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> But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywher
by FriedrichN 6y ago
> But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, and the incompatabilities of Writer with Word make it problematic.
I find Calc to be quite complete and quite compatible with Excel files. I deal with way more Excel sheets than I would like to, but I can't remember the last time I ran into a problem with them.
Google Docs on the other hand is quite slow and lacks a lot of features and has the disadvantage of being browser based and a Google product.
- acomjean 6y agoCalc also seems to handle comma separated (or tab) files much better. Especially when saving.
- gizzlon 6y agoAlso when importing :) Spent a few hours with Calc today because I could not get Google Sheets to import and handle my csv correctly. Much better experience than I expected, TBH. Will use it again, and probably default to LibreOffice Calc for single-user sheets.
- franga2000 6y agoYES! This 1000 times! I keep LibreOffice installed on my Windows install solely because of that. In general, Calc has got to be the best in the suite and perhaps the only one that actually has any advantage over MS (besides Draw's PDF editing, but that has no direct MS counterpart).
- andrewshadura 6y agoWell, Writer offers sane menus, toolbars and sidebars, unlike Word. Word's are a complete mess, each time I have to use it I'm lost and can't do basic things.
- davidgerard 6y agoWriter is as good or better than Word.
- longtom 6y agoIt amazes me how an open source project can outperform a 40 year old multi-billion dollar app. I think this points to major corruption and incompetence as a result of market monopolization.
- franga2000 6y agoIt doesn't though, as basically everyone in this comment section can attest to. This is simply one instance where it's better - looking at it closely, this is actually an open-source program supporting a standard open format better than proprietary software that has its own alternative - pretty common when you think about it.
- longtom 6y agoThough CSV is an extremely common format. Even if does not outperform in every regard, it is still astonishing how close it gets.
- gcblkjaidfj 6y ago> open source project can outperform a 40 year old multi-billion dollar app differente incentives. I guarantee the open source is not outperforming the 40bi company offering on the metric they care about: profit. Likewise, nothing is outperforming the metric the open source project care about: developer (well, power user) satisfaction.
- olav 6y agoOther than being the „Right Thing“ to use, this is the real killer as Excel frequently can‘t open its own CSV Files. Microsoft seems to hate its users very much.
- ta988 6y agoCalc is good, but Impress is disastrous. Really buggy and lacks a lot of ergonomy compared to Powerpoint. Writer works really well except some weird behavior when switching languages occasionaly.
- kenniskrag 6y agotried impress yesterday. Killed the layout completely.
- tinus_hn 6y agoThe phrase ‘killed it’ could mean it was great or it was awful.
- franga2000 6y agoYeah, Impress is a mess. I use OnlyOffice for ppt files since I don't really care about performance in a slide editor. As for Writer, one more problem is that it is sometimes simply unbearably ugly. Just scrolling through a pretty small document creates rendering artifacts everywhere and the font rendering tends to randomly switch between passable and horrendous. If you're lucky though and that doesn't happen for you, it's actually pretty usable (ignoring format compatibility, of course, but that's also MS's fault).
- ekianjo 6y agoCalc handles unicode csv properly, unlike Excel...
- corty 6y agoCalc handles CSV far better, period. Excel has language-dependent unconfigurable separators, quoting problems, whitespace problems, charset problems, BOM problems, weird expansion problems (like interpreting stuff as dates randomly), etc. I cannot understand how anyone uses Excel with any nontrivial amount of CSV data without going mad...
- tsomberi 6y agoI have not used Goog Sheets for years but it is very annoying when the keyboard shortcuts of the browser interfere with it.
- ysavir 6y agoYou mean when Google Sheets interferes with the keyboard shortcuts of the browser.
- m-p-3 6y agoThere are some formulas from Sheets that I use and are sadly inexistent in Excel/Calc. I suppose it's one way to lock some users in. Example: QUERY: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343 ARRAYFORMULA: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093275 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093275
- gcblkjaidfj 6y agoQUERY: is selfserving google feature. But you can probably do it in libreoffice in a way that is less google-selfserving and more portable, by using a macro/script that fetches content. ARRAYFORMULA: https://help.libreoffice.org/6.3/en-US/text/scalc/01/04060107.html?DbPAR=CALC#:~:text=Using%20Array%20Formulas%20in%20LibreOffice%20Calc%20You%20can,or%20columns%20in%20which%20the%20formula%20is%20found https://help.libreoffice.org/6.3/en-US/text/scalc/01/0406010....
- skissane 6y ago> QUERY: is selfserving google feature. But you can probably do it in libreoffice in a way that is less google-selfserving and more portable, by using a macro/script that fetches content. I don't understand how QUERY is a "selfserving google feature". It allows you to write queries over spreadsheet data using a variant of SQL. Anybody else could implement the same idea.
- cosmie 6y agoARRAYFORMULA itself doesn't exist in Excel, but they did recently add support for dynamic/spilled arrays[1]. Which brings it close to (if not at) parity with ARRAYFORMULA. It's not even close to as handy as QUERY (in ease of use or intuitiveness), but they also recently introduced FILTER[2]. Which can be used in combination with other functions to replicate a subset of QUERY use cases. My pet list of functions that have me reaching for Sheets are the regex ones[3][4][5]. Excel's search and replace functions support basic wildcards[6], but anything more sophisticated than that quickly becomes infeasible, impractical, or impossible to replicate using Excel function built-ins and requires dropping writing into Javascript or VBA to write up a custom function. That said, Excel has had a pretty nifty and powerful ETL tool hidden inside of it for the past ~7 years called Power Query[7]. This is essentially an entire app-within-an-app (and is a data processing engine in many Microsoft data products), complete with it's own programming language[8] and compressed columnar data store format. For anyone with a development background, you can easily ramp up on Power Query's language and do 90% of the work you need to do there, and obviate the need for complicated and fragile formulas to begin with. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/guidelines-and-examples-of-array-formulas-7d94a64e-3ff3-4686-9372-ecfd5caa57c7 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/guidelines-and-ex... [2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/filter-function-f4f7cb66-82eb-4767-8f7c-4877ad80c759 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/filter-function-f... [3] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098244 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098244 [4] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098292 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098292 [5] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098245 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098245 [6] https://support.microsoft.com/en-ie/office/using-wildcard-characters-in-searches-ef94362e-9999-4350-ad74-4d2371110adb https://support.microsoft.com/en-ie/office/using-wildcard-ch... [7] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/getting-started-with-power-query-7104fbee-9e62-4cb9-a02e-5bfb1a6c536a https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/getting-started-w... [8] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/