I find Calc to be quite complete and quite compatible with Excel files. I deal with way more Excel sheets than I would like to, but I can't remember the last time I ran into a problem with them.
Google Docs on the other hand is quite slow and lacks a lot of features and has the disadvantage of being browser based and a Google product.
differente incentives.
I guarantee the open source is not outperforming the 40bi company offering on the metric they care about: profit.
Likewise, nothing is outperforming the metric the open source project care about: developer (well, power user) satisfaction.
Much better experience than I expected, TBH. Will use it again, and probably default to LibreOffice Calc for single-user sheets.
As for Writer, one more problem is that it is sometimes simply unbearably ugly. Just scrolling through a pretty small document creates rendering artifacts everywhere and the font rendering tends to randomly switch between passable and horrendous. If you're lucky though and that doesn't happen for you, it's actually pretty usable (ignoring format compatibility, of course, but that's also MS's fault).
I cannot understand how anyone uses Excel with any nontrivial amount of CSV data without going mad...
I wholeheartedly agree. :-) Dealing with CSV was the main reason I had LibreOffice installed on my work laptop.
Example:
QUERY: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343
ARRAYFORMULA: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093275
ARRAYFORMULA: https://help.libreoffice.org/6.3/en-US/text/scalc/01/0406010....
I don't understand how QUERY is a "selfserving google feature". It allows you to write queries over spreadsheet data using a variant of SQL. Anybody else could implement the same idea.
It's not even close to as handy as QUERY (in ease of use or intuitiveness), but they also recently introduced FILTER[2]. Which can be used in combination with other functions to replicate a subset of QUERY use cases.
My pet list of functions that have me reaching for Sheets are the regex ones[3][4][5]. Excel's search and replace functions support basic wildcards[6], but anything more sophisticated than that quickly becomes infeasible, impractical, or impossible to replicate using Excel function built-ins and requires dropping writing into Javascript or VBA to write up a custom function.
That said, Excel has had a pretty nifty and powerful ETL tool hidden inside of it for the past ~7 years called Power Query[7]. This is essentially an entire app-within-an-app (and is a data processing engine in many Microsoft data products), complete with it's own programming language[8] and compressed columnar data store format. For anyone with a development background, you can easily ramp up on Power Query's language and do 90% of the work you need to do there, and obviate the need for complicated and fragile formulas to begin with.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/guidelines-and-ex...
[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/filter-function-f...
[3] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098244
[4] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098292
[5] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098245
[6] https://support.microsoft.com/en-ie/office/using-wildcard-ch...
[7] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/getting-started-w...
The thing is they were administration (Army, Home Office) and in the last decade a lot of the administration here dropped MS in favour of Libre for economic/political reasons.
And then, just a couple of months ago they dropped Libre and switched to mmm... OnlyOffice. There hasn't been much talk about it -compared to when switching to Libre- but it seems it was decided because they wanted a suite that was available via web but didn't want to go back to MS with O365 or use Google.
Microsoft has an entire ecosystem that works fairly well. It doesn't make much sense to just use libreoffice when Office just works and comes with the the rest of the pie you are eating.
I understood why when teams came out they said "okay stop using slack because we now get teams for free". They already have MS every-other-product and now they got another one at no extra cost.
At the same time, I've always wondered about the collision of office software with issues around decentralization versus centralization.
For instance, when I've thought about why I resort to the web-based suites, it's usually because of backup and collaboration. But when I think about it, there's no reason that you can't just specify some cloud-based automatic backup in a desktop app, and it's been puzzling to me that LibreOffice or someone similar doesn't try to integrate some kind of decentralized file sharing stuff like syncthing into the editing workflow. It just seems like there should be tractable ways to provide the same backup and collaboration services without having the software all sitting on MS (or Google) servers. Why not transfer the collaboration algorithms to some generic cloud server you specify, or in the context of decentralized storage?
With really large documents and lots of editors, the web suites in my experience can become unworkable. I personally think there's some big opportunities for something like LO or another open-source office suite to really shake things up in terms of decentralization features. Maybe I'm just missing things, but so far I haven't really seen them.
Google Docs is absolutely bloody useless at DOCX reading in every way, and messes up quite simple documents, but nobody ever raises this objection.
LO is really fantastically good at reading the fake standard called DOCX. In my experience, it handles it more consistently than MS Word - which is notoriously incompatible with other versions of itself.
Put it this way: I believe this class of objection when the objector links the LO bug, with a test document.
Sometimes. Online Word chokes on many things, and misses simple stuff like center aligned columns.
Did you have these fonts installed, or LO was forced to use substitutes with slightly different metric?
Just having identical fonts available is 99% of solving the layout problems.
Now that GDocs has become more popular and so people more and more are distributing presentations as PDFs I've also seen more people starting to use Impress. It's usage isn't widespread, but it's trending up.
Word and Excel? I don't see their dominance fading in my organization anytime in the foreseeable future.
I was thinking about the online version when I wrote my comment, as that is what I usually use. My point is that even the browser version is basically perfect, which is rare to see in web apps (including "electronized" ones).
Same thing can happen on Mac (Catalina bricking MacBooks via bad EFI update) or Linux (where do I start).
Basically, you have to pick your poison and a sysadmin that withholds updates until all SW apps and packages are tested thoroughly on the company devices before green-lighting the rollout.
Clicking Update each time you get a notification, has the risk of ending badly for your business no matter what OS you choose.
Not true, there are tons of ways in Linux where you can completely recover from a bad update. Either manual backups (even using tar works), BTRFS or ZFS, or something more fancy like NixOS (that I use).
I've had more bad updates with Windows when dabbling than using Linux/macOS full-time--but I'm willing to chalk that up to personal experience. What was annoying was they removed shortcut keys to access "safe mode" or "recovery mode." You now let Windows detect it had a failed boot (surprise, it didn't in my case).
Linux has way more options for updating. Unless you're updating the kernel you don't have to reboot (I believe there are ways around even that). You install the updates when logged in, so it's a normal reboot and you're not waiting longer. For large installs we booted straight off the network (PXE) which means unless you hit an undiscovered hardware or weird hardware config issue, you can test offline or rollback 100s of machines with a reboot.
In my uni, the computers booted over PXE and were often re-imaged, while mounting user files over the network. I imagine it is a rather common setup?
Anyway, since they had groups of similar hardware, software was thouroughly tested before any update was deployed to a given group. This was the case for Linux, and probably for windows as well.
This was a smallish university, with an IT staff of 3-4, mind you, so that's probably not too complex to deploy. There's probably turnkey solutions out there (Red Hat likely has something like this).
Linux makes sense in a company setting IMO, as companies can generally pick the machines their employees will use, so they can vet compatibility and software updates in advance. Of course, more moving parts (different HW/SW combinations) means more difficult testing.
I had updates in Windows take quite a long time to complete, even on SSDs, and in Windows you also can't update the system while running (it must be during reboot). And since you can't use the machine, this can be considered downtime too.
This sounds really paradoxical to me: granted Calc isn't Excel, but it has maybe 50% of the features when Google Doc has, I don't know, maybe 3% …
When doing basic things, you are almost always good with Calc, meanwhile Google Doc is like the most minimal spreadsheet you can get.
> Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel
Which sounds really BS when compared to Google Sheets, as the post that you replied already mentioned.
But yes, some "normal" tasks take a few clicks more than in MS Office when you're not used to it. The look&feel is really different and the UI still make this 90s-OSS-hardly-works impression - which is unjustified. On the other hand it is far more powerful than Google Docs and I can check in the files in git which is not an option for Google Docs. FWIW I think there's an online version of it as well now.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/from-microsoft-to-libreoffice-...
Well and my company does, but naturally biased as we're European (meaning, sending over lots of data to Microsoft is a bit more frowned upon) and produce open source software ourself.
The online collaboration aspect seems to be the killer feature. If I load Excel Online in a browser to edit a file together with someone else, that just works, and it handles simple use cases very well. I suppose the web version of Excel wouldn't deal with complex spreadsheets well, but complex MS Office files are also prone to fail in LibreOffice.
I continue to run LibreOffice because it does what I need, but seems like cloud office suites are now expected to be an option, and the FOSS options there seem to be way behind.
Having a full stable office suite like LibreOffice was probably the final reason I've switched to FreeBSD on my desktop, and haven't looked back.
Feel free to add any missing ones :)
Here, also nope. There are GDocs users, and then MS Office users (there is a tendency that GDocs users here are using the office suite for its relative ease of use while MS Office users do tend to use the bits that are relevant to their needs (for example, Excel automation and advanced formatting found in Word which is good enough to not justify spending more in InDesign and similar applications).
We have trialled LibreOffice before, but the results were dismal: even though LibreOffice (to its advantage) approaches Microsoft compatibility, we still experienced some minor bugs (were reported and subsequently fixed) and missing features (in the sense that PowerBI and others were providing, plus real-time collaboration which Microsoft has a decent solution) means that even considering and removing training costs from the computation, it would not justify changing from Microsoft Office (or even GDocs) to LibreOffice for us. Google has eaten the basics and Microsoft has eaten the advanced users (and R/Py/Julia for even more advanced users), so to speak.
I see these two as very different need and usage. Google Docs is for some basic cross department collaboration usage. Which is replaceable only by Office 365 online but not traditional Office itself.
With Office, 2007, 2010, 2013+ ( Anything beyond 2013 is far to new for most Enterprise upgrade and usage ). These group of user aren't going to be switching to anything.
I am willing to bet money there are Trillion dollar revenue today relying on Good old Excel SpreadSheet. From Small family business to large Investment firms using Excel to its limit. Which is working perfectly fine, DONT FUCKING TOUCH IT.
Even if LibreOffice promise 99.99% of Excel compatibility, are business and Enterprise willing to risk 0.01% of failure? For What? Ideology to not use anything from Microsoft? Or Supporting Open Source?
I have stated this before, the biggest lock-in Microsoft has might not be Windows, but Excel. Companies are more than willing to switch over to Mac as long as Microsoft Excel is on the platform. ( Which is also one reason why I see a slim possibilities of Microsoft one day open sourcing Windows Kernel )
We are a development consultancy, the sales people mostly used MS Office before the switch to Google.
Of which quite a few in the latter group think that proprietary software is for suckers.
https://www.tedxgeneva.net/talks/richard-stallman-free-softw...
> In my experience, everyone uses MS Office, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users.
At one job, I recommended OpenOffice for handling some very old files that were in a Lotus format Microsoft Office didn't support. I wouldn't call it gaining traction, but they installed at least one copy.
Google Docs is functionally pretty close to most of excel, but has significantly more restrictions in terms of row count.
Libre office misses key functionality available in the latest office releases last time I checked. Things like unique(), filter(), let() and more recently lamda() really do change the game.
Excel for this is significantly faster and more flexible than any other tool I’ve used.
Also transport data and models can often use many columns. Google Docs limit is actually the active cells used so this then reduces the row limit further.
If we receive data that is a few million rows on bigger formats, we will still use excel, just with PowerQuery / PowerPivot and using measures which works pretty well up to 10 million records or so.
Bigger than that and we will use PowerBI.
I have been using the free-but-not-opensource WPS Office for years, and it's great. Lightweight, featureful, works a lot better with Microsoft formats... no reason for me to ever touch LO again.
it's easy to forget, but even for document edition.. legacy can strike hard. My last bout at a court room they were using WordPerfect 12, due to coupling with its template system with the legal doc generator.
Nowadays I don't even have an office suite installed because of Google Docs
I have been impressed with Google's in-browser compatibility, but it isn't a replacement. It's just nice not to have to fire up Word or Excel and get a quick glance, if that's what I need.
After spending a fortune they ended up going back to Microsoft Office because it just worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LiMux&oldid=99256...
Also, it seems that they have now switched back to Linux again:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
I assume they'll make the same discovery as last time: It's not free as in free beer; they'll have to develop the missing pieces themselves if they want it to work.
Oh and did you actually read the links?
FYI: They are switching to Linux again. https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
When it's critical software that's required to get work done it's a legitimate complain. And that's why they were still running Windows in parallels years after "switching"
In my experience everyone uses MS Office or Google Docs, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users.
I'm sure the situation is different in other parts of the world, where saving on license cost is more important.
It's a bit of a shame that eg governments aren't switching en masse.
But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, and the incompatabilities of Writer with Word make it problematic.