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> LibreOffice is an okay office suite writer, perhaps. calc, not even close - google sheets is unfortunately better in almost every way, and google sheets aren
by baq 1y ago
> LibreOffice is an okay office suite
writer, perhaps. calc, not even close - google sheets is unfortunately better in almost every way, and google sheets aren't great either.
- indigo945 1y agoWriter is awful too. It will randomly mess up formatting, especially in tables. Also in tables, it will insist to try and parse cell values like Calc would (breaking numbers and dates), even though Writer doesn't even provide a way to run calculations on those numbers anyway.
- buccal 1y agoIt does support calculation: https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/swriter/guide/calculate_intable.html https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/swriter/guide...
- lousken 1y agoWord is awful too, it messes up formatting, especially when pasting images. Good luck writing anything longer than couple pages. Hasn't been solved in 20 years. Have stopped using word 2 years ago but I am gonna assume it's still an issue
- distances 1y ago> > LibreOffice is an okay office suite > > writer, perhaps. calc, not even close This really depends on your needs. I'm sure it's not enough for someone who does Excel wizardry for living. But I use it for tracking personal finances and other simple tasks and graphs, and it is completely sufficient. This in my book easily earns it the "okay office suite" badge. To be honest all office suites in the last 20 years have been good enough for most small scale needs, including OpenOffice back in the early days.
- theshrike79 1y agoThere's an old anecdote that everyone uses only 10% of Excel's features ...but everyone uses a different 10%. Something that's useless to you might be a dealbreaker to someone else.
- jncfhnb 1y agoI doubt that holds up personally I would guess reliance on excel is declining
- 131012 1y agoNah it just got promoted as the database for PowerBI. /s
- cyanydeez 1y agoExcel spreadsheets built 30 years ago likely pin people to excel
- theshrike79 1y agoIf the general public knew how big decisions are done based on some ancient Excel sheet they'd faint. It's in the sweet spot of "already installed" and "kinda-sorta database" and "kinda-sorta programming environment" where industrious people can build massive tooling over the years on top of an Excel sheet. Yes, it could be an Actual Application, but then Legal gets involved (where is the data stored, what's the contract with the supplier), then you need to talk to Finance (Who's paying for this? Justify the cost!), IT (Managing the installations and licenses) and Security (Is the provider following good practices, is the application audited). ...then you decide "fuck that" and just use Excel, it's good enough. Anecdote: A programmer friend got promoted a few steps upward quickly and got into the "provide us with reports" level of employment. Their predecessor (a career manager) had spent multiple days each month manually doing the reports. But a programmer's mind isn't built like that so they used the fact that Excel can pull stuff from HTTP APIs and now the report takes about 15 minutes to build automatically.
- boudin 1y agoLibreOffice Calc works well and does the job for what most people needs, I don't see any issue recommending it.
- drumhead 1y agoIf you're a finance professional then there's no alternative to Excel. But otherwise Libre office calc is perfectly fine.
- lousken 1y agowindows - if you need kernel anticheats, excel or CAD mac - if you need battery
- happymellon 1y ago> If you're a finance professional then there's no alternative to Excel Not sure what you mean by this exactly, but I work in banking with a lot of "financial professionals", and the general opinion is that Excel is not good because it screws with numbers, whether its scientific notation (Why? Its just as long as the original number), rounding of numbers (had that with a large list of account numbers just last week where half the account numbers lost the last 3 digits) and there is no easy way of saying "just treat these as entered". Even setting fields to text doesn't stop Excel from fucking around and overriding them to be date formatted if it feels like the balance could be. The main issue is that Excel comes with Office and you aren't allowed to install other software so it forces you to use it and get used to it. It really wouldn't take much to be better than Excel.
- cogman10 1y agoThe problem, as I see it, isn't a feature problem but rather just the fact that everyone in banking and finance is already using excel. You aren't going to see `ods` files passed around.
- happymellon 1y agoI would agree with this.
- rvba 1y agoIf your bank is exporting and importing csvs, the problem is on the software stack side. Both xlsx can be exported and imported. It is just harder
- dtj1123 1y agoAny task that warrants a complex spreadsheet can be done better in a Python notebook using pandas or polars IMO
- thyristan 1y agoCalc is far better than Excel. CSV import in Excel sucks. LibreOffice Calc is far better there. Best feature of all in LibreOffice Calc: highlight current row/column, so you have a cross-like cursor. Easier and better embedding of Python and other languages, not the "Python in the Cloud" crap that Excel does. Less crappy conversions like "oh, that surely looks like a date, let's mess up your data"...
- happymellon 1y ago> CSV import in Excel sucks I'm going through a project at the moment where all the data is held in spreadsheets, and every time anyone opens them Excel fucks the numbers to be "scientific notation" despite there being space to display the full number and no way to disable this anti-feature. The amount of times I've had to restore the spreadsheet from a backed up CSV because of data loss is frustrating. I wish I could stop using Excel.
- smt88 1y agoThis is just a formatting/display issue. Excel isn't rounding the number internally. It sounds like the problem in this case is that you don't know how to use basic Excel features.
- happymellon 1y agoUnfortunately you are wrong. You just are mixing up two different problems I've listed into one problem and then made the arrogant assumption that I don't know how to use Excel. Excel has definitely truncated numbers.
- dspillett 1y ago> This is just a formatting/display issue. Excel isn't rounding the number internally. It isn't rounding or truncating while you are actively using the workbook or saving in its native formats, but it does when saving back out to CSV or certain other formats. As much as I like Excel for many things, it is sometimes the bane of my existence wrt people using it to manipulate tabular data that isn't in its native formats and causing accidental corruption. One of the many projects on my list of “things I'll never get around to” is a good⃰ CSV (or other text-based tabular data) editor. -------- [*] There are actually quite a few that look good, but don't have some of the features behaviours I want, or in some cases are not available on an appropriate platform (there are a couple of Mac only options for instance), or are paid proprietary apps that are surprisingly expensive (I could justify it and get work to pay in DayJob, but not for my own use).
- jdalgetty 1y agoI've used calc every day for years. It works well.
- lelanthran 1y ago> > LibreOffice is an okay office suite > writer, perhaps. calc, not even close For what I see 99% of people do in excel (make a table, then sort it and draw some charts), calc would support all their uses just fine. For those using it for actual accounting/financial stuff with equations in the cells, and custom macros, etc ... then no, calc won't be sufficient.
- smallstepforman 1y agoFor scientific calculations with tables of data, I find LibreCalc better than Excel, so in my experience, Excel is the “good enough for simple tasks” tool, but LibreCalccis the tool when you actually do scientific big boy calculations. The real issue is familiarity and importing, but if you start fresh, LibreCalc is better for me.
- smallstepforman 1y agoThere are users (me included) that state the opposite, LibreCalc is better for my needs (complex formulas table driven) and that Excel is a toy for more “scientific” calculations.
- hgomersall 1y agoI've come to the conclusion that anyone trying to use a spreadsheet in a way that requires excel, probably shouldn't.
- red-iron-pine 1y agogoogle sheets sucks too. excel runs the world, and I mean that unironically.