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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone here work an environment where LibreOffice is sufficient?

It replaces Word well, but for Excel, there is just too much of a shift for me.

It is a great product, but given the market saturation of Office, I am not sure there is really a place for it in the market spectrum.

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I use LibreOffice calc daily as an excel replacement on Linux. I am a Software Developer and prefer to use Linux for my development OS.

I'm in the exact same boat. I know there are differences between excel and calc, but none of them affect my daily usage - which to be fair is about 60-70% using it ass a glorified CSV editor.

Same. I find no problem with it at all.

>I use LibreOffice calc daily as an excel replacement on Linux. I am a Software Developer

The issue is not whether software developers can replace their (barely existent) Excel usage but whether accountants & office workers can.

I have yet to meet a SINGLE accountant aware of openoffice/libreoffice's existence. OO/Libre is deader than dead in the one segment where it matters.

How many people out there have workloads that can't be met by LibreOffice Calc? I would like to meet those people because they must have very interesting jobs and automating their work would have a high monetary impact.

Um, for starters, anyone who needs stable software, professional support, timely software updates, or the ability to run on a mainstream OS.

So basically? Everyone.

LibreOffice has certified consultants you can hire[0] for large deployments, seems to be under pretty active development, and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, which together make up the vast majority of OSes used on the desktop. It’s been a while since I’ve used it heavily, but I can’t recall it being particularly unstable.

It doesn’t have professional support for individual users, I’ll grant you that.

[0] https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/

LibreOffice Calc absolutely chugs when it comes to recalculating. Entire sections of the economy run on large, complicated Excel sheets; porting them over would not only be slow, cumbersome, and time-consuming, but would require hardware that does not yet exist to run them on.

THERE IS NO REPLACEMENT FOR EXCEL in the financial sector. Part of the reason why is because Excel has customers -- big, rich, important customers, and lots of them -- and so it is supported and updated as if by an entity that wants to please its customers.

The same could have been said about lotus 123 in the early 90s. Companies got rich getting himem.sys working

>How many people out there have workloads that can't be met by LibreOffice Calc?

Irrelevant. We're dealing with industry wide network effects here.

Excel has complete dominance and will keep it unless they release a version where 1+1=3

No. There are no network effects here. Any company in the financial sector would switch to an excel alternative with a tangible edge over Excel in a heartbeat. LO Calc is Excel 2003, but uglier and with more bugs. That is not a viable commercial proposition.

It does indeed have a high monetary impact. Just look at Microsoft.

I use PowerPivot and PowerQuery a lot. A job does not have to be particularly interesting for you to derive value from those two, practically any Excel-using job will do. Either of the two is a game-changer by itself.

I think that the bulk of user-facing changes to Excel over the last ten years is in either PowerQuery or PowerPivot. Neither has an adequate alternative in LO, as far as I’m aware.

I use it regularly just as a GUI for csv/tsv/etc files, because it can nicely deal with that, but I doubt anybody from financial sectors would ever even think about using it. Opportunity costs of not using Excel are just too high.

>Does anyone here work an environment where LibreOffice is sufficient?

I used to do IT for a high-school with ~300 students, faculty and staff. Ubuntu dolled up to look kinda Windows-ish on half the lab machines. Windows on the other half. Faculty got a Toshiba Sattelite Pros that had windows licenses. Servers all ran linux. We used Libreoffice on everything and aside from a few complainers it was fine.

I've been using LibreOffice for 15+ years with no issue, only times I remembered MS Office exists is when someone sends stuff in Office proprietary formats and no software wants to open them.

Same. I've used calc to check my taxes and prepare invoices for close to twenty years. Never had an issue, even circa 2000.

I'm not a power user, but I've been using LibreOffice as a Word and Excel replacement for years. Lately both have been replaced by Google Docs, for better or worse.

I haven't touched MS Office in more than a decade, and I don't miss it.

Actually I miss Access the most. As an Excel replacement it has what I need to do my taxes and to set up voting sheets and schedules for conferences.

Is there anyway to do visual basic, Access-type apps in the cloud? I mean a full cloud-based IDE?

Might not be the exact right feature-set here, but Google Sheets allows you to write custom functions in Javascript. IIRC, you can hook a Google Sheet up to Google Forms and this might give you what you want.

It doesn't let you do declarative queries (read: SQL) and it's not relational.

Google Apps Scripts (equivalent to VBA in Office) can script most Google products; you could build a form on one tab of a Google Sheet, use Apps Scripts to store and query data against Cloud SQL, then use another tab of Sheets to output the data from Cloud SQL.

https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/jdbc

That's not what a replacement for Access should be like.

LibreOffice Base is an Access-type program

In the same way a Lada is an automobile.

Perhaps it's improved, but a while ago I tried to program Base and found the documentation around it's functions/methods/properties to be scant and/or terribly out-of-date, and pretty much useless.

Ouch!

:-)

Yeah, it's the unloved step-child of the LibreOffice suite, we fix stuff sometimes, but there is no commercial user of it to fund development

In theory, but not in practice. Yes, it's a somewhat visual database. But it doesn't have anywhere near the power or ease of use that Access did 20 years ago and its integration with the rest of LO isn't even close to what Access does in MS Office. If that weren't bad enough, the underlying database it uses is effectively an island in the larger open source world.

In the Windows world, just about everything can interact with Access. Just about nothing can with Base.

Dealing with various CSV files is just much more simple on LibreOffice Calc than in Excel. Especially when non standard encoding is involved.

OpenLibreOffice.org Calc works close enough to Excel for me. Microsoft Excel is more polished clearly, so I'd use it, but I'm not going to figure out how to pay for it. In my experience, Google docs sheets doesn't work well with equations, if I update a cell that others depend on, those other cells don't always update, or update with significant delay, and it becomes difficult to use. (My equations are usually pretty simple, just sum this column, multiply by this cell, etc. One page financial sheets, not like tax return estimators with tons of hidden calculations behind the scenes)

I've always found Open/Libre Office unpleasantly heavy-weight and fragile. On Linux I use lighter stand-alone programs (which are... fine, kinda, for lack of anything better) and on Mac, the bundled Apple office programs, which I love—they open almost instantly and I can leave them on in the background and forget they're there, no crashes, no noticeable effect on system responsiveness even on very old Macs, nothing bad at all, plus they interoperate pretty well.

I use LibreOffice daily, I wrote all my publications including my monograph with it. For my purposes, Calc works just as well as Excel too.

Sure, I use LibreOffice as well as Google Docs for spreadsheets, and both are equally horrible. Clumsy user interface, slow, awkward. How is it that the scroll bar simply doesn't work sanely in either of them? I'd love there to exist some kind of "command line spreadsheet".

I really wish they worked on the UI more. Better yet, it'd be great to offer an online version. You can make it so you can work right away on a new file all client side and save the files to your desktop, Drive, Dropbox, etc, or continue working on a file from one of those locations.

It's honestly probably easier to work on new project than try to finagle around the libre/open office UI code

It suffices in the few cases I use an office suite for. Calc does its job; it doesn't necessarily have to compete with Excel on features or looks. There were spreadsheet apps on DOS long before Excel, such as Lotus 1-2-3 or even MS' own Multiplan.

Yes, except that we use google spreadsheets for collaborative editing. My coworker switched from MS Office to LibreOffice just because the former never detected UTF-8 encoding in TSV files.

It's pivot tables that made me buy MS Office. Neither Office.com nor LibreOffice Calc allow you to sort a pivot table by field values.

Financial services company here.

Calc + Pandas + google sheets for us.

As long as you are looking for a capitalism-free solution, you will need something else than Office.

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