14 ms·
Univer: Open-Source Alternative for Google Sheets, Slides, Docs
- ranger_danger 2y agoAnother option: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE And a similar project for Photos, also end-to-end encrypted: https://github.com/ente-io/ente https://github.com/ente-io/ente
- zipping1549 2y ago> (Pro feature) Sheet collaboration yeah..
- m4thfr34k 2y agoLost me at Sheets Import/Export (Pro Feature) Open source .... but who would actually use it without the 'pro features'?
- cyanydeez 2y agoForking seems to be a sufficient value of open source. Perhaps hou just mean, how do they expect traction if the open components dont entice marginal users
- tap-snap-or-nap 2y agoOnly a pro needs to export Sheets.
- williamstein 2y agoAnother pro feature is realtime collaboration: " Enterprise Edition -- Provides a commercial version for enterprises with specific needs, including but not limited to multi-person collaborative editing and browsing, data connectors, and Live Share for collaborative browsing."
- kkfx 2y agoEhm... Do not take me wrong but "break application silos and connect business data to a single platform" mean "escape many jails, just come in our unified jail". To be free we need usable data, so for instance instead of strange zipped file formats a spreadsheet (witch should not exists, but that's another story) should save data as *sv/SQLite DB by default, a visual doc should be LaTeX or something similar and so on. The suite should be only a viewer.
- djbusby 2y agoNow you've picked two jails? I with you on sqlite but lost me on LaTeX. Maybe, many open formats, with many open tools? And I'm over wishing, hoping for better print support on HTML - I think is the holy Grail.
- kkfx 2y agoWe have various tools and options, some was a bit lost on the road, some are still active and give very impressive results, some are crap, popular or not. First crap is the WYSIWYG model, it produce not so nice results and demand very complex UIs. To produce high quality documents LaTeX so far is the best tool, PostScript itself is not known essentially anymore, {La,}TeX is often wrapper for instance in R RMD/Quarto docs to produce nice printouts, it's the de facto standard of scientific typeset and have so far no better competitors, so it's a wise choice. Second crap is the spreadsheet concept, yes sometimes we need tables, and compute something on them. Org-mode show a simple example of table computing without being a spreadsheet, R is another, most modern NotebookUIs from Mathematica to Jupyter do the same as well. Spreadsheets was an idea to offer limited data manipulation to computer illiterate, and failed. The long tail of disasters suggest it's time to abandon such model. So we need something to store data. sv works well for non-giant dataset, they are simple than some ML dialects, for more SQLite is a popular powerful tool offering a self-contained easy to move storage. I do not like it, but for various things is good, for the rest it's deadly simple to export the DB in some other formats. We should re-create the Smalltalk desktop model, the end-user programming concept that happen anyway today but hyper limited and in user-unfriendly ways. Take a look at Pharo, than image not just the bare bone environment but something developed like Emacs today. You imaging this: http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf or http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Products_Apr87.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ... for the modern world. Back than it fails because of high costs and general ignorance, people simply do not understand the power of this model so feel no need of it. Such legacy burden plague much the present IT as well, with people still imaging files as sheets and folders as suspended folders full of paper sheets in a drawer. Mentally most people have issue going past the paper tool even today. But today we have hw costs small enough and computers themselves spread enough to push again such model. This model is the nightmare of all big of IT, from old IBM to modern GAFAM, because they know they can't compete with a FLOSS networked desktops model. That's why they do what they can to keep people on the old mainframe model, now the cloud, and many ignoring this keep mimicking the big e powerful not understanding that they try to replicate an archaic model born out of some Xerox spoils once they see how to change them in anti-users ways. The "FLOSS alternative to" is the networked, end-user programmable desktop model, not some sightly different clone of some GAFAM platform.
- ohmyiv 2y ago> Sheets Print (Pro Feature) Experience the HD printing capabilities of Univer Sheets Is there a reason for "HD" printing vs "regular"? Sorry, my spreadsheet usage is limited to numbers and letters so "HD" printing sounds superfluous.
- michelsedgh 2y agoLooks great! Apparently the self host docker has collaboration features also. Does anyone know if you can integrate it with nextcloud or owncloud or similar?
- Stephen304 2y agoI hope they add that ability, I'm pretty fed up with onlyoffice and nextcloud office (collabora) frequently breaking and having terribly buggy/laggy UIs.
- StarlaAtNight 2y agoI tried the Sheets Big Data example, and it crashed on the first run Reprex-ish: 1. Open this on iPhone Firefox: https://www.univer.ai/examples/sheets-big-data/ https://www.univer.ai/examples/sheets-big-data/ 2. Select a cell and drag down 3. It crashes once it hits row 1M-ish I get that it might be some kind of memory limitation, but if so there should be guardrails to prevent the user from doing it
- sambazi 2y agogood catch. seems worthy of an gh issue
- zeeed 2y agowhen pronounced backwards it sounds a whole lot like „revenue“
- Dalewyn 2y agoAt least personally, my chief concern if I was considering "open source alternatives" for office software would be to ensure interoperability. I use office software for both personal and business purposes, and I need my documents to get across in perfect shape to their destination for the latter purpose. For better or worse, that is ensured not by whether source code is open or closed but rather by simply sticking to industry standards, also known as using what everyone else is using. That means Microsoft Office by far and Google Docs to a lesser extent, whether anyone likes it or not. I suppose I should put it out there I also like paying for and using Microsoft Office anyway. I get back much more than what I pay.
- trueismywork 2y agoYou would then need to make sure to contact your regulators to make sure that open source companies are allowed to use "industrial standards". All open source alternatives I know do support industrial standards (ODF). It's just Microsoft office which doesn't use them.
- Dalewyn 2y agoMicrosoft Office supports ODF. Every single business communique I've ever seen and conducted that's not PDF comes and goes in .docx/.xlsx/.pptx, though.
- trueismywork 2y agoMicrosoft supports ODF pretty badly. That's why people use other stuff.
- js4ever 2y agoSeems buggy, if your try the first example (https://www.univer.ai/examples/sheets/ https://www.univer.ai/examples/sheets/) then go to data validation, try to type chars in the date field, this is crashing the whole page ... wow and this is paid stuff?
- pmontra 2y agoI remember that I self hosted an EtherPad instance https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite There was something like that for spreadsheets too but I can't remember what. The only collaborative projects I had to work on were with customers so we always used Google Docs, nothing self hosted.
- n_plus_1_acc 2y agoethercalc
- rspoerri 2y agoI think this is more interesting: https://cryptpad.fr/ https://cryptpad.fr/
- righthand 2y agoI run a Cryptpad instance and it is okay. Cryptpad fails a little bit because you must live within Cryptpad (you have import/export documents with no automation about it). What I ended up realizing I needed had the following features: - Encrypted syncing between machines - I want to write using Sublime Text or LibreOffice Writer, I don't want to load up a browser as I often need to focus - Collaboration features The first one is made possible by setting up Syncthing on my machines. The next two are already provided by LibreOffice. The missing piece is if I want to share the document with someone. Well this is covered by email OR I have been building a small service to sit infront of my remote syncthing to allow me to set specific documents/directories as viewable. This is basically an Nginx proxy with some fancy configs. If Cryptpad was more interoperable with retrieving documents I would use it more as a remote interface. However it's too concerned with it's own idea to ever grow in that direction. I really like the Forms you can build with it however. I often use that feature for creating invites to parties I'm hosting. In the future though my sharing program may have a form build feature and Cryptpad will be non-useful to me. In any case YMMV.
- ranger_danger 2y ago> I don't want to load up a browser I didn't know anyone ever closed their browser anymore. Honestly trying to imagine a workflow that doesn't include regularly using a browser seems very alien at this point.
- righthand 2y agoIf it’s alien that means you’re not trying to have a focused experience. You just prefer living in services with lock-in. Perfectly fine to do that. For me a dedicated desktop app means I’m isolated to the tasks associated with it. I can always open a browser when I need it. There are plenty of equivalent apps in the browser that have eaten that workflow now but there are many more restrictions too (vpn compatibility, auth flows, ads distracting, user hostile flows) where a dedicated app shines is that I’m not stuck on the net. 90% of the time I just need text syncd in some manner. I shouldn’t have to load a web service for that.
- solarkraft 2y agoI'm still waiting for a document editor to approach styling sensibly. I don't want to explicitly set color, text size and others, I want to define style classes that I can easily change later. I know that the office programs theoretically support this, but I found the flow so terrible to be impractical - no wonder casual users don't use it (all the way to many programmers hating WYSIWYG because they hate the process of manual styling so much).
- hanniabu 2y agoOr at least select multiple groups with a similar style at once. So you select the first group of text, then a dotted line will appear around groups of the same styling, and you just hold down control or shift and click each one and it'll highlight then entire group that you clicked.
- Brajeshwar 2y agoYou and I think like this, because we worked on/for the Internet. Unfortunately, other people who use these tools don't think like that.
- liotier 2y agoStyling predates the Internet - Microsoft Word 1.0 for MS-DOS had style sheets. WordPerfect 5.0 introduced styles on that side. Hierarchically structured text documents with headers, paragraphs etc. are even older: IBM Generalized Markup Language began development in 1969. Lack of tooling for hierarchical structure manipulation is the mark of aiming for the lowest common denominator - casuals who edit short documents one-off. Microsoft Word Outline Mode is life. My pet feature request: outline mode - with a ticket opened to Libreoffice since 2011, preceded by an Openoffice feature request from 2002. Probably won't ever happen.
- solarkraft 2y agoIntroducing new UX concepts is always hard, but I'd suggest that most people would understand and appreciate the advantages rather quickly. Everyone knows the pain of manual styling.
- igtztorrero 2y agoIs there any collaboration tool for Markdown documents ?
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoWhy not just use LibreOffice?
- ptman 2y agoshare a link