4 ms·

I do. There are a lot of computer users out there that need to create an occasional spreadsheet or more complex text document. For these users, buying a product

by ht_th 15y ago

I do. There are a lot of computer users out there that need to create an occasional spreadsheet or more complex text document. For these users, buying a product like MS Office is overkill, both in features and in price. And as a bonus, LibreOffice has a ``collage'' program in the form of LibreOffice Draw, the vector drawing program. Microsoft Office doesn't have that.

mayanksinghal 15y ago
I actually worked with a firm that developed content - that was their core competency. Google docs worked really well for them - MS Office was definitely an overkill. Unfortunately, other firms that they were working with required them to send content in .doc format even when the final destination of the shared content was a blog - hence a majorly useless transformation that really pissed me and the writers off. There were of course cases when more complex text documents were required, I had suggested Latex but others were not familiar with it and didn't want to spend as much time on formatting as is necessary for using Latex. They chose Adobe bundle. My central point is, as collaboration tools become more and more advanced, the need for packages like Libre/Open/MS Office will die down and web based tools and much more advanced packages like Adobe's will replace them. Excel on the other hand, it is still irreplaceable unless people can make a REALLY intuitive UI to something like Matlab.
- JadeNB 15y ago
  > Excel on the other hand, it is still irreplaceable unless people can make a REALLY intuitive UI to something like Matlab. Boy, would I love to see that. Wasn't their a program out there a while back that, in somewhat that spirit, aimed to provide a Python backend to spreadsheet calculations? (Imagine if you used that Python backing to interface with SAGE ….)

4 ms·

I do. There are a lot of computer users out there that need to create an occasional spreadsheet or more complex text document. For these users, buying a product

by ht_th 15y ago

mayanksinghal 15y ago
I actually worked with a firm that developed content - that was their core competency. Google docs worked really well for them - MS Office was definitely an overkill. Unfortunately, other firms that they were working with required them to send content in .doc format even when the final destination of the shared content was a blog - hence a majorly useless transformation that really pissed me and the writers off. There were of course cases when more complex text documents were required, I had suggested Latex but others were not familiar with it and didn't want to spend as much time on formatting as is necessary for using Latex. They chose Adobe bundle. My central point is, as collaboration tools become more and more advanced, the need for packages like Libre/Open/MS Office will die down and web based tools and much more advanced packages like Adobe's will replace them. Excel on the other hand, it is still irreplaceable unless people can make a REALLY intuitive UI to something like Matlab.
- JadeNB 15y ago
  > Excel on the other hand, it is still irreplaceable unless people can make a REALLY intuitive UI to something like Matlab. Boy, would I love to see that. Wasn't their a program out there a while back that, in somewhat that spirit, aimed to provide a Python backend to spreadsheet calculations? (Imagine if you used that Python backing to interface with SAGE ….)