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Comment by octosphere | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

> 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?

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.

My experience is that I’ve used libreoffice to convert unreadable .doc 2003 files to working .docx documents. In these (admittedly few) cases, (a more recent version of) word could not read the .doc files in a meaningful fashion.

For me, I can't use it on macOS because it freezes for several seconds any time I open a document, try to scroll, etc. Thankfully I don't need to open doc and xls files much.

Last time i tried to use LibreOffice (~2 years ago) on OSX it was super slow/hanged when opening large CSV files while Excel on a virtual machine (same host) had 0 problems.

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