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What viable European alternatives to Microsoft Office are there? Google Docs is also a US-based cloud service. LibreOffice is ugly, its UX is sometimes worse t

What viable European alternatives to Microsoft Office are there? Google Docs is also a US-based cloud service. LibreOffice is ugly, its UX is sometimes worse than Office 2003 (especially Calc, where pivot tables have to be blindly configured in a modal dialog, and there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel), and they still haven't implemented automatically downloading updates.

MathMonkeyMan 3y ago
LibreOffice isn't going to win any beauty pageants, but it does everything you need in an office setting. Some specialists can't live without MS Excel and all of its extensions (banking), but that's not the common case. Common case is word processing, slide presentations, and task management (in spreadsheets).
- troupo 3y ago
  MS Excel is the most common case. Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    > Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel And that's a problem because it isn't even particularly great software [0,1,2]. Of course all complex calculation tools have bugs, but compare the code quality of Excel with something like Matlab or R and it looks amateurish. [0] https://www.microassist.com/software-tips/real-world-risks-of-spreadsheet-errors/ https://www.microassist.com/software-tips/real-world-risks-o... [1] https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-the-worst-excel-errors https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
    - johannes1234321 3y ago
      Yeah, but it allows amateurs to do quite some stuff and is available everywhere. All other systems have a way steeper learning curve.
impossiblefork 3y ago
I like plaintext documents. I think it's the future, since it's compact and LLMs can consume it without having to consume strange tokens. For typesetting and presentations that have be 'nice' I use TeX and beamer. For the kind of stuff MS users use Excel for I use R. For presentations that don't have to be nice I use nano, plaintext and then just scale up the text.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  >I like plaintext documents. [...] I use TeX and beamer He probably meant an alternative to Office for companies and average people not tech enthusiasts. Nobody is gonna switch to raw text files and TeX.
  - impossiblefork 3y ago
    I did use this for actual work at a major European software/technology firm though, and nobody complained. That is, actual presentations made from scaled-up nano, mini-manuals for the team written in plaintext, etc.
    - Rinzler89 3y ago
      I also used it at work in the SW team. Nobody else in the company used it tho. Everyone only used office 365 and that's that. Stop extrapolating that your niche experience somehow is the norm. There's a reason why companies prefer to pay for office instead of using raw text and latex files for free.
      - impossiblefork 3y ago
        My point is really that it could easily be the norm though. There's nothing hard about writing plain text files. You just need to write good English and have some feel for text as a medium. In some way there's less to learn there than in word, where you can bold things, insert images, etc. People outside this niche have even less need for complicated functionality. A sales team that writes in word could have written in plaintext, and have had an organised picture of all their doings, with little details, that will eventually be machine-digestable. The only problem is if you want to write mathematics, but then you have LaTeX. An in-between solution, if you want things a little bit conventional, is markdown.
bj-rn 3y ago
There is SoftMaker Office from Germany. Never used it though. https://www.softmaker.com/en https://www.softmaker.com/en https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftMaker_Office https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftMaker_Office
- Kwpolska 3y ago
  I tested the free version, their Excel equivalent seems fine, although with some strange limitations in the free version (you can edit Tables in Excel documents, but not create new ones, as creating is a paid feature).
- CRCPowershroom 3y ago
  I tend to prefer OnlyOffice, if only because it's open-source (unlike SoftMaker), and has better compatibility with MS Office documents.
akdor1154 3y ago
> there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel FWIW this is no longer true, the feature is called 'Database Ranges'. However i (sadly) don't disagree LO is still miles behind Excel.
- Kwpolska 3y ago
  I tested this with LibreOffice 24.2.1.2, and it’s far, far from what Excel tables do. The most basic features of an Excel table (Insert -> Table) are (a) the ability to reference cells in the same row by the name of the column, (b) displaying table headers in the chrome when scrolling, (c) auto-completing formulae until the end of the table, (d) pretty formatting, (e) auto-filtering configured by default. I can’t see any of those with the ranges in LO.
npteljes 3y ago
ONLYOFFICE comes to mind, although the "Europeanness" of it can be up for debate. Promises pretty good compatibility with MS formats! AGPL licensed too, which I think is a plus. Free personal tier, which they host themselves, similar to Google Docs / Sheet: https://personal.onlyoffice.com/ https://personal.onlyoffice.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice
- Kwpolska 3y ago
  > Based in Latvia, OnlyOffice owner Ascensio System SIA was a subsidiary of Russian-based New Communication Technologies.[2] Due to EU economic sanctions targeting Russia, European organizations that used the commercial version of OnlyOffice were prohibited from doing so.[3] Thanks, but no thanks.

MathMonkeyMan 3y ago

LibreOffice isn't going to win any beauty pageants, but it does everything you need in an office setting. Some specialists can't live without MS Excel and all of its extensions (banking), but that's not the common case. Common case is word processing, slide presentations, and task management (in spreadsheets).

troupo 3y ago
MS Excel is the most common case. Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel And that's a problem because it isn't even particularly great software [0,1,2]. Of course all complex calculation tools have bugs, but compare the code quality of Excel with something like Matlab or R and it looks amateurish. [0] https://www.microassist.com/software-tips/real-world-risks-of-spreadsheet-errors/ https://www.microassist.com/software-tips/real-world-risks-o... [1] https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-the-worst-excel-errors https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    Yeah, but it allows amateurs to do quite some stuff and is available everywhere. All other systems have a way steeper learning curve.

impossiblefork 3y ago

I like plaintext documents. I think it's the future, since it's compact and LLMs can consume it without having to consume strange tokens. For typesetting and presentations that have be 'nice' I use TeX and beamer. For the kind of stuff MS users use Excel for I use R. For presentations that don't have to be nice I use nano, plaintext and then just scale up the text.

Rinzler89 3y ago
>I like plaintext documents. [...] I use TeX and beamer He probably meant an alternative to Office for companies and average people not tech enthusiasts. Nobody is gonna switch to raw text files and TeX.
- impossiblefork 3y ago
  I did use this for actual work at a major European software/technology firm though, and nobody complained. That is, actual presentations made from scaled-up nano, mini-manuals for the team written in plaintext, etc.
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    I also used it at work in the SW team. Nobody else in the company used it tho. Everyone only used office 365 and that's that. Stop extrapolating that your niche experience somehow is the norm. There's a reason why companies prefer to pay for office instead of using raw text and latex files for free.
    - impossiblefork 3y ago
      My point is really that it could easily be the norm though. There's nothing hard about writing plain text files. You just need to write good English and have some feel for text as a medium. In some way there's less to learn there than in word, where you can bold things, insert images, etc. People outside this niche have even less need for complicated functionality. A sales team that writes in word could have written in plaintext, and have had an organised picture of all their doings, with little details, that will eventually be machine-digestable. The only problem is if you want to write mathematics, but then you have LaTeX. An in-between solution, if you want things a little bit conventional, is markdown.

bj-rn 3y ago

There is SoftMaker Office from Germany. Never used it though. https://www.softmaker.com/en https://www.softmaker.com/en https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftMaker_Office https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftMaker_Office

Kwpolska 3y ago
I tested the free version, their Excel equivalent seems fine, although with some strange limitations in the free version (you can edit Tables in Excel documents, but not create new ones, as creating is a paid feature).
CRCPowershroom 3y ago
I tend to prefer OnlyOffice, if only because it's open-source (unlike SoftMaker), and has better compatibility with MS Office documents.

akdor1154 3y ago

> there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel FWIW this is no longer true, the feature is called 'Database Ranges'. However i (sadly) don't disagree LO is still miles behind Excel.

Kwpolska 3y ago
I tested this with LibreOffice 24.2.1.2, and it’s far, far from what Excel tables do. The most basic features of an Excel table (Insert -> Table) are (a) the ability to reference cells in the same row by the name of the column, (b) displaying table headers in the chrome when scrolling, (c) auto-completing formulae until the end of the table, (d) pretty formatting, (e) auto-filtering configured by default. I can’t see any of those with the ranges in LO.

npteljes 3y ago

ONLYOFFICE comes to mind, although the "Europeanness" of it can be up for debate. Promises pretty good compatibility with MS formats! AGPL licensed too, which I think is a plus. Free personal tier, which they host themselves, similar to Google Docs / Sheet: https://personal.onlyoffice.com/ https://personal.onlyoffice.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice

Kwpolska 3y ago
> Based in Latvia, OnlyOffice owner Ascensio System SIA was a subsidiary of Russian-based New Communication Technologies.[2] Due to EU economic sanctions targeting Russia, European organizations that used the commercial version of OnlyOffice were prohibited from doing so.[3] Thanks, but no thanks.