Hacker News Reader

Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

Just switch to LibreOffice. The dependency on .docx/.xlsx is an overblown propaganda.

I personally had a business in 2007..2011 that replaced windows for Linux. All that time I heard that same old song again: "But but MS Office is so essential!". Turned out, not so much, on over 5000 PCs in several dozen companies.

Update: business eventually failed, for one simple reason - Ubuntu Linux is too freaking stable. The idea was transferring customers to Ubuntu, and have them pay a monthly service fee to do maintenance and fixes. And we have soon discovered that a properly configured GNU/Linux desktop PC can run for YEARS without maintenance at all. Customers had it figured out too and opted to do one-time fees when something goes wrong, and it just wasn't sustainable.

View on HN

In addition to sibling comments about UI, if you work with Asian/Complex Script Language, Libre/OpenOffice is terrible choice.

I use WPS Office (not open source) on Ubuntu mainly because it supports Asian/Complex script much, much better (as in, almost identical to MS Office).

Well, it's a matter of preference and tastes. I can't stand the ribbon interface introduced in MS Office 2007.

I'm not familiar enough with Asian/Complex Script language, but I once was in China and have installed a few Ubuntu 10.04 (brand new at the time) to a class of PCs where students were struggling greatly with Chinese version of Windows. On Ubuntu they were quite happy with how pinyin support worked in OS and LibreOffice.

I don't do Asian scripts, just latin and cyrillic, but I still use WPS office, since a lot of the options are in exactly the same place as they would be in MS Office, it's so nice not to have to go searching for things.

Have you ever tried to open an Excel Sheet from 2002, that one that is existencially important for the whole success of the company :), with makros as big as the Windows Codebase itself, in Libre Office? I can tell MS Office will not leave the field.

Sounds like something a human wouldn't have any use looking at anyway. Multi gb excel files? This is what programming is for.

> Multi gb excel files? This is what programming is for.

Excel is arguably the most successful programming language ever, or at the very very least second most successful after JavaScript.

(Note to future commenter: I said "most successful", not "best".)

Yeah excel, outlook, etc, and their db-app, access, word, and photoshop, adobe, etc, will be tough beasts to either man handle or convince, I guess.

Looking forward to handle being a terminal app to install all of those things. Throw us some games too.

No manual entry for handle

Excel is a very nice purely functional programming environment with a fantastic debugger.

Excel is a nice flight-simulator, it's just too bad it doesn't wear a miniskirt.

Edit: here's the procedures to activate a flight sim in excel 97 as I understand https://kb.iu.edu/d/agqw

You can fly around using your mouse or the arrow keys. The monolith lists Excel 97's developers.

Reality does not work in the way you wish it to.

Don't you even get me started on xls from 2002. That pathetic standard was poorly supported even my MS itself, files were opening with great difficulties and differences even on same version of Excel on different PCs, and sometimes newer versions could not open them properly at all. Once I have discovered that one .XLS file could internally have different types of encoding within one same document.

Anyway. It is clear that MS Office will not leave the field, like FORTRAN, but the key principle is the same: if you want to get out of the pit, you should stop digging. DO NOT create new spreadsheets in XLSX format. DO NOT ever send out MS Office documents. That's it, simple rules. Follow them for 5 years and you'll wonder, how little you depend on MSOffice.

Yes! Im with you on that. But it is not the tech or IT "Poeple" that we are talking about here. This Discussion is going on for many years now and there will be another 10 Years of "simple" solutions. I will be honest here. As a Programmer and Application Supporter (for 17 Years now) i earn Money with that kind of Problems. I dont like MS and it would be a joy to switch to GNU/Linux. But i think i will see someone standing on Mars before MS Office will be replaced.

Just have to move to an adjacent/another field. I have not seen Office in ten years, and haven't used it in twenty.

Recently got some UX whiplash after being in engineer world for years and long ago migrated to .md/.rst over rich text editors. To quote the Matrix, "I don't even see the markdown anymore, I just see bold, italic, header..."

Then I started working with some folks on a Covid mask project and they are massively struggling with MS office docs, dropbox, file versioning, web deployment, wordpress, for something that needs both high uptime and fast updates. I'm like why not just use git, github, and jekyll static sites? Add better looking pages in time.

...

Lets just say they weren't thrilled with that idea.

Sticking to open formats (flat text, odf) is a great start for the individual but it's still a workflow shift for everyone else, which is painful. It was a start reminder for me of the frustration I experienced when shifting my workflow to more open standards. Add to that some serious Hyrum's law when it comes to excel usage.

> if you want to get out of the pit, you should stop digging.

Great quote, I'll try to remember that.

Also, folks forget how times change. Ten years ago most were still trapped on Windows. Today a lot fewer are.

> The dependency on .docx/.xlsx is an overblown propaganda.

It depends on the company. One will use it as a glorified letter composer. Another has a sharepoint integration with version control and documents with ActiveData integration into SQL servers and (literally) thousands of lines of scripting.

Nothing, not LibreOffice, not Google Sheets, not Excel for Mac can replace Excel for me. It's wonderful, they keep adding features and I know all the quirks like the back of my hand. If I ever swap to Linux on the desktop, I'll keep a VM around just for Excel.

Word is nice too, although that I could probably change that rather quickly (word processing is not hard to get right).

This speaks only that you are so used to MSOffice that you don't want to study different app, not that it is really better.

When I switched to OpenOffice.org in 2006 it took me some time to switch, and you know what? I have found that OOo was way more stable, predictable and logical in how things are done. It was also really free as in freedom, and I could run it on any OS of my choice. Now, I know LibreOffice like the back of my hand and it's wonderful.

People who used MS Office all their life usually do this: launch LibreOffice,see different interface, and like "nah... I don't want any changes, I'd rather keep myself and the world vendorlocked into proprietary software".

> _"nah... I don't want any changes, I'd rather keep myself and the world vendorlocked into proprietary software"_

People don't have a problem changing if the change doesn't break their work(flows). The fact that Internet Explorer is pretty much dead proves it - everyone switched to Chrome although is different.

MS Office document format support is simply not good enough on any alternative (of which Libre Office is the only serious contender).

I have tried to switch to Libre Office on multiple occasions over the years, but every time I gave up after couple of weeks of frustration, because I couldn't collaborate on shared documents. Either the stuff I created in Libre Office looked different when others open it in MS Office, or I was breaking the documents for other people.

I don't consider MS Office to be better - it's simply that the alternatives are not compatible.

> MS Office document format support is simply not good enough on any alternative

This is a key fault in your logic. You SHOULD NOT judge the alternative by how it supports the document format that is specifically created in such a way to block competition from effectively supporting it. The company that did it also corrupted the international standards organization to get it an official 'standard' status.

But the truth is, you don't really need MS Office document format support at all. The company I've founded in 2007 never ever sent out any document in MS Office format, never owned any copy of MS Office, and we survived since then just fine.

If you want an electronic spreadsheet, use an open, documented and well supported standard - OpenDocument, and get on with it. Oh, and it is supported just fine on Ubunut 20.04 that we discuss here, as is on a Mac and Windows. The only thing it lacks is a proper online collaborative editor, that's true.

> The company I've founded in 2007 never ever sent out any document in MS Office format, never owned any copy of MS Office, and we survived since then just fine.

It's great that it worked out for you, but that's just not the case in the most business environments I have been dealing with. When a person sends out a document to a customer, and it turns out that customer didn't see the content as intended, alternatives get deleted and MS Office gets reintroduced.

Just to be clear, I'm not a proponent of MS Office. As a matter of fact I run on Mac and Linux and don't have much touching points with Windows, but MS Office is simply a necessity in most business environments.

> but MS Office is simply a necessity in most business environments.

My experience says otherwise. Most businesses can replace it with alternatives without too many difficulties. Definitely 95% of SMB can, I have led many transition projects myself, where companies moved 90% of their computers to Ubuntu and 100% of their computers to OpenOffice.org / LibreOffice

It's great that you got so good results of it, say yes to free software. May it continue and may it improve. Perfect man.

You'd lose the realtime collaboration features though.

Ignoring format issues, LibreOffice just feels extremly slugish for me. I get little freezes all the time, the UI is laggy and startup time is pretty bad too. I came to dislike it so much that i prefer to edit things in Google Docs over LibreOffice .

I haven't tried it but some people say 'OnlyOffice' is a better branch than libreoffice, it seems to support MS-Office standards better, but, as I said I've never tried it. Only trouble these people had was with certain fonts, but I guess the remedy would be to choose embed all fonts upon saving and sharing, if that helps, then perhaps OnlyOffice, desktop version, is an option, for some. I plan to try it, although I use my old office-versions, in a vm, for now.

I love OnlyOffice along with WPS Office, but they're not "branches" of libreoffice at all, completely different products. You might be confusing LibreOffice branching from Sun OpenOffice.org/Star Office.

It's most likely that I am totally wrong, they just told me it was some "Latvian" branch, Lituanian, so I don't know. I might be confused overall but it's good someone knows. Thank you.

I personally didn't experience any problems with LibreOffice performance, but things happen probably. Maybe you'll feel better about it since that sluggishness you experience is compensated by the fact that you can run LibreOffice on a proper OS, not slowed down by necessary antivirus software and the likes

It's always felt slow (I mean, since early in the OpenOffice days). I've assumed it has something to do with its Java dependencies. Back when I used linux I'd stick to Abiword and Gcalc and such when I didn't need Microsoft compatibility, for that reason. On Mac, Pages and Numbers and such are nice and light. Google Docs is too input-laggy and glitchy for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com