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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

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

It breaks down because you need some serious backup in your organization (for example from the owner) to switch to something like LibreOffice. People got enough on their plate and changing their tools for (from their perspective) no apparent reason will get a lot of push back. I think technically LibreOffice is perfectly up to the task. Sure if your a statistician then maybe Spreadsheet won't work as well for you as an Excel replacement. But other then that...

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It doesn't matter how much backup you have in the organization if the product is missing essential functionality. LibreOffice just doesn't have everything that MS Office does. That doesn't matter for some businesses but for others it creates a total block.

Yes, I would imagine given how long Office has been around, there are some people who have delved quite deep into the feature set and become dependent on it. It's hard to let go of one feature that you have come to rely on.

I have some pretty complex spreadsheets from Excel that I now run under LibreOffice without any problems.

That said, while they do use some complex formulas, they don’t use any VBScript or other such madness.

Complaining that your custom MSFT/VBScript stuff doesn’t work, so you can’t migrate — it sounds to me a bit like “We’re stuck on Oracle and can’t move to PostgreSQL because we decided to use a lot of Oracle magic stuff that doesn’t work anywhere else”.

This is classic vendor lock-in, which I tend to view as a business risk best avoided. There really is no option except to recognize it as technical debt and find time to dig yourself out from it.

When your only option for “Business Function X” limits you to a single vendor, fix that first.

This sounds like an argument I would've made in my early twenties. I will now correct you in the way my elders corrected me:

Oracle and Microsoft Office are global standards. The world uses them. Our civilization relies on them. If alternatives such as PostgreSQL and LibreOffice are not 100% compatible with these standards, they are lacking in functionality.

I’m flattered to have such notions of youth imputed upon me :)

One must not give up the fight against closed-source monopoly.

They are de facto standards as an application. As data formats, governments and large companies required them to become available under formal standards. After doing a lot of outright sleazy things, Office format (which is basically xml files wrapped in a zip file) is now a formal standard. When companies like Microsoft step around interoperability, they should be severely chastized and then punished, which apparently only governments and large companies have the wherewithal to do.

I wouldn't compare Oracle and Office: office is a monopoly, with LibreOffice being David against Goliath. Oracle is big, but it's not at all a standard, it's one of the players of database market, which is quite competitive: there are open source alternatives(MySQL and postgres) which are widely used (not like LibreOffice), and also big corporate players (DB2 and SQLServer).

Is this the biggest bull* I read today?

Oracle is a bit of a reach, imo.

Oracle's definitely a standard in companies of a certain size and pedigree, but it's not even remotely as ubiquitous as Office, which is both a business and consumer product.

Everything has risks and tradeoffs. Excel means that you can communicate with clients and vendors in their preferred tool, it means you can onboard new hires more quickly, it means you need less internal support staff, etc. Switching from Excel adds those things back in as risks for your business.

Good business is about managing and understanding risks, and not about eliminating them at all costs.

This is a very sane approach, and I agree wholeheartedly.

But when the only thing holding you back and locking you in is your own company's internal vendor-specific tooling/infrastructure, the argument doesn't hold as much weight.

fwiw, I have never received an Excel spreadsheet from a vendor/partner/customer that I could not open and work with in LibreOffice, re-export to Excel and send back to them.

I did because a lot of our clients and partners were non technical people using complex excel spreadsheets with macros and vba.

And since Excel is the de facto standard, shouldn't Libre Office offer a 100% compatibility to whatever Excel has if it wants a piece of that market share? Also $150/year for something that does it all and just works it's really not much. The same reason why we don't ask how much Visual Studio Enterprise costs or IntelliJ products even if you have free alternatives.

there is an option though: accept what you’re calling technical debt (though honestly, calling vendor lock-in technical debt reduces that term to meaningless in my opinion)... there’s nothing technically wrong with it.. you can create something well designed in excel or it can be shitty.

Anyway, it’s a risk like any other, and it may often be worth it. The alternative of switching to libreoffice is not free, and can truly be more costly than some office licenses and the risk that Microsoft will drop or fuck up excel (which most consider low)...

Personally having earnestly tried to do some complex work in libreoffice calc and running into just bugs and poor polish (error handling anyone?), it is not an experience I elect to relive... I still feel locked in to Excel as my life is too short to waste on the inferior product.

> I think technically LibreOffice is perfectly up to the task.

IT people really need to stop declaring this about FOSS products when it is regarding workflows they have no experience in.

>Sure if your a statistician then maybe Spreadsheet won't work as well for you as an Excel replacement.

We had a client send us a questionnaire in an Excel document with macros to compute various things based on our answers. You underestimate just how many things are done in Excel across companies (ie: you can't even force both side to switch to Libreoffice) that you would, probably, write a quick webpage for.

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