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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

> If your excuse is editing MS Office files, LibreOffice supports the formats and works

For very small values of "works". I've found that even high school projects turn out to be a bit too much for libre office.

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I'm not sure if MS isn't still sabotaging support, but Europe did force them to implement exporting to the open document formats. You should be able to convert all your docx / pptx / xlsx files to odt / ods / odp before switching, or just using Wine as a conversion tool.

Well, my definition of "works" is that you can read it. Authoring new documents should use ODF. And again, MS Office works on Wine, so you can use that in the worst case.

I have used Linux (Mint) for all my work in college for ~6 months. In my experience, using Word online on Chromium was better than using libre Office locally. Both features and UI wise. Both for reading existing stuffs and for making new docs. I have nothing agains Libre Office but suggesting it can be used as a replacement for MS Office in any capacity is disingenious.

Regarding wine, no need for that now that Office online and Google docs exists.

> Regarding wine, no need for that now that Office online and Google docs exists.

This is evidence you've never used Google Docs for real work and have never encountered its absolutely dismal docx rendering. I get stuff in Gmail regularly I then have to open in LibreOffice to bloody read.

You're really undermining your own argument here, even though you started out very well.

If I send an ODF to my lawyer, investor or accountant they're going to panic.

That's disingenuous. Word has supported odt and odf for both read and write, for nearly a decade already. (2008 version supported it from preliminary checking)

Follow up with "open the file with Word". If they panic over that, you have an awfully stupid lawyer/investor/accountant. It'll even have the word icon on it! I doubt they even have file extensions enabled, they probably wouldn't even notice.

Filing you into the "change resistant and lying to themselves" category of Windows user, too.

> MS Office works on Wine, so you can use that in the worst case.

Only 2013 or older which you can't easily buy anymore. 2016 / 365 doesn't work at all: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...

I didn't event understand why people use Excel. There's no ERP software in this company?

Excel teach bad habit about having list every where not maintained.

Because it's the best spreadsheet software out there. It really is first-class, and LO Calc has a lot of catching up to do (and they are quite aware of this).

My theory is that Excel's userbase includes the guys who actually sign the cheques, so MS has to get it right.

There are also many computers, where nothing but Windows, Office and company ERP client are installed. This has been for decades.

Due to lack of other tools, people learned to do absolutely crazy things with the Office - from saving screenshots in the Word files to drawing in PowerPoint.

Yeah... LO may have 80% of the features, but if 25% of users use a few of those other 20% of features, you're going to face a lot of resistance from any company with even a dozen users. I've seen some amazing/scary things done in Excel (and Access even).

It's not even crazy features. LO still doesn't support lists, I believe. This makes the more permanent spreadsheets so much harder to maintain.

But on the other hand LO has Base, which is pretty good.

I also like Access for what it is. I haven't used Base enough to really comment... Would be kind of cool to see Base spun off, so that it could be a stand-alone access competitor, if that isn't already an option.

Interesting, I found the opposite. My MS office doesn't even have 'export to PDF' and Libre has it.

Sounds like you're comparing a 10 year old Office version to a current LibreOffice version.

Seems to be the case. Both work fine for my writing needs though.

Maybe that's why Microsoft is pushing hard to move everybody to an online office subscription?

LibreOffice already had PDF export 6 years ago and OpenOffice even 10 years ago.

I now consider this an utterly, utterly bogus argument - Google Docs has absolutely dismal docx and xlsx support, and I've never seen anybody but me note it.

This is now a bad excuse, not a reason.

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