6 ms·

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 compl

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.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  >Sure if your a statistician then maybe Spreadsheet won't work as well for you as an Excel replacement. We had a client send us a questionnaire in an Excel document with macros to compute various things based on our answers. You underestimate just how many things are done in Excel across companies (ie: you can't even force both side to switch to Libreoffice) that you would, probably, write a quick webpage for.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > I think technically LibreOffice is perfectly up to the task. IT people really need to stop declaring this about FOSS products when it is regarding workflows they have no experience in.
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).

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.
marcinzm 7y ago
>Sure if your a statistician then maybe Spreadsheet won't work as well for you as an Excel replacement. We had a client send us a questionnaire in an Excel document with macros to compute various things based on our answers. You underestimate just how many things are done in Excel across companies (ie: you can't even force both side to switch to Libreoffice) that you would, probably, write a quick webpage for.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> I think technically LibreOffice is perfectly up to the task. IT people really need to stop declaring this about FOSS products when it is regarding workflows they have no experience in.

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).