I haven’t used OpenOffice much? But it feels much less polished than Office or iWork. I guess there’s Google Docs, but even that’s limited compared to even iWork. Is there anything actually decent that can be used for “Office” stuff on Linux?
Also Office 2003 and LibreOffice4/5 have way more in common than Office 2003 has with 2010/2013/2016.
None of this really matters - if you tell someone word ate a word document then they are sympathetic whereas if you tell them libreoffice ate a word document the reaction is much less favourable. I do not like this.
My solution - I just refuse to use any office software.
That said, a VM works wonders and people aren’t as confused by them as I would have expected!
Not sure what to do about pptx.
What can it not do that office can do?
Google docs are great as a Word replacement, but Google's spreadsheet offering is a spreadsheet. Excel is an extremely sophisticated development environment.
That would be great. People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming. Get people with R or Python and Pandas, or some other statistical program. (88% of Excel Spreadsheets contain human errors) These are human error. Use a program not an Excel sheet.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spr...
One error cost $6 Billion in the "London Whale"
Could they be better? Sure. But don't knock it as not "programming" on that basis -- PHP is also bad.
It's not realistic to expect everyone in a company to learn python, and I'm not convinced that replacing shitty excel documents with shitty code would introduce less errors.
Also the concept of 'minimum viable product' in excel is typically adding a couple of columns and adding titles to them. To develop something for others to use in python will take much longer.
I'm sorry that the democratization of computing hurts you so, but Excel has done more for normal people who just need to push numbers around than perhaps any device since the pocket calculator. And it has exposed more people to functional programming than anything else has, ever.
COM and VBA scripting? Access database sourcing?
Google spreadsheets even has analogies to this functionality (albeit in Google flavors).
It's certainly not the formula and pivot table capabilities which Google spreadsheets has pretty good parity with. At one point in time you could argue that excel handled larger files better, but more recent versions of Google Spreadsheet seem to handle larger files pretty well.
[1] https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Using-structured-re...
PowerPivot. Database Access (JDBC to a handful of DBs isn't anywhere close to what Excel offers.)
I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features. As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets. You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.
PowerPivot is a sophisticated set of features.
> As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets.
Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent.
> You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.
You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.
The distinction isn't artificial: you can build upon excel as if it's a programming platform, but that doesn't make excel itself more powerful - all you've done is built yourself into a proprietary tech stack. With enough time you could do the same thing in Google sheets with Google's proprietary scripting interface. Comparing the two apps at baseline there is no difference in sophisticated features. PowerPivot is a plugin.
> You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.
Yeah, actually it does - you just won't be solving everything with an xls file and you might actually be using a more appropriate tool for the problem, but I guarantee Google has an equivalent offering.
Tell me something excel can do that Google spreadsheet can't.
For something brand new I would imagine Google Sheets can handle the vast majority of use cases.
1. user defined style definitions
2. citations / bibliography
3. anchoring
There are plugins that can help, but at least where I work using these is often banned to avoid the risk of leaking corp info.