Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

Andrew_nenakhov

I have. Been using OpenOffice.org / LibreOffice since 2005, started business in 2007, never ever had a copy of MS office.

I LAUGH at silly FUD like "you can't run a business without MSOffice", "You can't read documents ", "format compatibility problems!!", because that all is just FUD.

If I ever (rarely, maybe 4 times total) receive a price file or spec that is unreadable by LibreOffice, I just ask to resend it to me in some open format cause I lack the software to open their proprietary file. And I did received it in a PDF or .odt every single time I asked.

That said, I liked the software more in their OOo days. When it became LibreOffice it became somehow more buggy and ugly. OOo with the right icon pack was very neat and had a superior interface to MSOffice. LibreOffice icons got uglified and are no longer pleasant to look at, and combined all looks... Worse.

Their online efforts are also disastrously bad. LibreOffice Online is based on a flawed idea to run LO on a server and deliver rendered images to a user. It works super shitty bad. They should have just made a web-first editor for OpenDocument file format, with concurrent editing. (Maybe when I'm finally done with the XMPP I'll look for funding to make just this. ... )

> I LAUGH at silly FUD like "you can't run a business without MSOffice", "You can't read documents ", "format compatibility problems!!", because that all is just FUD.

Not really a FUD if you're dealing with Excel spreadsheets from other companies, especially those that uses integrations with Excel. However PowerPoint/Present compat is a hit-or-miss bother but not world-shuttering like with Excel though, and Word compatibility is actually okay except when dealing with weirder documents that is also fragile with different Word versions.

When I used to work on publishing government reports we used to run into strange formatting issues if we didn’t stick with the Windows version of Office 365. Could we have worked around them with multiple versions or LibreOffice etc? Sure, but it would take time and at at $150-$350 and hour per contractor its not worth it. Just provision the licenses and be done with it.

If there are excel integrations with third party SW you arguably have additional issues, even with M$ Excel

I find that some of the models I get sent by the team won't open properly in LibreOffice Calc, so definitely agree with this. I very rarely get Writer / Impress compatibility issues, however.

If you are disproving wide claims like "you can't run a business without MSOffice", even one contrary example is enough to make the claim invalid. Of course, I can imagine some scenarios where compatibility with a proprietary format world impede business processes, but I think that for a vast majority of businessess it is a non-issue.

Regarding the presentation format, the One True Format is PDF.

> If you are disproving wide claims like "you can't run a business without MSOffice", even one contrary example is enough to make the claim invalid.

That's not how rhetoric works. That is how logic works, but this is not a logical argument. One counterexample does not disprove the rhetorical claim that businesses do not run without Microsoft Office, because rhetorical claims are not hard logical claims. They are exemplar claims. They are to be backed up for most cases, and caveats will exist.

Rhetorically, most businesses do processing through Excell files. You will receive them from B2B partners. You will be required to send them to businesses and governments. They will have weird advanced features and logic embedded, and if you do not make use of all of the features and send something back to the other side that works perfectly, partners will drop you like a hot potato.

Logically, it is possible to run a business that has no interaction with B2B partners, one that chooses partners carefully to never interact with Microsoft customers, etc. Rhetorically, this limits the possibilities for your business vastly. Rhetorically, the solution space you limit yourself to with that one constraint is infinitesimal compared to the standard problem space with standard constraints.

All arguments are rhetorical. Some arguments are logical in form but without an absolute truth evaluation engine (which is logically but not rhetorically impossible) you cannot hope to evaluate them, since you'll be starting from some axioms. We cannot prove axioms, even within the pure spaces of logic and mathematics there are still axioms; you cannot prove a system using itself. This is the oft-cited and almost as oft misused (Rhetorically: always misused) incompleteness theorem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompletenes...

Unrelated to the argument, but related to your arguing: you might enjoy "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance"

I found their comment more interesting and valuable than yours. Just a data point.

You might also enjoy the book if you enjoy conversation about rhetoric.

"When it became LibreOffice it became somehow more buggy and ugly."

Matter of taste - I quite like the current interface. I've just fired up Writer and it actually reminds me of Word 2 with a much higher resolution and a lot of polish. There's just enough functionality exposed via buttons and no more. There are menus with loads of functions and they are sensibly laid out.

LO is being developed at a remarkable pace. The codebase they forked from Apache that came from SO was pretty wank and had some fairly odd things going on. It's a massive job and I really like their direction.

The end result has just worked for me for at least five years now with no friction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com