of my computers (except phones) in something like 20 years. But, if Microsoft made a version of Excel for Linux, I'd buy it immediately. LibreOffice Calc is so bad it's embarassing, and it has barely gotten any better over the last decade or so.

dvh 7y ago

How do you open spreadsheet with more than 1024 columns?

mickotron 7y ago

I have been using LO exclusively on my personal machines for years now. I have somewhat limited use cases, I wouldn't be a "Power" productivity app user, but it has been refreshing. Sure there are differences, and quirks, but overall I find I am fighting with the software far less and just getting work done. Once you know the little issues you work around them, easy. They aren't a deal-breaker for me. For me it was also the transition from paid version to subscription that made me switch full time to LO. It seemed like a negative value proposition to me. Plus Open Source advocates need to practice what we preach. If you want others to use it, you better damn well be using it too, and be ready to recommend it from experience and not ideology. Because we are biased with our ideology toward open source, while users just want convenience and features. Completely different requirements.

Markoff 7y ago

tried it for few months, it could not even open linked image from folder and had heavy toll on my productivity, returned back to excel which just works and there were other major issues (copypaste from other apps). as much I support OSS I can't waste hours per week on it

haileris 7y ago

Beautiful article explaining the downsides of cloud infrastructure but as a sysadmin I'd never dare to think of replacing that sales lady's M$ Office suite with LibreOffice.

fencepost 7y ago

I'm confused about what he was actually trying to purchase for $319. Office Home and Business which includes Mac support lists at $249, and the other Office Products like Standard and Professional / Professional Plus I think are only available through volume license agreements which has its own whole separate set of issues. Update: Office Mac Standard is more, though it's not entirely clear to me why you'd be buying it - does it contain features not in H&B? H&B is licensed for business use. The other thing that you're paying for with a lot of the Office 365 subscription plans is online storage and added services. On the Windows side for personal use Office 365 gets you a terabyte (or up to five terabytes) for about the same cost as Dropbox and you got a free office suite with it.

Paraesthetic 7y ago

Libre office? What is this? Use trash when there is a much better paid option day?

gls2ro 7y ago

In case someone from LibreOffice reads comments here (or someone with enough knowledge/time to contribute), I would write here a little bit of feedback about the first time experience of the website. This is because I interacted a lot with open source projects and I really think that they should quit the concept: "Use us because we are open source" when addressing general public. Seems to me that in open source there is an aversion against product marketing, but if we want more people to use open source then we should try to convince them to use it because of the value they offer and not because of the group who is building the tools. It is a good starting point to ask people to use one's software because of your group value. But then, when wanting to get after a wider market adoption, one should try to talk about the value it brings to users lives. So here are some points: - There are no screenshots of how the apps look like when opening the website. After a couple of tries, I finally saw Screenshots in the Discovery menu. But really coming from Office and Apple's iWork I was really trying to see how LibreOffice looks like. - There are no texts trying to explain to me, the user, why I should use LibreOffice in my own life, to solve my own problems. There is a small paragraph saying "Do more - easier, quicker, smarter" but that is hardly believable as almost every product wants me to do more, easier, quicker and smarter. Also it is not clear _how_ LibreOffice is doing that. - The only point in the whole homepage which could bring value to an end user is about "Free" but for the wide market "free" is not enough. It is just the starting point. - The look and feel of the website suggests old tools. This is not a bad or good thing per se. But I think to attract new users the website should be redesigned so that the product transmit the idea of polished or ready to be used. Please do not take this a a critique. It is because I care that I feel to say what I think and hope that someone will pick it up.

htietze 7y ago
Thanks a lot. We started to redesign the website and you input is very much appreciated and will be implemented, hopefully. Would be good to join one of the mailing lists for those discussions...

Fnoord 7y ago

The post is quite ironically talking about freedom, yet the author sticks with Amazon Kindle (DRM and big brother). I don't have the problem of 32 bit software on Catalina. Kobo software runs on it. Calibre works on it. If authors don't publish in an open format, I just grab the ePub from Usenet or BitTorrent.

JohnClark1337 7y ago

I like libreoffice, but this article was basically just someone complaining about microsoft office and then saying they were switching to libreoffice.