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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

Hm, I don't think online tools are that far ahead. If I look at the horrible experience, which is Google docs or MS Office 365, especially their word processing parts, they lack behind soooo much compared to a tool like Libreoffice. You cannot even properly use styles and, if I got a few $currency for every silly bug I encountered in those online half-assed tools, I would probably work half time only. If that experience is anything to go by for the design space, then I would rather work offline and without collaboration, than having to worry about my whole document getting completely messed up by some silly bug.

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> If I look at the horrible experience, which is Google docs or MS Office 365, especially their word processing parts, they lack behind soooo much compared to a tool like Libreoffice. You cannot even properly use styles…

As a reasonably serious user of Office 365 and someone who's desperately wanted to like LibreOffice, I'm not sure what you could mean by "properly use styles". I'm guessing this is specifically a critique of the Word web app, but the native Office apps also do "online, live collaboration", and it all generally just works. Even Apple's overlooked suite feels more mature (and offers a dramatically better user experience) than LibreOffice.

Libre office is pretty much the only game in town on Linux. Well excepting the web based office suites. I really like it, especially for csv files which it works great for.

I tried Gnumeric for a bit. When sorting, the formats stay in the cells they were, but the content moves.

That said, AbiWord is a serious lightweight contender to Writer.

FreeOffice works great on Linux. Same as on Windows and the Mac.

(https://www.freeoffice.com/en/)

There is also OnlyOffice: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE which I have not personally tried yet.

LibreOffice is great, but it's not comparable to commercial desktop word processors.

However, it's far, far better than any browser-based one I've used.

Depends on what you want to do... I find LibreOffice fine because if I want to create documents that are actually complex I'm going to reach for InDesign or LaTeX. I don't find something like Microsoft Word really much better for anything I'd want to do with it than LibreOffice.

This is what I've arrived at too.

If I just want to make notes, I'll use Org or Markdown in plain text. These can also be converted to HTML for web.

If I want to print something with lots of text, nothing beats LaTeX.

If I am making something design intensive, I'll use Scribus or some other desktop publishing software.

I guess regular people think of word processors as the Swiss army knife here: does everything, not particularly well, but worth only having to learn one software?

Hey now it’s unfair to limit this to just their online verions. I have reproducible word bugs that date back to word 2007.

Microsoft in my opinion is a company that writes good core logic followed by trainwreck UI/UX teams only eclipsed in their destructive cabability by the user hostile marketing and profit department who keep trying to get me to do stuff like upload sensitive documents to OneDrive through some absolutely intended bad UI, or default to the most expensive resource selection in Azure every time you hit the back button on their forms.

In contrast to your anecdote, I have never had issues with Google docs. It has always just worked, reasonably clean interface. I'm not sure what elaborate styling you need, but it seems serviceable for when you need a basic document which I imagine is most peoples use case. Also the collaboration is actually very useful. The same reason I use overleaf as an interface for a lot of my LaTeX projects. I can quickly share and get updates, they just have to open their browser instead of download pdf > open it in their pdf viewer > make comments > send it back etc. The web interface is great for people that do not use git etc.

G Docs is fine but very basic. Great for sharing and collaboration, not great for exercising precise control over the document.

I don’t know what precise control you need over the document in the use case served by Google docs.

That’s exactly the problem; Google Docs’ use case is only “share a basic document and collaborate on the words.”

It’s not capable of creating precise or maintainable documents (e.g. no styles as others have mentioned), which is a very common need that it’s adjacent enough to that lots of people use it for and then it fails.

What is a style? Are you trying to create a poster or do some graphic design? Some weird xml style sheet thing? Yes it’s not for that, but then also doing that in libre office or word also sounds horrible and unmaintainable.

To define a custom style in a word processing context means to define "a group of settings that I can apply at will to parts of the text".

That is, I should be able to define a "Code block" style that should appear in the same dropdown where google docs lets you select heading levels. When I select that "Code block" style, the app should format the selected bit of text according to the syte's definition. For instance: use a monospace typeface, apply some margins to this paragraph and paint a gray background on it.

Likewise, I should be able to update the style definition and all code blocks should update accordingly.

This is very basic functionality that has existed in word processors since... forever. Large and/or more complex documents are simply much much more painful to maintain/evolve without this feature.

To add on to your well laid out points, many companies have "house styles" embedded into their templates that allow a consistent look and feel. GDocs lack of support for these makes it a non-starter.

I feel the same about GDocs. And GSheets is just insane. I have mixed feelings about Google but they knock it out of the park with their drive tools.

gsheets is hilariously slow compared to excel, once you start getting into larger files.

Gsheets offers some formulas I found quite useful and would be a pain to replicate in Excel.

Excel has lambdas now.

Excel formulas have a horrible 1970:ish syntax. Reminds me of BASIC programming. But typically I get the job done, sometimes after several awkward intermediate steps.

I wasn't aware that Google has a different one. I have never used more than simple sums and differences in Google sheets. Can you give an example where Google offers better, incompatible functionality?

For example, QUERY [1], SPLIT [2] and ARRAYFORMULA [3] are the ones that comes to mind. To be fair MS Excel can do arrayformulas, but I prefer GSheet's syntax. Last time I tried Excel, TRANSPOSE wasn't a thing it but it seems to be there now.

[1]: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343

[2]: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3094136

[3]: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093275

excel is fully programmable with vba.

Google docs is also reportedly terrible for working with sizeable documents.

gsheets lets me collaborate with others in real-time and share with others very easily. When you think about “performance”, you have to consider more than just the immediate steps taken while in the application. If you think about the entire end-to-end experience, gdrive is so much faster and seamless.

office 365 offers "co-authoring" and easy sharing as well. You're talking about something excel already has.

But working on large files is ridiculously painful. It's just not as as good as a native app. I don't want to give up my ability to work on large files in a performant fashion, which I do all the time, in exchange for collaboration support I do occasionally but a worse overall experience and frustrating lag compared to a native application.

Google Docs cannot even add custom styles. And if you open word file with custom styles, it just… removes all of them.

Meanwhile LibreOffice is way better than the original MS Word in my opinion.

Word 97 was amazing and leagues beyond LibreOffice, IMO. The best part is that the entire installed size of word 97 is like 50mb!

Wonder how it works in Wine.

Perfectly, according to test results! :P https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...

This is a really interesting opinion. Would you mind elaborating?

I don’t really use either Word or LibreOffice much as my needs are really simple, (I mostly get away with just plaintext tools).

What is it that separates these two for you?

Is it some specific missing features you rely on or something to do with UX?

I periodically check on LibreOffice to see if it's usable and typically I don't last more than a minute or two without hitting a major show-stopper. Last time I tried LibreOffice Writer, the text didn't render until after I stopped typing. The time before that, LibreOffice Calc took 3 seconds to begin editing any cell.

It's a common problem with Open Source: who does the slog work of testing, tracking down, and fixing the simple bugs and perf issues? Evidently, LibreOffice doesn't have enough maintainer cycles to have good coverage of common setups. It's unfortunate and as a developer I feel for them, but as a user it makes paying Microsoft an easy choice.

The original comment was about the design space, and I have to agree: Inkscape is stuck behind. Figma is a very high quality product, actually fewer bugs or issues than its offline counterparts.

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