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Re:Microsoft's “Love” of Linux by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Thursday November 21, 2019 @01:10PM (#21597302)
Bug-for-bug? Nah. Just come up with something even remotely as productivity-enhancing as Excel is and you might have a shot. Fact is, people who think this already exists underestimate that powerhouse of productivity. It is possibly the most used programming environment on earth.
Re:Microsoft's “Love” of Linux by aseipp on Thursday November 21, 2019 @04:19PM (#21599748)
Here's my hot take, as a Linux distro developer with an Office356 sub: Excel is absolutely ridiculous and anyone who thinks anything in the FOSS world can compare or stand up to what Excel does is completely deluding themselves, and this is a major reason why Excel will never be replaced, or even touched, by FOSS solutions. PowerQuery is absolutely game changing (and no I will not accept "but you can cobble together awk and 5 other tools to run a preprocessing pipeline before opening your spreadsheet", that's not competition, it's a joke.)

I hate saying this considering how much LibreOffice, etc have invested -- but OTOH I imagine they understand their competition better than the average programmer who uses Office suites to track their month-to-month finances and thinks they've got it figured out.

There is the fact that actually challenging Excel as a product and implementing any competitor would technically require a substantial amount of labor and effort, on a very large scale. But that's just one part; the fact is that you can't actually win a battle unless you're willing to analyze where you've already lost. I think most FOSS users don't actually realize how badly they are losing to products like Office or even (the inferior, IMO) G-Suite. This isn't surprising in the grand scheme considering how much software freedom we've lost in the past few decades; it's just one more lost battle, but it still stings.

This isn't a situation that pleases me, but at the end of the day between an O365 family sub and the alternatives, it was very easy to make the choice given the returns I got.

Re:Microsoft's “Love” of Linux by philwelch on Thursday November 21, 2019 @06:41PM (#21600985)
TBF, depending on data size I’ve had much better results with awk and friends than with Excel.
Re:Microsoft's “Love” of Linux by CoolGuySteve on Thursday November 21, 2019 @01:23PM (#21597476)
Even Excel isn't as productivity enhancing as Excel is. Microsoft has been trying to get people into .net macros for years but a lot of places are still using VBA.