LibreOffice blasts OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in

Re:LibreOffice blasts OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft ... by vertnerd on Saturday February 21, 2026 @08:36AM (#47100711)

I am not an MS Office user, but I have seen the effect of format lock-in with Google Sheets. A few months back I began a project to de-Google my life, which went pretty smoothly until I tried to download my spouse's accounting spreadsheet from Google Sheets to Excel format. Both LibreOffice and Excel could open it, but nothing worked correctly. So for several months, I kept that one Google Sheet live until I could come up with an alternative. When I created the original file in Sheets, I was blindly using all sorts of features and capabilities (including Google Forms) that simply have no direct analog in other products.

A couple of days ago I bit the bullet and dug into the Excel file and figured out how to redesign everything and get it going again. Yay me. I'll admit I don't like the UI in LibreOffice, but I didn't like it very much when I first tried using it (as Star Office) back in the 90s either. Yet I keep coming back to it.

If I'm going to be locked into a format or app, I'd rather it be something like LibreOffice.

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Re:LibreOffice blasts OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft ... by maxloh on Saturday February 21, 2026 @09:06AM (#47100970)

Your use case (specifically with Forms) seems aligned with Grist, which is also open source and has been adopted by the French government.

In my experience, it’s much stricter than a standard spreadsheet though. It feels a bit like moving from Python to Java.

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Re:LibreOffice blasts OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft ... by 1e1a on Saturday February 21, 2026 @09:02AM (#47100939)

Did you try exporting it in the OpenDocument (.ods) format?

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