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Comment by tempnow987 | Hacker News Reader

Quick question - I'd love to migrate (or at least allow option to migrate for those who want to) from Windows. However, we are dependent on Office (Word and Excel).

Any recommendations on the best folks to pay on the libreoffice side to squash some formatting bugs etc for complex word docs. I filed the bugs (or found them). But it's hard to move over until we can get of office. If we could port some vba code over even better.

Alternatively was looking at google docs which seems a bit re-invigorated - historically as high complexity word users it didn't have the features we needed (sections, styles, styles in tables with alignment details for numbers etc) We have some VBA we can work around I think (or in Libreoffice perhaps replicate or even surpass).

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Honestly I'd recommend Google Docs but the truth is, if you are an Excel power user there is really nothing quite like it without taking that next jump into SQL or something like Python/R. Google Sheets will let you use SQLite though which is cool.

I personally am starting to feel that tools are secondary and restrictions imposed by the office environment come first. You want to be able to jump between them as needed, because heavens know my place won't let me openly use Python.

Google's version of Excel has come a long way. Worth checking out again. The thing you're missing though is the shortcuts which are very important for heavy Excel users. I never understood why the open source excel clones didn't focus on shortcuts. If they could build an interface to map your own, someone could create a shortcut profile to mimic Excel, or even your own shortcut profile. That would be a game changer

Even the shortcuts on Mac are different for Excel. Sounds crazy (maybe is crazy) but that’s a jarring blow to productivity and surely intentional. If you have used excel for any length of time, you really depend on shortcuts. I probably store them in the same memory registers as the Contra cheat codes, never to be forgotten.

Google Sheets is quite decent now but still struggles with large files (or simply can't open them).

Eh moving from Microsoft to Google is just moving from Beelzebub to Asmodeus.

What is annoying is that office is starting to do little cross promo's - try downloading this app to your iphone, you can edit office anywhere.

If you log into a number of machines, you see these same alerts everywhere.

Google seems less obtrusive with this stuff.

That said, yes, if I could get to open source I would.

Google Docs still lacks some pretty basic and important features. You can't number headings and figures automatically for example. There's no cross-referencing.

>> Any recommendations on the best folks to pay on the libreoffice side to squash some formatting bugs etc for complex word docs.

These guys contribute a lot to LibreOffice, and also have their own offerings: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/

I haven't looked, but I think their work ends up upstream eventually.

Looks interesting but why the fuck don't they have pricing on their site, seems they're one of those companies that wants you to talk to a salesperson so they can decide how much you can afford to pay.

They do seem to have pricing for <99 users

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/subscriptions/

Yes, they directly support LibreOffice development. I purchased a small set of licenses from a reseller (I'm too small for purchasing directly) to support their efforts.

Interesting - ADMX templates really is trying to address the business users use case.

We are < 100 so they have relevant pricing.

I'll download and see how it handles some of our documents if they have a trial. And they do seem to have a consultancy.

Would Office Online do the trick if Libre Office / upgrading to different tools ( instead of advanced Excel, SQLite, etc.) don't?

Google Docs seems like a downgrade. At least with Microsoft, your documents are just files. With Google, (the canonical versions of) your documents only exist within the context of Google's cloud applications.

You can always export as open-format files or Office-formatted files. The re-import of those works quite well (including things like excel comments, etc).

Interop is so good I almost don't notice until I run into something like an embedded doc or something I can't open in GDocs (which I then have to download as the office doc to extract).

Just use Office on a Mac? That’s not complicated…

An accountant I know says its a pain as many of the keyboard shortycuts are not the same.

I use O365 on MacOS for my job and I prefers to use O365 on Windows than macOS. macOS version does not have a full feature parity as Windows. There are features that are vital in Excel that are missing in macOS version, like PowerQuery, PowerBI, etc. Also, it is missing few basic features that are not presented in macOS version.

like stuaxo commented, the shortcuts are not the same in macOS.

And I noticed that macOS version tends to be delayed UI response. If I click to apply the color fill, it takes Excel about 5 seconds to process my input and apply the color fill in the cell whereas in Windows is instant. I noticed the same UI behavior in Word as well. They just seemingly take time to take my input and apply it. I believe it is largely due to x86 code, O365 current stable version only have x86 which it relies on Rosetta2 to do the work. They have ARM version in the work, I think it is in beta stage.

Why not use Office for Mac?

Have you tried Onlyoffice? They use MS format as their defaults and promise good compatibility. They use JavaScript in their macros though, and their official recommendation is to convert them manually - so it's not a drop-in replacement.

Or if you looked at Google Docs, how about Microsoft's online editors? Unfortunately, again, no macro support.

Word isn't so hard to replace, with some teething, but you're going to have problems replacing Excel. Nothing else is at feature parity, and converted xls documents emerge looking pretty gnarly.

Nothing works well for large documents not even word but it’s the best

Latex does....

https://usebottles.com

I’ve not tested Microsoft apps personally (I use LibreOffice).

Can you run them in a VM? Or even WINE?

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