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Comment by GhettoComputers | Hacker News Reader

Who still honestly uses Office in their personal lives? Some people use excel for work but you don't buy that for yourself. Most young people I know just use google docs and never used MS Office so it doesn't even have the name branding for them to call the others bootleg versions. The ribbon was so disgusting and annoying that I never used it again and only used 2003 after trying 2007.

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I finally caved and got myself a copy, because the spreadsheet capabilities of Excel are still unrivaled compared to free alternatives. If you watch the classic "You suck at Excel" video, you'll see that there are numerous actions the presenter does that do not have analogs in LibreOffice nor Google Sheets. The table feature is probably the one I miss the most; in fact, I really like how in the Mac program Numbers, all sheets are multi-table by default. It makes it much easier to group parts of the sheet into logical sections, and to extend one table without affecting the others.

Thats interesting, many people I know hate excel since its so slow, its clunky and switched to python for data since their computers overheat, freeze and crash when they work with large data sets on excel.

Maybe that's it, I'm not working with large data sets. My use case is more like "track all of my salary, dividend, and capital gains, and estimate how much extra I need to pay in taxes." :)

You might be better suited with jupiter notebook.

It's often much easier to do grouping and charts in Excel with a few clicks, even for someone who already knows Python in a data science context.

Excel is incredibly powerful. Watch an accountant or financial expert in a mid to large company use it. They'll use functions you've never heard of...and don't require writing Python.

Or watch this video and level-up your Excel! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNuC6ayrNKQ

Note: Joel Spolsky (co-founder of Stack Overflow, Trello, FogBugz, more) was a program manager for Excel in 90's.

I was forced back into it after years of using GSuite and....it's just as clunky as I remember. You get a different feature-set depending on whether you're using the native app or browser version (but it's not obvious at first). There is some locking and checking-out required to modify shared files with the native apps - also not always obvious when this is required.

It was really annoying since office's database was also a required dependency and I couldn't use an older office I had even though I never used this feature another program insisted was essential. The only good part of office is onenote. Its very nice.

People like me who live in Excel and use the many things the web apps can’t do (or gotta go fast). I still have a mixed relationship with the Ribbon but use it mainly to crib all the keyboard shortcuts or just type commands in the search box.

You never had enough issues to abandon it? I always see and hear people with frozen laptops while using excel to edit their database.

It's magical to get a handle on things, if it's something huge or for production I can port it to not-Excel. I can do some stats on a table and get my answer by time I could've set up a new poetry env and started Jupyter.

Oh yeah for querying it’s great and more so with power query now built in.

For most things, Google Docs suffices for me. I rarely do complex formatting, and the most advanced thing I do in Sheets/Excel is vlookups, and even that I haven't done in months.

However, for my writing (fanfiction), desktop Office is a necessity. I used to think the "web layout" in Word was weird, but I live by it now. It's a much more efficient use of screen real estate than "print layout" (I have a 4k monitor and like to maximize the window), and Google Docs has no equivalent.

But ignoring the page layout, let's consider something more concrete: loading times.

I loaded a 106 page document in Google Docs on my desktop (AMD R7-1700, 64 GB RAM, NVME SSD, symmetric gigabit internet - a pretty good system overall). It took 27.72 seconds to load, and a couple more after that until I could type without it hitching. According to Chrome's task manager, the tab is already consuming 418 MB of RAM.

On my laptop (Intel i5-6300U, 8 GB RAM, SSD, same internet, Office 365 build 2109), I loaded two Word documents at the same time. Combined, they total 764 pages in print layout. It took 9.71 seconds to load both and for me to be able to type in the 527 page document without any noticeable lag. Word is currently sipping just 250 MB of RAM (and I have never seen it go >500 MB before except when exiting...meanwhile, a single Chrome tab hitting >1 GB is not exactly unusual if my desktop has been running for more than a week).

This doesn't even consider the experience of writing a document this long. Google Docs is already noticeably slower than Word with just a 106 page document, and it gets worse with longer ones. And the grammar checking in Word is miles ahead of what Google has.

Word certainly isn't perfect (I have plenty of complaints about it, and have found bugs which only turn up in long documents), but it remains my tool of choice because Google Docs really can't compete for this use-case. And I know I'm not the only writer in this situation.

Is there a reason you use office to write in? It’s not good writing software. Ever tried writing software like this? http://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/

I've never looked into it except some paid application which I didn't feel was worth what they wanted at the time. I might try that when I finish my current story.

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview was it this one? Its the gold standard for me I love it.

Yeah, that was it. Back when I heard about it, I was writing one-offs and couldn't see the potential usefulness (much less justify spending money).

It is a very nice app if it fits your workflow, give it a try, it changes the way you write. You can make tons of short stories, but I am going to try manuskript instead since I have linux, its got a very nice interface.

People who need a level of compatibility with MSO that LibreOffice and OnlyOffice still can't offer.

Is that docx or did they make something worst? I never swapped to docx and just used .doc, although it supports docx as well. Not much use for me anyway, most people I know just use google docs.

It is somewhat common to see commits on LO git that says things like: "OOXML specify X, but MSO does Y."

Good compatibility with OOXML is extremely difficult. The specification is enormous, hard to understand and, even if you implement the specification, you have no guarantee that you'll get good compatibility with MSO documents.

I honestly just saved LO in .doc and never had an issue when I needed office docs, is this something end users have an issue with or is it more backend?

The issue most people have are formatting problems when opening OOXML docs in LO.

Considering that .doc is an older, simpler and had been frozen for a long time, maybe its compatibility is better. I'll try asking people that send me OOXML to convert it .doc the next time to see how better it is compatibility-wise.

Yeah I saw no reason to switch to docx, it was just slightly smaller, at the core its a lock in that zipped document files (I don't care about being a few kb smaller) and caused more problems (some people didn't have office 2007 even years after it had been out) when sharing so I never saw a point to using it. It benefitted nobody and caused more pain.

It did benefit microsoft. Once the format became an ISO standard, many governments were free to use it. Also, by being "open", they had less chance of being threatened of abusing their monopoly position.

This whole problem is irritating to me because I feel like:

1. Half of the time people use a word processor, they don't actually need one (plain text would be find)

2. When people really need to format something for print, word processors do a shitty job anyway

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