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Software engineers opining on Excel vs LibreOffice strikes me as pretty funny. Imagine someone who programs sporadically asking why anyone would pay for intelli

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.
robocat 7y ago
> the $150/year cost is basically nothing The cost is a lot higher for Linux developers - you also need a Windows licence and to spend significant time managing a VM (I did that, no more). I boot Linux for my dev machine (because Windows costs me more time). I actually like Excel. (Word and Outlook are toxic waste as far as I am concerned: they frustrate me more than they serve me).
- brmgb 7y ago
  > Word and Outlook are toxic waste as far as I am concerned: they frustrate me more than they serve me. This opinion is largely shared even in the non technical world. Outlook is a lot better than Lotus but it suffers from the comparaison with Gmail. Powerful search was a game changer for me and I miss it dearly since my company decided to switch to Office 365. Excel and Powerpoint really are the two gems of Microsoft Office.
  - EricE 7y ago
    Search? Gmail didn't even index attachments until recently. Give me a break - Gmail is a joke. Never thought I would pine for Outlook but here I am :/
IronWolve 7y ago
Work wanted a cloud office provider, Went to M$ and they quoted 35 dollars per user. Thinking they own the market they price gouged us. Google gave us 15. This is for 20K+ users, guess what email solution we went with. 9 months later, M$ Came back and offered to match the price of google, after we already deployed to google office. 3 years later, Work is now thinking about switching the mobile iron (google phone management) piece to microsoft, since we are finished our windows10 upgrades, and switching from wsus to sccm with microsoft security/patching on azure. Fixes our remote laptop patching issue this way, since sales folks dont vpn in. Dont get me started on the ssl cert authentication installed on every laptop for gmail, with no password for gmail, just the oauth just the ssl cert password. Microsoft costs do come in play.
lucb1e 7y ago
You should read the post. > if you use it day after day to do your job, the $150/year cost is basically nothing [...] [Excel] Just Works™. From the post: > It’s not that I’m cheap either, I just want something that works according to my preferences, not Microsoft’s. See the post for details about what's wrong with Microsoft's Office offering. The author even goes on to say: > 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. I really don't think they're as cheap as you make them out to be. And I agree with the sentiment. I'd also be fine to pay for it, but I don't want to have to struggle with emulation layers to get Microsoft's crap to work on a non-Microsoft supported operating system (it's not as if I can compile it myself), when there is a perfectly fine alternative that does not rely on being a monopoly. If someone has a layout issue with my document, the solution is very simple. If someone has a layout issue with Microsoft-made documents, they expect the other party to pay over a hundred bucks just to open one document (it doesn't happen more than once a year to me, so they're asking me to pay that for one document). This scheme only works if there is a monopoly because those people wouldn't actually themselves pay for two or three licenses just to open other people's documents. For me, LibreOffice also works better (ever tried opening a CSV in Excel? It comes out wrong 90% of the time and I don't know how, or if, you can change it; LibreOffice Calc just gives you a dialog with the csv settings and a preview of the result), in part because I'm used to it and no longer used to newer Office versions, it aligns with my ideology more, and on top of all that it's free. "Even if [one] is just marginally better than [the other], if you use it day after day to do your job" then indeed it's a no-brainer to use LibreOffice instead of pay money for an inferior product.
blub 7y ago
$150 a year + Microsoft telemetry which gives itself the liberty of downloading your files to solve bugs.

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.

robocat 7y ago

> the $150/year cost is basically nothing The cost is a lot higher for Linux developers - you also need a Windows licence and to spend significant time managing a VM (I did that, no more). I boot Linux for my dev machine (because Windows costs me more time). I actually like Excel. (Word and Outlook are toxic waste as far as I am concerned: they frustrate me more than they serve me).

brmgb 7y ago
> Word and Outlook are toxic waste as far as I am concerned: they frustrate me more than they serve me. This opinion is largely shared even in the non technical world. Outlook is a lot better than Lotus but it suffers from the comparaison with Gmail. Powerful search was a game changer for me and I miss it dearly since my company decided to switch to Office 365. Excel and Powerpoint really are the two gems of Microsoft Office.
- EricE 7y ago
  Search? Gmail didn't even index attachments until recently. Give me a break - Gmail is a joke. Never thought I would pine for Outlook but here I am :/

IronWolve 7y ago

Work wanted a cloud office provider, Went to M$ and they quoted 35 dollars per user. Thinking they own the market they price gouged us. Google gave us 15. This is for 20K+ users, guess what email solution we went with. 9 months later, M$ Came back and offered to match the price of google, after we already deployed to google office. 3 years later, Work is now thinking about switching the mobile iron (google phone management) piece to microsoft, since we are finished our windows10 upgrades, and switching from wsus to sccm with microsoft security/patching on azure. Fixes our remote laptop patching issue this way, since sales folks dont vpn in. Dont get me started on the ssl cert authentication installed on every laptop for gmail, with no password for gmail, just the oauth just the ssl cert password. Microsoft costs do come in play.

lucb1e 7y ago

You should read the post. > if you use it day after day to do your job, the $150/year cost is basically nothing [...] [Excel] Just Works™. From the post: > It’s not that I’m cheap either, I just want something that works according to my preferences, not Microsoft’s. See the post for details about what's wrong with Microsoft's Office offering. The author even goes on to say: > 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. I really don't think they're as cheap as you make them out to be. And I agree with the sentiment. I'd also be fine to pay for it, but I don't want to have to struggle with emulation layers to get Microsoft's crap to work on a non-Microsoft supported operating system (it's not as if I can compile it myself), when there is a perfectly fine alternative that does not rely on being a monopoly. If someone has a layout issue with my document, the solution is very simple. If someone has a layout issue with Microsoft-made documents, they expect the other party to pay over a hundred bucks just to open one document (it doesn't happen more than once a year to me, so they're asking me to pay that for one document). This scheme only works if there is a monopoly because those people wouldn't actually themselves pay for two or three licenses just to open other people's documents. For me, LibreOffice also works better (ever tried opening a CSV in Excel? It comes out wrong 90% of the time and I don't know how, or if, you can change it; LibreOffice Calc just gives you a dialog with the csv settings and a preview of the result), in part because I'm used to it and no longer used to newer Office versions, it aligns with my ideology more, and on top of all that it's free. "Even if [one] is just marginally better than [the other], if you use it day after day to do your job" then indeed it's a no-brainer to use LibreOffice instead of pay money for an inferior product.

blub 7y ago

$150 a year + Microsoft telemetry which gives itself the liberty of downloading your files to solve bugs.