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Comment by nologic01 | Hacker News Reader

I wish Libreoffice would have smelled the coffee long time ago. In principle scripting using Python is possible but exceedingly cumbersome/ugly and there seems to be no roadmap to improve on this.

The same warning applies to the linux desktop and all its apps more generally. Increasingly proprietary platforms will be rolling out advanced "AI" functionality extensions to classic apps that are cloud based, many of them via a Python API.

Its a pity that the various strands of the open source universe are so siloed. The potential of the sum being more than the parts is squandered.

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I think in a lot of cases its not even the advanced stuff that keeps people on Excel and other proprietary things. It's the seemingly little things.

My biggest beef with LibreOffice's spreadsheet (and with Apple's Numbers) is how they handle copy/paste of discontiguous selections.

Consider this 5 row by 3 column set of data:

Suppose you select the 1 2 3 row, the 7 8 9 row, and the a b c row, copy them, and paste just below the d e f row. In Excel you get this (first 4 rows omitted for brevity):

In LibreOffice and Numbers you get this (empty cells denoted by "-"):

  d e f
  1 2 3
  - - -
  7 8 9
  a b c

I haven't found a setting to change this. Excel doesn't have a setting for this either as far as I know, so people who do want discontiguous copy/paste to preserve spacing would probably be as irked by Excel as I am by LibreOffice and Numbers. But I don't think I've ever actually wanted the spacing preserved so it is LibreOffice and Numbers that irk me.

I get the same result in LibreOffice 7.5.5 as your Excel example. Which LibreOffice version did you use?

7.5.5.2 on MacOS.

The only thing I can think of is macOS clipboard manager somehow interfering with the copied data. Was testing on Linux kf5 UI.

Also, I can preserve the empty row, if I paste with Ctrl+Shift+Alt+V (Edit - Paste Special - Paste Unformatted Text). This opens the Text Import dialog.

You've solved it!

I turned off the clipboard history app I use and now LibreOffice pastes like Excel.

The history app I use is 10 years old and I see that the company that made it apparently is no longer around (or at least their domain no longer works) so I guess I should get a newer clipboard history app.

Great to hear :)

Re: a new clipboard app, I often see people recommending CopyQ, which is cross-platform: https://github.com/hluk/CopyQ

To me Excel's behaviour is way more problematic here. I carefully select the data I want, and it silently includes irrelevant data as well. I don't want the spacing preserved, but I really don't want other random data included.

It doesn't include other random data. You select N rows, contiguous or discontiguous, and those are copied to N consecutive rows starting at the paste point.

It includes things that aren't selected, which is other random data. If I select, copy, and paste, the only desirable outcome is that I get a copy of my selection.

I don't understand what you mean. In my example I select the cells that contain 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c, then copy, then go somewhere else and paste, and Excel pastes 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c. I don't see an other data.

Try pasting into another app, like a text editor.

Umm... Libreoffice has shipped with Python scripting since almost forever.

Not many people care because the most popular use case of any office suite is to interoperate with Microsoft file formats.

To be honest, I don't even fully understand what are the use-cases for integrating python with spreadsheets right now. I use both of them separately for different things but cannot see what it can be good at doing in an integrated environment.

Isn't it simply a more mature language replacement for VBA scripting?

I use spreadsheets for all kinds of bookkeeping, and very often there's some data you need to fetch once when a new entry is created, be it stock prices from a webpage or calendar entries from Outlook. LibreOffice's python scripts are great for those cases, because the tooling is just plain better than VB. Alas, VB is still necessary for formulae.

Check out ScriptForge: https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/sbasic/shared...

APSO script organiser is recommended for running scripts from inside LibreOffice: https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/apso-a...

that's interesting, i see the opposite.

python is so easy to script that imo excel is nailing its own coffin. with an aging and retiring demographic of people that have never used a programming language, anyone who learns to incorporate python into excel will end up preferring python because its both more flexible and scalable.

i have no reason to use excel except for basic drawing board math, if someone demands a spreadsheet out me i automate its generation in python so i never have to deal with it again

I see spreedsheets more as an UI. An extremely intuitive (and reactive!) way of spatially decomposing computation. Yes, this creates lots of problems (you can not easily validate it etc.) but it is also very enabling. For sure more people are now exposed to programming, but how many are actually comfortable doing even simple stuff directly using code is a question mark.

A jupyter notebook is maybe somewhere in between. But even if other interfaces manage to bridge the gap further, I doubt the spreadsheet metaphor is going to go away in the visible future. Pivot tables and the like are like COBOL and mainframes :-) The corporate world would die a sudden death if you were to eliminate it (another reason to always make sure you can run things locally).

> with an aging and retiring demographic of people that have never used a programming language

This simply isn't true in any way and is completely divorced from modern businesses. Everybody I know who works in an office setting works with Excel. None of them know Python and none of them have touched a programming language. Almost all of them are younger than 30. And if anybody who's 20 starts at one of these companies, they'd better know Excel because that's what the business is built on. Not like that 20 year old is gonna know anything about programming either. 99% of people just aren't programmers and aren't going to learn programming when they just want to futz around with some numbers and the easiest (yet also the most powerful) tool they know for it is a spreadsheet.

If somebody in any business, anywhere, at any point wants to do something with numbers, they're going to use Excel.

Not a chance. There's nothing scary about VBA (except its inflexibility and lack of a lot of modern features), and people aren't learning that either. Of course, the last decade of vaguely threatening to remove it from Office completely (in favor of js and now python?) hasn't helped people think VBA would be a good investment of their time to learn. A required internet connection and having Python only work on Windows doesn't make it look like much better of an investment.

Also, imo, Python and whatever random environments and libraries that you'll have to use with it to get your work done, will be in almost every way worse than just using VBA. And if you use VBA, your work will be effortlessly portable. The only problem I have with it is that I have to come up with ways to get the code out of the embedded IDE into source control, but there are scripts that help.

> i have no reason to use excel except for basic drawing board math, if someone demands a spreadsheet out me i automate its generation in python so i never have to deal with it again

I, on the other hand, do it in VBA, and expose every important calculation within clearly labeled spreadsheets so programming-illiterate people can audit them and feel confident about the output.

This comment seems out of touch with why people use Excel. The fact is, Excel is popular because it manages to be pretty easy to use, while also being extraordinarily powerful and flexible. For most users, they'll ask "why would I program something in Python when Excel has a built in function to handle that?"

> i have no reason to use excel except for basic drawing board math

I think you underestimate the amount of work, globally, done in Excel. If Excel vanished it would be a business/economic extinction level event, It's not going anywhere.

LibreOffice has plenty of other problems to knock out first.

Its so slow.

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