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...
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.