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Comment by kemotep | Hacker News Reader

It’s more that I on occasion need to run Windows applications. Modern Office 365 doesn’t work with Wine and the web version doesn’t support the features needed.

When they fully merge the desktop app and web version of Office, I won’t need to boot into Windows ever again.

9/10 I use my computer, everything I do works in Linux. That 1 time out 10 is what forces me to pay for a Windows License and a copy of Microsoft Office. I’ll still pay Microsoft a license but I would no longer need to manage a dual boot to log into Windows to use Office when the occasion rises.

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Do you need some advanced features of Office? LibreOffice is pretty good, nobody amongst my clients know I use it as we exchange documents. It’s pretty seamless!

There is no replacement for Excel in many cases. Otherwise I agree.

i want to know beyond macros, where else is libreoffice lacking behind excel ?

i have been daily driving calc for a long time now and with each update it feels like they are fixing that one bug i did not remember last time but it is fixed this time.

yeah, then there is power query and power stuff but other than that, i mean for regular people at home or "regular" office stuff, this should be enough, what do you think?

For home use sure, libreoffice or Mac pages or even Google spreadsheet is adequate.

I do a bunch of financial modeling in excel and the custom formatting, formula construction and sheer number of formulas are useful — saves me from jumping to just writing a program. Honestly, writing a program would be easier for me, but the presentation would be a pain, especially losing the excel UX that lets someone else do “what if”.

Word has that same level of complexity or more, but it gets in the way. It’s easier to write a latex doc.

As far as I (not the OP) am concerned, it's mostly not that I need some advanced feature of Office, it's that a document I get from someone else uses some advanced (layout) features or some fonts which aren't available on Linux, and then the document appears completely garbled.

I need a copy of the Windows desktop version of Microsoft Excel for a specific add on for my wife uses for a class. Even the MacOS version is not compatible with this add on. Convincing people not to use Microsoft specific Excel features that don’t work anywhere else is not the easiest thing. It’s quite calcified. I would probably have an easier time teaching pigs to fly.

You don't really need to pay of Windows nowadays as it can work indefinitely without Activation.

It looks pretty unprofessional to have a watermark whenever you record your screen. Like I said, literally the only thing keeping Windows in my house (literally could be using MacOS not just Linux) is a specific software compatibility that the current Windows versions of the Office desktop apps have. The extensions I need to use do not work on even Macs. So the ability to either stream a Microsoft desktop to any device or have full feature compatibility with the web version of Office is something I am looking forward to.

https://massgrave.dev/kms38.html

And now you won't even have to do that.

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