3 ms·

Lots of things that just don't smell right here. First of all, every experience I've had trying to get GDocs to play ball with DOCX has led to the same misery t

Lots of things that just don't smell right here. First of all, every experience I've had trying to get GDocs to play ball with DOCX has led to the same misery that comes with LibreOffice. It works fine until you use an unsupported font, or tables, or precise image layouts, etc etc etc. DOCX is a proprietary format. Perfect support is categorically impossible. A best-effort attempt is the best we'll ever get, and IME LibreOffice tries a lot harder than other office suites do. Also, for what it's worth... you know what GDocs and Word won't open? A document written in WordStar on a TRS-80 in 1983. You know what will open that document? LibreOffice. LibreOffice checks all the boxes for my spreadsheet/document writing needs, and it has also been an irreplacable tool in my data archival efforts.

D13Fd 2y ago
I only rarely encounter people who use Google Docs, but when I do it’s a huge pain if you care about preserving the formatting at all.
- ryukoposting 2y ago
  Both startups I've worked for used it exclusively - one of them being a med-tech with a boatload of documentation needs. A lot of schools have dropped MS Office as they've switched to Chromebooks. None of this is to say GDocs isn't a miserable turd of a program. I'm convinced word processors have actually regressed in quality since the mid-2000s. GDocs somehow manages to be less featureful, slower, buggier, less user-friendly, and less compatible than Word XP. There isn't a single thing GDocs does better than an office suite that's pushing 25 years old, save for real-time collaborative editing which is hardly worth all the other compromises. This sounds silly, but I encourage you to dredge up an old Windows XP system and a copy of Office XP. I was shocked to see how far we've strayed from the light.
jahewson 2y ago
> DOCX is a proprietary format. Perfect support is categorically impossible. A best-effort attempt is the best we'll ever get, and IME LibreOffice tries a lot harder than other office suites do. Nah - well you’re correct that DOCX is under-defined - but the real the problem with LibreOffice is that it has 40 years of history supporting the wrong file format. Its internals are all built on models that later became ODF and any attempt to bolt-on the incompatible MS Office models is doomed to failure.

D13Fd 2y ago

I only rarely encounter people who use Google Docs, but when I do it’s a huge pain if you care about preserving the formatting at all.

ryukoposting 2y ago
Both startups I've worked for used it exclusively - one of them being a med-tech with a boatload of documentation needs. A lot of schools have dropped MS Office as they've switched to Chromebooks. None of this is to say GDocs isn't a miserable turd of a program. I'm convinced word processors have actually regressed in quality since the mid-2000s. GDocs somehow manages to be less featureful, slower, buggier, less user-friendly, and less compatible than Word XP. There isn't a single thing GDocs does better than an office suite that's pushing 25 years old, save for real-time collaborative editing which is hardly worth all the other compromises. This sounds silly, but I encourage you to dredge up an old Windows XP system and a copy of Office XP. I was shocked to see how far we've strayed from the light.

jahewson 2y ago

> DOCX is a proprietary format. Perfect support is categorically impossible. A best-effort attempt is the best we'll ever get, and IME LibreOffice tries a lot harder than other office suites do. Nah - well you’re correct that DOCX is under-defined - but the real the problem with LibreOffice is that it has 40 years of history supporting the wrong file format. Its internals are all built on models that later became ODF and any attempt to bolt-on the incompatible MS Office models is doomed to failure.