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I'm going to admit up front I'm probably hopelessly out of touch. I used to buy office from like Word 2.0 up through Office 2007 or so but for the life of me I

I'm going to admit up front I'm probably hopelessly out of touch. I used to buy office from like Word 2.0 up through Office 2007 or so but for the life of me I can't figure out why most people would need Office today. Like I said I'm out of touch but... If I write docs for publication it's HTML. If I write for correspondence it's email If I write for product design it's probably a wiki. Something the entire team can edit. I am in no way suggesting that people don't have legit uses for Office or OpenOffice. I am saying that I have not had a legit use for Office in 6+ years. Those few times I need to make a sign for party or a few page letter Google docs works fine. Even presentations I've done in Google docs just fine. Spreadsheets work fine as well. They can even be scripted if you want to do crazy stuff. Why would I want to install Open Office when I can access Google Docs from ANY machine, not just machines have have Open Office installed? Especially the Hacker News crowd. Do you find you need Office or Open Office still?

Silhouette 13y ago
Why would I want to install Open Office when I can access Google Docs from ANY machine, not just machines have have Open Office installed? Much larger feature set. Privacy. Robustness and future-proofing. Shall we go on? Do you find you need Office or Open Office still? Sure. I've never used word processors much for professional work, as I find different tools of one kind or another are usually a better choice for preparing any given documentation. But there is more to office suites than word processors. Spreadsheets, in particular, are still the most convenient tool for many administrative tasks.
- bnolsen 13y ago
  I always find gnumeric to be plenty powerful for doing any spreadsheet stuffs I need to do. No I don't get fancy, just mess with columns and formulae and statistical analysis.
pacaro 13y ago
Excel is a great tool for a developer.
- greggman 13y ago
  For what purpose? I've used Excel in the past for developer things but with Google Docs everyone can edit at the same time. I've used that feature as well which AFAIK I don't get with Excel or Open Office. The bigger the project the more likely multiple people will need to be able to edit the same file. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one. Just a thought.
  - pacaro 13y ago
    Some of the Microsoft Office suite have collaboration features (OneNote is good for this in my experience) I'm not sure about Excel As a developer I've often used Excel for modelling algorithms, as a log analysis tool (everything from plotting filtered log entries over time to creating complex pivot tables/charts) as a mathematical scratch pad Before twitter changed their auth protocol excel could be used as a pretty good twitter client[1], and it's still quite effective at web scraping the list goes on... [1] http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/02/05/twitter-from-excel/ http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/02/05/twitter-from-excel/
    - greggman 13y ago
      Those features are all available on spreadsheets in google docs. I use google docs as a mathematical scratch pad all the time. It also does graphs and it can be scripted in JavaScript. One of my friends wrote a script that downloads all the latest stock data every few minutes and does a bunch of analysis on it. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets I'm not suggesting you should give up Excel. Just pointing out the features you listed are available should you decide to take a look.
yeukhon 13y ago
Maybe it's just me. Google Docs seems hard to work with, espeically for someone who grew up with MS Office :( I give it a try a lot, but I still can't do everything I want with Google Docs. On the other hands, MS Office online is more complete (well, no duh)... and it isn't so much about privacy for me though. I am not a journalist; I don't have sensitive information I need to hide from others.
eropple 13y ago
I use (Mac) Excel for a niche but handy purpose: as an editor tool for the game I'm building. Tabular data files for my game are stored in the (easily parsed) Excel 2004 XML format. There aren't really any similar, generalizable tools that are more modder-friendly and I'm not going to sit there writing YAML/JSON/XML to fill in stuff like "this wooden sword costs 10 coins" because there are vastly better things to be doing with my time. I could use LibreOffice, as it supports Excel 2004 XML files, but Office is cheap enough and LibreOffice annoying enough that it's worth my time to just use the real thing rather than run the risk of a psychotic, gouge-my-eyes-out break from the still-horrible-in-2014 LibreOffice UX.
- greggman 13y ago
  I posted something below but, I've used Excel for that purpose too but with Google docs multiple people can edit at the same time. I've used that feature quite a bit. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one. If you're a tiny dev then yea, maybe Excel or OpenOffice, but as soon as your team gets bigger it seems like people are going to be waiting on each other to edit those excel files.
  - eropple 13y ago
    Google Docs requires an export step. This lives in git.
    - greggman 13y ago
      And Excel requires a save step. It also requires manually making sure 2 people don't edit the excel file because git won't be able to merge that changes. Google spreadsheets won't have that problem.
analog31 13y ago
Excel. I can live without all of the rest. It's not only a great tool for my own use, but it's widespread enough to be a de facto standard.

Silhouette 13y ago

Why would I want to install Open Office when I can access Google Docs from ANY machine, not just machines have have Open Office installed? Much larger feature set. Privacy. Robustness and future-proofing. Shall we go on? Do you find you need Office or Open Office still? Sure. I've never used word processors much for professional work, as I find different tools of one kind or another are usually a better choice for preparing any given documentation. But there is more to office suites than word processors. Spreadsheets, in particular, are still the most convenient tool for many administrative tasks.

bnolsen 13y ago
I always find gnumeric to be plenty powerful for doing any spreadsheet stuffs I need to do. No I don't get fancy, just mess with columns and formulae and statistical analysis.

pacaro 13y ago

Excel is a great tool for a developer.

greggman 13y ago
For what purpose? I've used Excel in the past for developer things but with Google Docs everyone can edit at the same time. I've used that feature as well which AFAIK I don't get with Excel or Open Office. The bigger the project the more likely multiple people will need to be able to edit the same file. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one. Just a thought.
- pacaro 13y ago
  Some of the Microsoft Office suite have collaboration features (OneNote is good for this in my experience) I'm not sure about Excel As a developer I've often used Excel for modelling algorithms, as a log analysis tool (everything from plotting filtered log entries over time to creating complex pivot tables/charts) as a mathematical scratch pad Before twitter changed their auth protocol excel could be used as a pretty good twitter client[1], and it's still quite effective at web scraping the list goes on... [1] http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/02/05/twitter-from-excel/ http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/02/05/twitter-from-excel/
  - greggman 13y ago
    Those features are all available on spreadsheets in google docs. I use google docs as a mathematical scratch pad all the time. It also does graphs and it can be scripted in JavaScript. One of my friends wrote a script that downloads all the latest stock data every few minutes and does a bunch of analysis on it. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets I'm not suggesting you should give up Excel. Just pointing out the features you listed are available should you decide to take a look.

yeukhon 13y ago

Maybe it's just me. Google Docs seems hard to work with, espeically for someone who grew up with MS Office :( I give it a try a lot, but I still can't do everything I want with Google Docs. On the other hands, MS Office online is more complete (well, no duh)... and it isn't so much about privacy for me though. I am not a journalist; I don't have sensitive information I need to hide from others.

eropple 13y ago

I use (Mac) Excel for a niche but handy purpose: as an editor tool for the game I'm building. Tabular data files for my game are stored in the (easily parsed) Excel 2004 XML format. There aren't really any similar, generalizable tools that are more modder-friendly and I'm not going to sit there writing YAML/JSON/XML to fill in stuff like "this wooden sword costs 10 coins" because there are vastly better things to be doing with my time. I could use LibreOffice, as it supports Excel 2004 XML files, but Office is cheap enough and LibreOffice annoying enough that it's worth my time to just use the real thing rather than run the risk of a psychotic, gouge-my-eyes-out break from the still-horrible-in-2014 LibreOffice UX.

greggman 13y ago
I posted something below but, I've used Excel for that purpose too but with Google docs multiple people can edit at the same time. I've used that feature quite a bit. It's easy to write a script to pull down the latest one. If you're a tiny dev then yea, maybe Excel or OpenOffice, but as soon as your team gets bigger it seems like people are going to be waiting on each other to edit those excel files.
- eropple 13y ago
  Google Docs requires an export step. This lives in git.
  - greggman 13y ago
    And Excel requires a save step. It also requires manually making sure 2 people don't edit the excel file because git won't be able to merge that changes. Google spreadsheets won't have that problem.

analog31 13y ago

Excel. I can live without all of the rest. It's not only a great tool for my own use, but it's widespread enough to be a de facto standard.