
Bye Bye Microsoft Office, Hello LibreOffice - StuntPope
https://easydns.com/blog/2019/11/25/bye-bye-microsoft-office-hello-libreoffice/
======
trthatcher
Excel is a piece of software that I would absolutely not hesitate to pay
for... but I'm unfortunately stuck with LibreOffice.

I used to work in an insurance company on an actuarial pricing team where the
preferred tool was Excel (the modelling was pretty simple). Needless to say, I
became very accustomed to and adept with using Excel. We definitely pushed the
limits... but what was nice was being able to grab 600K records (maybe 20
cols) from a DB, throw it in Excel and get some results in a matter of
minutes. You might have to wait a few seconds based on what you were trying to
do, but Excel could handle it.

At home I run Linux... where there is no Excel, so I use LibreOffice instead.
Just a few days ago I was poking around the Himalayan Database[1] and one of
the tables has about 50K records. LibreOffice absolutely chokes when I try to
do any filtering or calculations. As well, the pivot tables in Excel are in a
totally different league than LibreOffice in terms performance and
flexibility. It's unfortunate because I try to support OSS as much as
possible... but LibreOffice is just so painful.

You could argue that I'm using the wrong tool for the job. Ultimately, I do
throw it in SQLite or Pandas, but Excel is just so nice for ad hocs if it fits
in memory.

[1] [https://www.himalayandatabase.com/](https://www.himalayandatabase.com/)

~~~
noja
Why is that? Nobody ready to improve LibreOffice Calc? Calc is not good enough
to start improving on?

Do we need a list of missing features? I would also add:

* Copy paste from Writer does not work

* Summing a column (not a range) isn't possible

* Type detection is not as good

* Auto-update doesn't work at all

~~~
gerdesj
I've just pasted some data from Writer into Calc.

Could you elaborate on your column summation problem please. =sum(E:E) works
as does the summation button.

Don't understand your third point but if it is text vs numbers and dates etc
then I've had plenty of fun with this in Excel as well over the decades.

Auto-update - please elaborate where it fails

~~~
noja
_I 've just pasted some data from Writer into Calc._

Try to paste a table from Writer into Calc so that the structure is converted
to rows and columns (like Word and Excel does).

 _Could you elaborate on your column summation problem please. =sum(E:E) works
as does the summation button._

~I get Err:522 when I run =SUM(E:E)~

It works!

 _Don 't understand your third point but if it is text vs numbers and dates
etc then I've had plenty of fun with this in Excel as well over the decades._

Me too. It's annoying in Excel, but worse in Calc.

 _Auto-update - please elaborate where it fails_

The built-in auto-updater doesn't so much fail, as hasn't ever worked at all
(Mac, but I think Windows as well). iirc I get a %%PERCENT%% placeholder
sometimes, and the rest of the time I have to download the update from the
website instead. Same on several machines.

~~~
gerdesj
I can paste a table into Calc OK. It was a simple effort with a,b,c,d in row 1
and 1,2,3,4 in row 2. The numbers came in as numbers OK. Paste as unformatted
text is rubbish (single column of data) and I think I might file a bug for
that.

Sorry, I get you now about auto updater - software updater not [Google: Excel
auto-updater]. That's not really a thing on Linux because when you update the
system, the whole thing updates - apps and all.

The pace of development in LO is absolutely amazing but there _are_ some
horrendous bugs with near immortality status. If you can put up with them then
use it. No software is perfect but LO is moving at increasing speed towards
the light.

------
lilott8
Excel is the most widely used domain-specific language -- maybe even widely
used "programming language" (if I'm painting with a broad brush, though it is
turing complete) used to date. Getting people off, when a company's livelihood
is literally at stake, is no small ask. Solve this problem and you'd be a
bajillionare (official title).

I scan the comments and see a few anecdotal comments about how life is just
fine with LO. But as many other comments point out: it's not the one-offs that
make this hard, it's the fact that excel is the de-facto information exchange
between people, businesses, and boards. To be a broken record: it's too
ingrained.

~~~
screye
The CS industry doesn't understand that the rest of the non-CS world runs on
tools the employees learn once and never look back.

Coming from engineering, CS people never seemed to understand why someone used
Matlab at all, when python existed or even the utility of 'R'/'Stata'.

The effort needed to onboard onto a programming/mathematical/computational
tool, when you don't have a strong coding background to go with it, is
extremely high. The users will hold on to them till their dying breath,
because the is tied to more than 50% of their own value proposition.

Excel is the epitome of this phenomenon.

Also, excel is straight up a good tool. The only advantage of Libre office is
the price, which is a non-factor for any major corp. Google's collaboration
suite is better, but they lag behind in every other area.

I can see windows being completely replaced by competitor, but Office will
stay. It is MSFT's stickiest product.

~~~
normalnorm
> onboard onto

Another way to say this is: "learn".

~~~
jgamman
i think 'onboard' might refer to the wider context of using a tool in say, a
research group. it's not just you learning the tool, it's about how the group
uses the tool and the historical developments in place.

~~~
normalnorm
It's just a tech business language mannerism. People use it for the same
reasons they use "price point" instead of "price", or "usecase" instead of
"use", or "form factor" instead of "size": to show that they belong to the
tribe, and to sound clever while saying something that could be expressed more
simply and elegantly. The jargon adds nothing, except cringe.

------
chadash
Software engineers opining on Excel vs LibreOffice strikes me as pretty funny.
Imagine someone who programs sporadically asking why anyone would pay for
intelliJ or Visual Studio.

Even if Excel is just marginally better than LibreOffice, if you use it day
after day to do your job, the $150/year cost is basically nothing (especially
when enterprise software that does a lot less can routinely charge
$1000/user/year). Meanwhile, It Just Works™. Plus, it's a huge pain to learn
something new or deal with the aggravation of compatibility issues. Any
LibreOffice document will tend to open up nicely in Word or Excel because
otherwise, it's worthless if you want to share it with others. But the
opposite definitely isn't true.

~~~
robocat
> the $150/year cost is basically nothing

The cost is a lot higher for Linux developers - you also need a Windows
licence and to spend significant time managing a VM (I did that, no more).

I boot Linux for my dev machine (because Windows costs me more time).

I actually like Excel.

(Word and Outlook are toxic waste as far as I am concerned: they frustrate me
more than they serve me).

~~~
brmgb
> Word and Outlook are toxic waste as far as I am concerned: they frustrate me
> more than they serve me.

This opinion is largely shared even in the non technical world.

Outlook is _a lot_ better than Lotus but it suffers from the comparaison with
Gmail. Powerful search was a game changer for me and I miss it dearly since my
company decided to switch to Office 365.

Excel and Powerpoint really are the two gems of Microsoft Office.

~~~
EricE
Search? Gmail didn't even index attachments until recently. Give me a break -
Gmail is a joke. Never thought I would pine for Outlook but here I am :/

------
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
One of the reasons why I don't use LibreOffice is completely broken kerning:
[https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103322](https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103322)

~~~
octosphere
Any other show stopping bugs you have encountered? I'm thinking of making the
switch myself, but I hear nothing but anecdotes of people having a bad time
getting proprietary Microsoft Office _.docx_ files to play nice in LibreOffice

~~~
itronitron
I used LibreOffice at work for two years (on linux) and it was good for most
things, I used the powerpoint equivalent and it's definitely under-powered
compared to MS but probably fine for 95% of people.

I also did the MS 360 thing once about 3 years ago and will _never_ do that
again.

~~~
metters
> I also did the MS 360 thing once about 3 years ago and will never do that
> again.

What happened or was the key issue?

~~~
itronitron
The main criticism I have is the requirement to create an 'account' and then
having it 'phone home' every time one of the Office applications starts. This
is totally unnecessary as annual licensing for desktop applications was worked
out decades ago. The date for when the license expires is not displayed,
unlike most annually licensed desktop applications so when it does expire is
usually a surprise.

To make matters worse MS office applications _always_ default to saving files
to cloud based storage despite my _always_ picking a local drive to save
files. There is noticeable lag while the file explorer tries to access cloud
storage despite it never being intentionally used.

------
ape4
A company paying millions for Microsoft Office would probably get better value
if they paid some LibreOffice developers to fix the issues. Or just switched
to use ODF format.

~~~
Bombthecat
Munich tried that and failed. To many plug-ins, addins, macros etc etc etc...

~~~
sleepless
MS made a deal, to keep german headquarters in Munich. The price for that was
to kill Limux. Sad story actually and doesn't put the responsible politicians
in the best light. But in Bavaria the political party CSU is known to be
susceptible to ideas from the industrial lobby.

Here's a recent interview with Christian Ude who was mayor when LiMux was
introduced (german): [https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-
zurueck...](https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck-es-
gab-bei-limux-keine-unloesbaren-probleme-1911-144917.html)

~~~
weinzierl
> Here's a recent interview with Christian Ude[...]

This is a really interesting interview, unfortunately it is only available in
German so I translated (with the help of deepl) the part about the situation
right after the switch.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Linux-Magazin: How big was the pressure afterwards?

[...]

Christian Ude: The most intense thing I personally experienced was a visit
from Steve Ballmer, after all Vice President of Microsoft. He interrupted his
skiing holiday in Switzerland to visit me. With his well-known enthusiasm,
with which he dynamically jumps around on stage at conferences, he jumped
around in my office and first of all praised the beauty of Munich. But then he
said that I was making a catastrophic decision that I could never justify to
anyone, especially not to a taxpayer.

Funnily enough, he constantly made new financial offers during the
conversation, he talked about what Microsoft would add for free, for the
school department for example. On and on he reduced the price, one million and
a another million and a another million and a dozen million cheaper than
before. This is how important Munich - which is internationally perceived as
an IT center - was to Microsoft as a symbol.

Would [Munich] walk a new path or repentantly return into Microsoft's lap? We
have calculated that Ballmer has improved the financial offer by around 35 per
cent. But since we wanted to make a strategic decision and not just make a
price comparison, this was not important to us.

Linux-Magazin: Bill Gates also came to visit?

Christian Ude: He was in Munich because of a presentation of the _" House of
the Future"_, which inspired him insanely. With it, you could determine from
your car how high the room temperature in each room is and whether the
refrigerator should defrost a bit. On his way back to the airport I had the
opportunity to talk to him. So I sat together with one of the richest men in
the world in a camouflaged van, which was luxuriously equipped inside, but
looked from the outside as if it belonged to a small craft business. Gates
asked me stunned: "Why are you doing this? That's absurd! That's
incomprehensible!

Now that I'm not the hard-boiled IT specialist who could stand up to a Bill
Gates in every detail, I just said:

 _" Please note, we're all about independence. We don't want to be
dependent."_

Then he said, _" That's nonsense, who do you depend on?"_

 _" Now that you are here [I can tell you]: From you, of course!"_

That really made him collapse, and he said: _" It's incomprehensible to me,
it's ideology"_.

------
bernierocks
I made the switch to libreoffice a few years back. For simple word documents,
it works well.

It breaks down when you are using something like Excel with complex
macros/calculations. This is why most companies continue to use Microsoft
products.

~~~
diffeomorphism
> It breaks down when you are using something like Excel with complex
> macros/calculations.

As in compatibility with MS Office breaks or as in it can't be done in
libreoffice?

For example, if I understand it correctly libreoffice supports javascript,
python, beanshell and libreoffice basic for scripting and additionally offers
non-complete support for VBA.

Does MS Office "break" when you try to import "complex macros/calculations"
done in python?

~~~
wil421
The megacorp I work for has 40k people. There’s probably more people who can
write Macros for excel than know JavaScript or Python (or who are willing to
learn either). I’ve met business people who are masters of excel who’ve been
using it since the 90s. Asking a huge amount of non-tech people to switch is
extremely hard, much harder to convince them to use a new scripting language.

~~~
diffeomorphism
Sure, that is a perfectly valid point. However, I think that "libreoffice
breaks" says something quite different than "MS Office's VBA has bad
compatibility with anything but MS Office and thus provides very strong lock-
in".

Out of interest, is there any non-MS office suite with better VBA
compatibility than libreoffice? For instance in view to the whole Adobe
Venezuela story.

------
Scoundreller
I setup LibreOffice on my mother-in-law’s new computer and gave it the MS Word
icon.

No calls yet...

~~~
soperj
Used to do that on my mom's computer, but it was firefox with the ie icon.
Never heard a word. Tried it with my grandpa's computer and he was furious, I
asked him how he knew and he said it was completely different, everything had
totally changed. Naturally I was wondering what he was talking about, since
they seemed like a drop in replacement at the time, what could possibly be so
different. Turns out it was the menu where you could increase the font size
which he used multiple times a day. Things you don't think of.

side note: as soon as I showed him he didn't have to go into the menu at all
any more and could just use the plus and minus keys on his keyboard he was
thrilled with the change.

~~~
asdfman123
My dad is actually pretty smart and is decent with computers for a guy in his
70s, but he refuses to move from IE to Chrome just because he's more
comfortable with IE's bookmark system and he doesn't want to bother learning
it in Chrome.

Stuff we care about, like better load times and a cleaner interface, doesn't
matter to him.

~~~
Scoundreller
Heh, reminds me of when I changed people’s CRTs from 60hz to 85... and they
don’t even notice the difference.

How ??????

~~~
mjhagen
I did the same with changing to the native resolution of the LCD panel, people
never noticed the suddenly crisp pixels...

------
Someone1234
As an aside I really feel like LibreOffice had a lot of momentum back in the
day, but when the whole OpenOffice/LibreOffice debacle occurred due to the
Oracle purchase, the confusion of the branch (into LibreOffice and Apache
OpenOffice) just pulled the rug out.

That combined with lack of innovative/unique features and a UI that is
essentially unchanged since Office 95, and it is hard to argue why someone
should use LO/OO instead of MSO. For example, what is the USP? Free is one,
but is that the only one?

~~~
raxxorrax
Office 365 feels like a cheap beta test even on the biannual channels.

If not for corp legacy apps that mostly interface with outlook through old,
partly deprecated and arcane APIs, a switch to anything could occur.

At home I use LO exclusively, even though I have the licences for MSO.

And the interface doesn't even hold anything against LibreOffice. The
categories are completely random. Excel has some nice pivot visualization
functions, but that is the only positive thing I can come up with when
thinking of MS office.

I don't need office software to be that innovative, because the problem space
hasn't evolved since 20 years. And if autosave is one of those innovative
features...

~~~
Someone1234
> I don't need office software to be that innovative, because the problem
> space hasn't evolved since 20 years.

Workflows evolve all the time. For example how many word processor competitors
that target specific demographics are there (technical writing e.g. Markdown,
authors e.g. Scrivener/Storyist, academics e.g. LaTeX, etc)? The problem space
is evolving every day, LO/OO and even MSO haven't kept pace, but that doesn't
mean things have remained static around them.

------
xioxox
I wish I could use LibreOffice, but as a scientist the PowerPoint clone is
awful. Editing and importing PowerPoint is very buggy and clunky. For example,
sometimes bits of slides become uneditable. Also, the default kerning and anti
aliasing is pretty poor.

~~~
gcthomas
I thought that Latex/Beamer was a default amongst certain scientific
disciplines?

~~~
na85
Perhaps in comp sci but my experience in the mechanical/aerospace engineering
field has been that most people have never even heard of latex or beamer.

------
emsign
The Document Foundation should stop chasing the idea that LibreOffice can be a
replacement for MS Office. They will never achieve that goal. Apart from home
users and maybe small NGOs, every business and major organization in the
entire world uses Office.

So it makes no sense to develop a software for people who will never use it
anyway, instead make it nice make it perfect for the home users' use cases.
All the advanced feature like DB integration, scripting, etc. probably have so
many underreported bugs because nobody uses them.

I would love to use an office suite that is FOSS and does what I need
perfectly. Yet, I don't need most of LibreOffice's functionality at home, and
the functionality I do need it does poorly compared to MS Office at work.

~~~
gpresot
I agree. A simple to use software, that does very well the things you need for
personal / home ( & very small businesses) use (family/personal business
budget, lists, calendars, small inventories...). With a large library of well
designed, elegant templates. For LibreOffice ( and many other FOSS packages,
really) many more contributors should focus on how things look and feel,
rather than how many things the software can do... More Airtable than Excel.

------
galkk
On my work I use Linux as a desktop and LibreOffice Calc just plain sucks.

I needed to do process some CSVs and it crashed several times on simple
operations such as delete column, reorder, filter. Assuming that LibreOffice
can compete with MS Office is just wishful thinking of someone who doesn't try
to do anything remotely complex.

------
mark_l_watson
I used to be a big fan of Open Office and Libretto Office but with Microsoft’s
support of more open data formats, and their best deal ever of $99/year for a
family plan for Office 365, I have switched sides. I write my books using
markdown and LeanPub but everything else is Office 365.

~~~
tenebrisalietum
You used to be able to buy Office for a one-time purchase and not have to pay
yearly. So how is this their best deal ever? Tbf, if this includes OneDrive
you are getting more than just an office suite.

Also would be interested in more details on why you like Microsoft Office
better than the other two.

~~~
signal11
Indeed the offering is more than an Office Suite. You + 5 family members
_each_ get

* Office Apps -- install wherever you want, including on web, iOS, Android and Android-capable Chromebooks to get native apps on Chromebook. You can install on as many devices as you want, around 5 per-person can be in use at the same time

* 1TB OneDrive storage (clients on Mac/Win/Web only sadly, no Linux client yet)

* 50GB Outlook ad-free email storage

* Bring your own custom domain to get @my-family.tld email for your family

* Priority phone support

All in all, for families it's a good offering that competes really well with
Google One (one.google.com) -- quite irritating that Google One still doesn't
offer that custom domain thing. The 50GB ad-free email per family member is a
great offer for instance. All of this for about $100/yr, less with the
revamped Home Use Program.

~~~
mark_l_watson
When did they add custom domain names for email? Do you get that in the
$99/year family plan?

~~~
signal11
Not sure when they added it, but you do get it with[1] the $99/year plan. It's
a more restricted version of a feature they used to support with Outlook
Premium in the past, in that the domain _has_ to be hosted with GoDaddy for
now.

[1] [https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/get-a-
personalized-...](https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/get-a-personalized-
email-address-in-office-365-75416a58-b225-4c02-8c07-8979403b427b)

------
Spearchucker
This blog post addresses two issues - cost and support. There are a few more
that are more important to me and why I won't move to LO. Which I was forced
to use for almost a year a year ago -

In order of importance (to me) :

● Document format

● Keyboard shortcuts

● Stability

● The ribbon

● Screen layout

● Power Point. Just... all of it.

Libre Office feels like Notepad.exe with a VB6 UI.

------
29athrowaway
SoftMaker Office (or the free version FreeOffice) is, in my opinion, better
than LibreOffice.

Never liked LibreOffice/OpenOffice/StarOffice. I respect the work behind it,
but as a product I don't like it.

And using MS Office just contributes to the de-facto monopoly problem. Corel
used to have a nice Office suite for Linux but after MS bought them Linux
support was dropped.

------
ratiolat
I've used OpenOffice in the past (since 2005-ish), switched to Libreoffice
when it came out. During the same time I used Microsoft Office at work. About
a year ago I changed my job and now I get to use macOS.

Some huuuge surprises: 1\. libreoffice unfortunately is really slow on macos
with retina display. 2\. The web version of excel does not hold a candle to
Google sheets. 3\. Excel for windows is not interoperable with macos. Eg: have
data in one sheet in excel, create a separate sheet with pivotable from first
sheet. Open the file on macos's excel and it will complain that this usage of
data sources is not availabale on macos. I thought it was a funky excel file
but no. Easily repeatable with very simple cases.

Also, styles management in libreoffice writer is many times easier and
understandable than in microsoft word.

------
larrik
On my new PC I would often forget to install office. Then when I needed it all
of a sudden in a rush, I used to stick the Office CD in, start the install
process, get frustrated, download Open/LibreOffice, install it, use it, be
done, and then watch the Office installer finally finish long after I needed
it...

I used to blame LibreOffice for how mangled Word docs looked, but then I used
Office365 and realized that there's no such things as the "right" way to
display a word doc, since all of the machines I opened it on using Word365
showed it differently...

Unlike another commentator, Calc was way better than Excel for a long time,
and much better about not trashing your work. Before like 2010 Excel would
make it very easy to accidentally lose your work forever.

~~~
Joeboy
> I used to blame LibreOffice for how mangled Word docs looked, but then I
> used Office365 and realized that there's no such things as the "right" way
> to display a word doc, since all of the machines I opened it on using
> Word365 showed it differently...

Probably due to missing fonts being replaced by whatever's available on the
machine. Different fonts can have wildly different sizes / metrics.

------
johnminter
I have a current Office 365 license. I ran into a problem trying to open some
old Excel files from a project I did in 1999 and 2000. These workbooks
contained some valid VBA modules I had written. Excel's security model would
not let me open the files, nor was I able to overide even though I knew they
were fine. Finally, I opened them in Libre Office and saved in the current
format.

I have migrated the vast majority of my computational work to use R with
RStudio. In a Rmarkdown document I can embed R and Pyhon code and generate
plots. These documents play well with version control.

------
jlelse
I like LibreOffice a lot and it's my office suite of choice. The only thing
I'm missing is an alternative to OneNote.

------
mickotron
I have been using LO exclusively on my personal machines for years now. I have
somewhat limited use cases, I wouldn't be a "Power" productivity app user, but
it has been refreshing. Sure there are differences, and quirks, but overall I
find I am fighting with the software far less and just getting work done. Once
you know the little issues you work around them, easy. They aren't a deal-
breaker for me.

For me it was also the transition from paid version to subscription that made
me switch full time to LO. It seemed like a negative value proposition to me.
Plus Open Source advocates need to practice what we preach. If you want others
to use it, you better damn well be using it too, and be ready to recommend it
from experience and not ideology. Because we are biased with our ideology
toward open source, while users just want convenience and features. Completely
different requirements.

------
fencepost
I'm confused about what he was actually trying to purchase for $319. Office
Home and Business which includes Mac support lists at $249, and the other
Office Products like Standard and Professional / Professional Plus I think are
only available through volume license agreements which has its own whole
separate set of issues.

Update: Office Mac Standard is more, though it's not entirely clear to me why
you'd be buying it - does it contain features not in H&B? H&B is licensed for
business use.

The other thing that you're paying for with a lot of the Office 365
subscription plans is online storage and added services. On the Windows side
for personal use Office 365 gets you a terabyte (or up to five terabytes) for
about the same cost as Dropbox and you got a free office suite with it.

------
gls2ro
In case someone from LibreOffice reads comments here (or someone with enough
knowledge/time to contribute), I would write here a little bit of feedback
about the first time experience of the website.

This is because I interacted a lot with open source projects and I really
think that they should quit the concept: "Use us because we are open source"
when addressing general public.

Seems to me that in open source there is an aversion against product
marketing, but if we want more people to use open source then we should try to
convince them to use it because of the value they offer and not because of the
group who is building the tools. It is a good starting point to ask people to
use one's software because of your group value. But then, when wanting to get
after a wider market adoption, one should try to talk about the value it
brings to users lives.

So here are some points:

\- There are no screenshots of how the apps look like when opening the
website. After a couple of tries, I finally saw Screenshots in the Discovery
menu. But really coming from Office and Apple's iWork I was really trying to
see how LibreOffice looks like.

\- There are no texts trying to explain to me, the user, why I should use
LibreOffice in my own life, to solve my own problems. There is a small
paragraph saying "Do more - easier, quicker, smarter" but that is hardly
believable as almost every product wants me to do more, easier, quicker and
smarter. Also it is not clear _how_ LibreOffice is doing that.

\- The only point in the whole homepage which could bring value to an end user
is about "Free" but for the wide market "free" is not enough. It is just the
starting point.

\- The look and feel of the website suggests old tools. This is not a bad or
good thing per se. But I think to attract new users the website should be
redesigned so that the product transmit the idea of polished or ready to be
used.

Please do not take this a a critique. It is because I care that I feel to say
what I think and hope that someone will pick it up.

~~~
htietze
Thanks a lot. We started to redesign the website and you input is very much
appreciated and will be implemented, hopefully. Would be good to join one of
the mailing lists for those discussions...

------
FpUser
I'd switched first to whatever later became WPS Office and then to FreeOffice.
So far no problems but then of course as a proper dumbo I am probably using 1%
of the features available so it is hard for me to judge which tool is really
superior for advanced public.

------
vpmpaul
All fine and well but at the end of the day I've tried to convert real world
(non SV) companies and issues like people finding a 10yo macro that won't work
on libreoffice is just too much in the cost column to outweigh the benefit of
paying for MS office.

------
wyck
What a ridiculous article. Nothing comparing the actual feature set and
differant professional use cases.

If easydns is writing shallow blog fodder like this, should I expect the same
thing from thier actual product line?

~~~
fghtr
>> comparing the actual feature set

Here you go:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites)

~~~
wyck
That's not the point, I was commenting on the article.

~~~
fghtr
My point is that you do not need to write again what is written in Wikipedia.
You better go improve the latter.

------
jenscow
> I took the $319 I was about to spend on an Office license and I donated it
> to the LibreOffice project, and will just continue to do so every time I
> have to go through this process.

This.

Generally, I get much more value from OSS than commercial. I donate - not
mostly because it's the "right thing", but because I want it to continue.

If you write OSS, and would like something in return, consider this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863901](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863901)

------
tomaszs
Am using Open Office and Libre Office for 8 years after i switched from MS
Office. Enjoying everything is in the same place and works fast. No regrets

------
nkkollaw
I don't understand why people keep comparing LibreOffice to Microsoft Office,
or—God forbid—GIMP with Photoshop.

Sure, my mom will have a great time writing recipes on it and will save
$10/mo., but can anyone do any real work that you'd do in Excel? Let's be
realistic.

Also, does no one care about design? LibreOffice's interface looks awful on
all platforms, and stuck in the 90s. Same with GIMP.

~~~
jolmg
> but can anyone do any real work that you'd do in Excel? Let's be realistic

At my company, they do. They're not particularly tech-savvy users either.

> does no one care about design? LibreOffice's interface looks awful

Design isn't about looking pretty; it's about being usable. What's wrong with
LibreOffice's and Gimp's design?

~~~
nkkollaw
Gimp and LibreOffice are usable?

Fonts are so broken on Linux—which is the platform that would need this the
most—that you can barely select dropdown options if you're on a hidpi monitor.

~~~
nulbyte
Daily Linux user, here, on a run-of-the-mill laptop, no hidpi display. Fonts
are fully functional, as are dropdown widgets, GIMP, and LibreOffice.

------
scarface74
On a personal level. I hardly ever use MS Office, maybe a few times a year.
But $99 a year for Office 365 and I can have an account for myself, my wife,
my son, a cousin in school, and my mom and 1TB of storage apiece plus 1TB of
storage is a good deal. Just OneDrive alone is worth the price -- The entire
Office 365 suite is the same cost as Dropbox.

They work on my Mac, Windows PC, iPad, and phone.

------
TheRealPomax
Has it been made at least as fast as office by now, or is it still slower at
basically everything? Because the reason I gave up on it every time I tried it
in the past is that sluggish tools turn what should be a "doing a thing" into
a grind. Fine, if annoying, for incidental work, but impossible to not get
angry with once it's a daily driver.

~~~
mixmastamyk
What are you doing in office apps where speed is an issue?

~~~
nulbyte
Not OP, but speed is an issue for me on a daily basis doing basic things. I am
a keyboard junky, and find myself at times five steps ahead of the UI, even
running Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows. From the keyboard, I can make a
table, align general, turn off wrapping, delete the last row, insert a column,
give it a heading, and format it as text. The UI is usually halfway done while
I'm sitting waiting. Delay is jarring when I pay attention to it.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Do you have an SSD and a semi-recent machine? If so, this is an argument for
LO. I use it on a three year old laptop on Linux. It is relatively snappy.

------
Fnoord
The post is quite ironically talking about freedom, yet the author sticks with
Amazon Kindle (DRM and big brother).

I don't have the problem of 32 bit software on Catalina. Kobo software runs on
it. Calibre works on it.

If authors don't publish in an open format, I just grab the ePub from Usenet
or BitTorrent.

------
woldrich
The LibreOffice Draw app is capable and has become stable in the past year or
so. I built a little papercraft Outside-In TDD training tool with it:

[https://github.com/Nike-Inc/tdd-training-cube](https://github.com/Nike-
Inc/tdd-training-cube)

------
Animats
Well, yes. The last Microsoft Office product I bought was Word 97. Since then,
OpenOffice -> LibreOffice.

------
boring_twenties
I haven't used any non-free software on any of my computers (except phones) in
something like 20 years.

But, if Microsoft made a version of Excel for Linux, I'd buy it immediately.
LibreOffice Calc is so bad it's embarassing, and it has barely gotten any
better over the last decade or so.

------
fonosip
Another option is OnlyOffice + Nexcloud. We have installed it for quite a few
customers at [https://ba.net/private-cloud-office](https://ba.net/private-
cloud-office)

~~~
andrewshadura
OnlyOffice are significantly incomparably worse in terms of compatibility.
They're also being developed in the "throw over the wall" style, when the
source code is being published at once months after the release and in a non-
downstream-friendly way.

------
deeweebee
Lol libre office is plainly bad. No matter how hard I try I can’t be
productive with it. It irks me to the point that I’d rather use office365
suite. The author might have to get back to Microsoft Office in no time

------
haileris
Beautiful article explaining the downsides of cloud infrastructure but as a
sysadmin I'd never dare to think of replacing that sales lady's M$ Office
suite with LibreOffice.

------
OldGuyInTheClub
Wouldn't his new Macbook come with Apple's office suite?

~~~
ExBritNStuff
I'm nice and deep in the Apple world (iPhone, iPad, Macbook) and I generally
am very pro-Apple. However, I can whole heartedly say for anyone with an even
semi-complex use case, Numbers is completely unsuitable and will actually
drive you insane. Just Google "apple numbers pivot table" for an example.

~~~
rtpg
+1 on this. Keynote is very good, but Numbers gets functionally useless very
quickly, and Pages is.... rough for anything that isn't "school essay". So
fidgety!

Turns out word processing is hard.

------
MaupitiBlue
The UI of Libreoffice is comparable to 1991 Word 6.

~~~
davidy123
The developers of LibreOffice made a conscious decision to make their product
look and feel like Office, since one of their goals is to help people learn
these suites for functional skills, so their learning would then translate to
the predominant package. I have this first hand from a conference.

Then of course Micorsoft created their ribbon UI and enforces protection
against others copying it.

Personally, I don't find the ribbon intuitive, and others, perhaps a majority,
feel the same way, but Microsoft has all that weight behind them.

~~~
gcthomas
LibreOffice _does_ have a ribbon-like interface available (their NotebookBar).
It's still officially experimental, but you might like it more than the
_older_ interface. FreeOffice also has a ribbon.

(Really - does not using the MSO ribbon automatically make something out of
date? I've never particularly liked the ribbon.)

------
xvilka
Most of the corporate jobs on top of Excel/Word can be automated away, I
suppose. Not everything, obviously, but most.

------
cubob
Try to open all your old MS WORD document into libre office and then tell us
if you still want to switch...

------
coldtea
> _It’s not that I’m cheap either, I just want something that works according
> to my preferences, not Microsoft’s._

Well, except for lucky coincidence (of features/preference) there's no
inherent reason a FOSS project would work more according to one's preferences
though. FOSS projects also have leads, take decisions, do rewrites, change
directions, etc, same as proprietary software...

------
doggydogs94
A coworker of mine refused to use Microsoft Office. One day, he had to give a
presentation in an environment where he could not bring in his own laptop; he
had to bring in his non -MS “PowerPoint” on a DVD. For whatever reason, MS
PowerPoint could not open his non-MS presentation. He had to do his
presentation without benefit of his slides; his project lost funding.

~~~
away_throw
This is why I always use PDFs as the slides. Even if there is no PDF viewer,
the web browser is capable of opening it.

------
Markoff
tried it for few months, it could not even open linked image from folder and
had heavy toll on my productivity, returned back to excel which just works

and there were other major issues (copypaste from other apps). as much I
support OSS I can't waste hours per week on it

------
pizzaparty2
Libre Office thinks its doing the world a favor but it's a pretty weak
experience compared to what else is out there. Plus, fun fact, the markup
language they use is quite verbose and weak compared to just html/css.

The only document format my beaurocracy accepts is .html.

------
dvh
How do you open spreadsheet with more than 1024 columns?

------
izzydata
I once failed an assignment in university for submitting in ODF instead of
DOC.

------
otikik
> BitCoin is Open Source Money

It sounds like Open Source Especulation to me.

------
greggman2
Bye Bye LibreOffice. Hello Google Docs (or some other online service).

(1) Auto backup

(2) Accessible from all my devices with zero work.

(3) Can share with anyone with just a link

(4) Can allow anyone to edit with just a link

I'm sure HN will be "evil google" and you might be right. I don't believe they
"spy" on google docs and I'm a paying g-suite customer.

I get different people have different needs. Google Docs meets mine. Been
using it since soon after it shipped. Haven't looked back. I might be able to
be convinced to move to another online service but I could never go back to a
native app for documents or spreadsheets

~~~
juped
Office 365 is embarassingly better in every way

~~~
gcthomas
Cost, certainly, is not better with Office 365. And LibreOffice has versions
for Linux. It's also much easier to drag and drop cells in Calc than Excel
(small advantage, but with my eyes, Excel is tricky) Excel has far fewer file
types it can handle (ClarisWorks, QuarkXPress anyone? Export as EPUB, and so
on.) LibreOffice has a much better configurable spellchecker, six different
ribbon-like interfaces, can exports bits of your spreadsheet as a JPEG file,
and is free. And cost. Did I mention that? Why rent something that can be got
for free?

(OK, if all you get is MS file formats, than O365 is fine, if expensive. I've
been using LO for years at work in a MS shop, and had no issues for a couple
of years.)

~~~
scarface74
You can still do a one time purchase of Office Home & Student 2019 for $149
and it's yours forever.

