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Comment by mstipetic | Hacker News Reader

I’m all for open source but suggesting libre office is perfect is a bit too much for me

It is not perfect, but in a number of areas it is significantly better than MS Office, and this has been the case since it was still OpenOffice back in 2005: I'd import collaborative schoolwork into Open Office to fix the mismatch of styles that other students had used[1] and then (to be fair) I'd export it back to Word format and do final formatting in Word to get the exact layouts and page numering options that was demanded from us.

Today MS Office is still broken in a number of crazy ways. One of the most annoying ones is that if whoever packages and deploys Office to our computers use localization for the user interface, suddenly all formulas are in some broken local language variant making it next to impossible to search for it.

If I know the solution with standard Excel language it is doable to translate it to this broken "Norwegian BASIC" language, it is just really really annoying.

A quick and easy solution then is to write it in Libre Office Calc, export it to xls and import it and done.

With Libre Office I can also choose if I want cute "Ribbon" menus or easy-to-use menus.

List probably goes on, this was just the things from the top of my head.

[1]because it felt almost impossible to do in an efficient way in MS Office even if I had significantly more experience with it)

Good enough for the vast majority. Just not the ones making the decisions. And when it is changed, you have to fight all m$ because it keeps breaking formats and compatibility let alone standardisation with others.

Perfect for 98% of the things government officials are using Word, Excel and PowerPoint for...

If you have a spreadsheet with macros that are anything more than the most basic, you can't run it in Calc. It's not that trivial.

The 2% ...And your company logic should not be in the Macros.

"The Wall of Shame for the Worst Excel Errors" - https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t...

Right, so your argument is that this is easy, and if it turns out that it's not, we'll just be smug and tell them that they were holding it wrong all along?

It sounds like you are picturing in your head that all spreadsheet work is greenfield. Do you have any idea how much Excel code is embedded everywhere? Very often made by people who are no longer around. You can lecture all you want, but this is the situation. I don't like it either.

Relax...the weekend almost here... :-)

Did not intend to be smug...honestly..not really. :-) In my defense, I have more than 20 years corporate experience in tech AND finance domains, in more than 25 countries. And in the cultural domains of the five different languages I am familiar and whose grammar I regularly brutalize. Can't recognize the problem you are describing, as the mountain that would stop any company from start using LibreOffice.

All that logic in Excel sheets is just a serious governance problem...

"How an Excel error cost JP Morgan $6 billion" - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eriklidman_how-an-excel-error...

LibreOffice works for 99.99% of the cases where Microsoft Office is being used. Moreover, NextCloud offers a free "LibreOffice on the web" capability if you prefer.

Oh, BTW. Nextcloud is also nice. Very nice.

Edit: Looks like Owncloud guys have arrived (just joking, I like them equally).

I got access to a NextCloud instance as part of my Hetzner storage.

Setting up access for my wife was easy. Adding "apps" to my nextcloud instance was easy. Sharing storage, playing with a Kanban board, editing documents, it all just works.

I'm very impressed with nextcloud, I had no idea it was so good!

Installing it on a bare metal server is equally easy. Not a walk in the park, but half a day at most, with server optimizations and polish.

It updates nicely too. I'm managing one for ~4 years now, and it's painless.

Nobody calls for me for support either. I think this is, good?

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