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Comment by dcsommer | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have a good comparison between this and LibreOffice?

OnlyOffice seems to be the only FOSS office suite that handles Microsoft Office documents correctly.

When I open my Word docs in LibreOffice, they still look significantly different than in Word after all these years. In OnlyOffice they look exactly like in Word. So it replaced Word-in-Wine for me.

> When I open my Word docs in LibreOffice, they still look significantly different than in Word after all these years.

Huh, I've not had that issue with the documents I've worked with in the best part of a decade.

What is it that's different for you? Page layout, text wrapping/length, image support, table formatting? Something else?

What platform are you using, and if you're not on Windows do you have the equivalent-metric Liberation font families installed so that docs which rely on non-redistributable proprietary Microsoft fonts can be rendered properly?

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/09/08/libreoff...

Even a Times New Roman doc or one that bundles its fonts won't render right. It's pretty bad, actually - it was only really fixed by MS allowing saving as ODT.

The elephant in the room is excel not word IMO.

So how does OnlyOffice's Excel replacement compare?

in my recent (less than a year ago) experiments both struggled with excel files in different ways (some content missing), so can't be trusted as a drop-in-replacement, at least not for already existing documents.

> OnlyOffice seems to be the only FOSS office suite that handles Microsoft Office documents correctly.

I remember also looking at WPS Office for this and it seemed mostly okay to me: https://www.wps.com/office/ (though no source code available, at least it doesn't seem so)

Then again, LibreOffice feels like the most trustworthy option out there for me (and is the default in many Linux distros), so I ended up just using that, any drawbacks and all. Nowadays I use LibreOffice on all my computers and have basically gotten rid of MS Office altogether. If I ever need to send someone something that looks consistent across all devices, there's PDF/A.

I've actually used PDFs for presentations as well with no issues, especially after the inconsistencies of LibreOffice Impress and PowerPoint made one of my past presentations look like an utter mess on someone else's computer (fonts/locations were all wrong).

Only Office can run in a cloud-based capacity. Think Office 365 that is able to be self-hosted.

You can also self-host Office: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeonlineserver/office-...

The protocol that connects the office suite to the file sharing platform is called WOPI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Application_Open_Platform_...). OneDrive/Dropbox/Nextcloud all seem to support it.

Seems like Collabora and OnlyOffice are the two big players right now.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_...

There have been various efforts to bring LibreOffice to the web, but I haven’t tested anything in a long time, so I can’t say if it works well.

They work quite well, I've been using it (Collabora + "richdocuments" in Nextcloud) for a number of years now.

Why would you want to?

One reason is that it’s more convenient to use on computers you don’t own and can’t install software on, and other is you can share things with people without them needing to install it to view or edit your documents

OK, the first one I can understand. The second one... installing an open-source package that runs on almost everything doesn't seem like that big a deal.

But those are reasonable answers. I would rather see engineering effort go into fixing bugs in the suite, but I realize that the people volunteering to "Web-enable" the software aren't necessarily the ones who'd be fixing unrelated bugs.

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