5 ms·

Installing an "office suite" these days is becoming less and less of a need. I can only speak for myself, but online versions at Google, or Microsoft (to mentio

Installing an "office suite" these days is becoming less and less of a need. I can only speak for myself, but online versions at Google, or Microsoft (to mention two) are all I need.

mintplant 12y ago
Not sure if this has changed since then, but around a year ago, I was using Google Docs to collaborate with a few other people on a school project. I lost connection to the internet, and when I reconnected, Docs popped up with an error message telling me that something went wrong and I had to refresh. That was the only option, though: it disabled all controls and I couldn't copy off the work I'd done that didn't get saved. So, speaking for myself, I wouldn't trust these online office suites with my data or time. They also tend to lag more on lower-end hardware (I frequently use a netbook for notes, etc).
- Fastidious 12y ago
  I can't provide an answer on what happened to you, but I use Google Drive (which has word processing, spreadsheets, etc) extensibly. Any document created resides on Drive, instantly synchronized with my computer, autosaved on change. And I can edit it while offline. I had not had any problem, but that is not to say it is problem free.
ashkurko 12y ago
Here is online version of LibreOffice: https://www.rollapp.com/libreoffice https://www.rollapp.com/libreoffice, so you can check ver. 4.4 out without installing. BTW cloud version of LO is quite popular among Chromebook users.
- Fastidious 12y ago
  Interesting, thanks for the link! Google implementation of an office suite is very popular at middle, high school, and online universities (even though most of them offer the free Office365).
- pacofvf 12y ago
  how it works? looks like a VNC .
  - dmalenko 12y ago
    All remote application access technologies are similar to a certain extent. It is similar to VNC in the way image of application is captured, but does much more than simply showing content of the frame buffer on the client.
- randomchars 12y ago
  Unfortunately this is too slow to be usable even on a very fast internet connection.
spain 12y ago
I still prefer LibreOffice to cloud document editors because it has better support for writing in Finnish through plugins like Voikko (for proofreading and the like). I would assume this also applies to a few other languages.
jeffreyrogers 12y ago
For spreadsheets you pretty much need Excel or Calc (the LibreOffice equivalent). I'm not aware of any cloud based solution that comes close. For text documents though I agree with you.
- cmrx64 12y ago
  I agree. Every time I go to use Google's spreadsheet app, I'm sorely disappointed and crawl back to Calc, which is acceptable.
  - ufmace 12y ago
    What features do you need that it lacks? I've found GSheets good enough to satisfy all of my personal spreadsheet needs so far. The only real deal-breaker level annoyance I've found with any of the Drive apps so far is that whatever Javascript the writer one is using eats up enough CPU power to drop my Macbook's battery life to about a quarter of what it normally is.
  - foxylad 12y ago
    I remember discovering pivot tables in Excel way back when, and thinking that was a really useful tool. I was amazed to find that Google Sheets could do this too, and to me that marked it's promotion to my first choice for spreadsheet work. I'm not a power user, but I'd say Google Sheets are good enough for almost all of us. Google Write, not so much.
- davidgerard 12y ago
  People complain about LO and random .docx files, but LO's rendering is superlative compared to the hash GApps makes of them.
  - thrownaway122 12y ago
    I suspect that this is because people have different standards for software installed on their computer compared to web apps. They expect the software installed on their computer to do what their old software did (as a drop in replacement) whilst the web app is a gimmick (too many people) and is only used to produce new documents.
Silhouette 12y ago
I can similarly only speak for myself, or perhaps myself and my colleagues in this case, but our experience with Google's on-line suite has been less happy. As a handy collaborative text editor with some basic formatting, it's fine. For longer documents, technical documents, anything that needs professional levels of review and revision control, or basically any other "serious" work, it's not even entry-level. Likewise if you want to share some tables with light formatting and maybe some simple calculations, the on-line spreadsheets are fine. However, anyone who does significant number crunching using a real spreadsheet isn't going to last five minutes. In short, if you find the real-time collaboration useful and need only very simple formatting and manipulation, these on-line suites are fine (and of course this probably does cover a fair amount of useful work). If you need anything more sophisticated, they aren't really competing with the heavyweight desktop applications at all.
shmerl 12y ago
I didn't find anything for charting for example. I'm using Calligra Flow for that which feels way more usable than LibreOffice Draw.
emodendroket 12y ago
Well, sure, if you never do anything serious it's fine.
davidgerard 12y ago
We use Google Apps at work. I frequently find myself needing a better word processor or spreadsheet than the anaemic versions included in GApps. But then again, I'm the sort of user who runs LO on Linux compiled from git master just because I can ;-)

Installing an "office suite" these days is becoming less and less of a need. I can only speak for myself, but online versions at Google, or Microsoft (to mention two) are all I need.

mintplant 12y ago

Not sure if this has changed since then, but around a year ago, I was using Google Docs to collaborate with a few other people on a school project. I lost connection to the internet, and when I reconnected, Docs popped up with an error message telling me that something went wrong and I had to refresh. That was the only option, though: it disabled all controls and I couldn't copy off the work I'd done that didn't get saved. So, speaking for myself, I wouldn't trust these online office suites with my data or time. They also tend to lag more on lower-end hardware (I frequently use a netbook for notes, etc).

Fastidious 12y ago
I can't provide an answer on what happened to you, but I use Google Drive (which has word processing, spreadsheets, etc) extensibly. Any document created resides on Drive, instantly synchronized with my computer, autosaved on change. And I can edit it while offline. I had not had any problem, but that is not to say it is problem free.

ashkurko 12y ago

Here is online version of LibreOffice: https://www.rollapp.com/libreoffice https://www.rollapp.com/libreoffice, so you can check ver. 4.4 out without installing. BTW cloud version of LO is quite popular among Chromebook users.

Fastidious 12y ago
Interesting, thanks for the link! Google implementation of an office suite is very popular at middle, high school, and online universities (even though most of them offer the free Office365).
pacofvf 12y ago
how it works? looks like a VNC .
- dmalenko 12y ago
  All remote application access technologies are similar to a certain extent. It is similar to VNC in the way image of application is captured, but does much more than simply showing content of the frame buffer on the client.
randomchars 12y ago
Unfortunately this is too slow to be usable even on a very fast internet connection.

spain 12y ago

I still prefer LibreOffice to cloud document editors because it has better support for writing in Finnish through plugins like Voikko (for proofreading and the like). I would assume this also applies to a few other languages.

jeffreyrogers 12y ago

For spreadsheets you pretty much need Excel or Calc (the LibreOffice equivalent). I'm not aware of any cloud based solution that comes close. For text documents though I agree with you.

cmrx64 12y ago
I agree. Every time I go to use Google's spreadsheet app, I'm sorely disappointed and crawl back to Calc, which is acceptable.
- ufmace 12y ago
  What features do you need that it lacks? I've found GSheets good enough to satisfy all of my personal spreadsheet needs so far. The only real deal-breaker level annoyance I've found with any of the Drive apps so far is that whatever Javascript the writer one is using eats up enough CPU power to drop my Macbook's battery life to about a quarter of what it normally is.
- foxylad 12y ago
  I remember discovering pivot tables in Excel way back when, and thinking that was a really useful tool. I was amazed to find that Google Sheets could do this too, and to me that marked it's promotion to my first choice for spreadsheet work. I'm not a power user, but I'd say Google Sheets are good enough for almost all of us. Google Write, not so much.
davidgerard 12y ago
People complain about LO and random .docx files, but LO's rendering is superlative compared to the hash GApps makes of them.
- thrownaway122 12y ago
  I suspect that this is because people have different standards for software installed on their computer compared to web apps. They expect the software installed on their computer to do what their old software did (as a drop in replacement) whilst the web app is a gimmick (too many people) and is only used to produce new documents.

Silhouette 12y ago

I can similarly only speak for myself, or perhaps myself and my colleagues in this case, but our experience with Google's on-line suite has been less happy. As a handy collaborative text editor with some basic formatting, it's fine. For longer documents, technical documents, anything that needs professional levels of review and revision control, or basically any other "serious" work, it's not even entry-level. Likewise if you want to share some tables with light formatting and maybe some simple calculations, the on-line spreadsheets are fine. However, anyone who does significant number crunching using a real spreadsheet isn't going to last five minutes. In short, if you find the real-time collaboration useful and need only very simple formatting and manipulation, these on-line suites are fine (and of course this probably does cover a fair amount of useful work). If you need anything more sophisticated, they aren't really competing with the heavyweight desktop applications at all.

shmerl 12y ago

I didn't find anything for charting for example. I'm using Calligra Flow for that which feels way more usable than LibreOffice Draw.

emodendroket 12y ago

Well, sure, if you never do anything serious it's fine.

davidgerard 12y ago

We use Google Apps at work. I frequently find myself needing a better word processor or spreadsheet than the anaemic versions included in GApps. But then again, I'm the sort of user who runs LO on Linux compiled from git master just because I can ;-)