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Comment by bredren | Hacker News Reader

Do you use google docs and other office tools? I've tried to switch to Dropbox Paper and Microsoft but they feel clumsy or incomplete or spammy or slow compared to Doc and Sheets. I'm looking for a relatively straightfoward set of changes to my major web activities away from google.

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I'd be curious how you're using MSFT Office, but I've been bouncing between a Surface Pro for work and Mac Mini at home, and love the Office 365 suite.

Virtually 100% of my clients can open Word / Excel / Powerpoint documents, and you'll have to pry Excel from my cold, dead hands =). I personally love the power features of Excel, and even do some VBA scripting to automate some workflows in Excel and Outlook.

I don't do much real-time collab on documents at the same time with other folks on my team, so I can't attest to that - though I hear that Msft has come a long way here and the Fluent roadmap looks really promising.

I can't stand excel. It thinks it knows what I mean and actually edits my data destructively, mistakenly, especially when I enter dates in day/month/year format. If you just import a CSV and then export it directly, it mangles the data. I will not tolerate such behavior.

If you have a column of phone numbers with leading zeroes, coming in from a csv, it decides it's a number and drops the leading zero, which breaks the phone number.

I paste the data via Text Import Wizard, choose Text for the date columns, & then later split & join again as correct date format.

I figured out that you can technically specify type in Excel to prevent destroying the data, but by that point I’d much rather just load a data frame in R or Pandas.

Maybe you just suck at Excel ;)

https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c

This. Microsoft Office and O365 are magnitudes more useable and mature compared to GSuites. This wasn't clear to me until I'm now at a shop that only uses Google - its like a giant step back tech and usability wise. A year in now, and slowly getting some O365 shadow IT going to improve everyones life. Lol

And everyone knows, Microsoft Office isn't perfect...

Apple's office suite is really nice, if you're in that world. I dunno if they do collaborative editing, but Notes does, so they might. If it's gotta be in a browser—IDK, it bugs me having a document editor or spreadsheet program eat so much memory and so many background cycles that I don't feel like I can leave it open and forget about it while doing other things even on a pretty powerful machine without slowing things down and killing my battery, plus they all feel really laggy, so I've mostly stopped using browser-based office tools, period, whenever I can avoid them.

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote do collaborative editing, even across devies:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206181

"Invite others to your documents and work on them together in real time. Collaboration is built into the iWork apps on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and iCloud.com"

I just like how lightweight they are, and (this may be silly, I know) I like how good-looking and useful the included templates are. Also they rarely crash or do anything weird, which you'd think would just be normal by now, but very much is not.

Last time I remember using modern-ish GUI Office-type programs that felt this respectful of system resources was years ago when I used Linux, and I dropped OpenOffice (too damn heavy and slow) for some of the single-purpose alternatives like Gnumeric (is that even around anymore?). Apple's various utility and basic productivity programs are really damn good (god I love Preview) and a big part of what keeps me suffering through all the bad things about Apple products.

In the case of Gmail vs. Fastmail I’m not so sure it’s a downgrade, but if you switch away from Google Docs etc. you will indeed lose things you were used to (great collaboration, speed etc.)

However you also gain something. For me personally actually three things:

* I no longer feel like the service I’m using is like a rug that can be pulled from under my feet at any moment

* My data (mail, documents, etc.) are now actually under my control and not in some “arbitrary“ format on a server I can’t reach except from my browser

* As a bonus feature, my mail is only read by me and my behavior is tracked by no one

I am not sure how you use Word and Excel but google's offering are like tinker toys compared to what MS has put out for the desktop and web.

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