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Comment by ktpsns | Hacker News Reader

It's so amazing that the dinosaur LibreOffice/OpenOffice is still maintained. From the codebase, it is probably similarly old-fashioned like Thunderbird. Some folks may say it is hopeless to modernize. For me it does not even matter whether that's true or not -- it is a well-done and partially timeless and universal tool in my everyday work flow. While there are fancy and modern alternatives like the (closed source) Google Docs, LibreOffice always stays as a fall-back solution if nothing more works. Thank you for this work, developers!

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I recently discovered that Microsoft literally will not sell you Office for a computer not connected to the internet. You cannot buy this product, I tried very hard, lots of escalation, etc.

Needless to say, LibreOffice works very nicely in an offline environment, and it's very rare that I find a file it does not handle well. (The only example I have — a Word document with Track Changes enabled, heavily revised by multiple people, multiple times over many days. L.O. seemed to lose track of the changes and showed a wrong document. I imagine for most people this is pretty rare.)

And you don't have to worry about malware (for those tempted to pirate Microsoft Office).

I'm a bit confused by this. Microsoft normally has excellent offline activation capabilities for all the three letter agencies that buy their software and run it on internal networks.

Precisely my thinking (based on supposition). Adobe provides similar activation for offline computers (a sort of challenge/response where you take a number off the offline computer, enter it on their website on a different computer, bring a number back to the offline computer to finish activation).

I assume they just have decided to make this functionality a special case for enterprises of a certain size. I emphasized to them this could be bought through a business channel if needed but I assume I have not the right scale.

Enterprise editions exist with 100% offline installation, but unfortunately, home and business licenses have an "offline install" that requires online activation...[0]

This has been a huge PITA for me since I often need Word and Excel on a computer that's restricted from accessing the internet.

[0]: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-the-Office-2016...

This is a bit kafka-esque:

> You need to be connected to the internet to download this installer file, but once that's done, you can then install Office offline on a PC at your convenience.

> ...

> After your Office installation is complete, you need to activate Office. Be sure you're connected to the Internet and then open any Office application, such as Word or Excel.

I mean the lede is "problems with slow speed or unreliable connections" but at the same time ... offline is offline.

That’s only available with an EA, which means 250 seats or more.

You can still activate it by phone, it just tells you it can't be: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/-telephone-activati...

The most crufty part in both mozilla's code base and libreoffice code base is essentially equivalent in that it tries to solve essentially same set of problems (cross-platform UI and object model), but the implementation is significantly different, because in mozilla's case this layer of cruft was introduced 20-ish years ago as a complete rewrite of the thing (and most of the really ugly hacks have to do with sub-par C++ compilers and support for classic MacOS), while there was no attempt at a major rewrite of the staroffice codebase until libreoffice (and it is quite obvious that the way libreoffice's rewrite proceeds is at least partially motivated by experience from how the netscape->mozilla rewrite suffered heavily from second system effect and in the end failed at least from the bussines standpoint).

Good point. Indeed it is interesting to follow the Firefox Quantum approach (which breaks with XUL) or KDE's open source office suite, aka Calligra (https://www.calligra.org/) which is "plain C++/Qt" and thus not a sole effort to solve the cross-platform UI/object model problem such as Mozilla and StarOffice did in their time. Thanks to this, Calligra devs can probably concentrate much more on implementing features while getting a modern cross-plattform UI for free (literally: Qt is free).

I use LibreOffice calc every time I need to export an Excel spreadsheet as csv, because you can specify double quoted fields and you can specify UTF-8 encoding. I think this is a major use for LibreOffice, moving enterprise data into a web CMS. I work on a dataset with a lot of foreign characters and LibreOffice is my savior.

Gnumeric includes a tool named ssconvert that does this sort of thing from the command line, very handy. Gnumeric doesn't have the mindshare of Libreoffice but you may find this simplifies your workflow so I thought I'd mention.

Edited

Gnumeric also requires very little RAM or CPU so it's very light-weight compared to LibreOffice Calc. I don't use spreadsheets that often but when I do, it serves my needs adequately and it works with most of the keyboard short-cuts that I'm used to from Excel and LibreOffice Calc.

Curious - do you mean it's old fashioned because it's a desktop application, and not a web app? There are actually hosted on-line versions, e.g. https://demo.collaboracloudsuite.com/tdfnextcloud/index.php/...

When I wrote "old fashioned", I refered primarily to the look-and-feel but also the status of the code base (+20 years), the fact they don't use a widespread UI toolkit but rolled their own, etc.

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