Comment by skopje | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skopje | Hacker News Reader

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I switched from Google Docs to Libre Office a few months ago. I'm surprised how buggy LO is, because I tried it a decade ago and it doesn't seem to have gotten any better. I don't plan on going back to MS or Google, but I am very frustrated with the number of bugs in LO's spreadsheets, so I try to keep my sheets simple and CTRL-S a LOT!

Examples: [1] I selected a range of cells recently, by clicking and dragging, and when I let go of the mouse button, all of the selected cells shifted up and to the right by one cell, and CTRL-Z didn't undo it! [2] I have a workbook and when i duplicate a sheet with a chart, the chart is blank, so i have to delete it and re-insert a new one. [3] Sometimes the left-hand X-axis is cut in half, and I have no idea why, but if I create a new doc it goes away. I really, really want to promote LO, but it is very buggy. I can deal with it but I don't think others would.

Please report the issues as Libreoffice developers would like to know how to improve it. Might I also suggest trying ONLYOFFICE, it really looks and feels like MS Office. I am not a heavy Office user so I never run into issues but this one 'looks' professional.

I use LO for its word processor fairly extensively and have been pretty happy with it, but for spreadsheets I am 100% on team gnumeric---it is rock solid, less buggy than Excel itself, and supports a lot of Excel formulas and formatting better than MS's own web client.

thanks for the suggestion i just installed it (macos). it solved problem #2, I'll have to wait and see what happens with #1 and #3. I like it but it's like going to a new grocery store and everything is in a different place than i am used to thanks!

Glad you liked it! For charts in particular, I find gnumeric to be more solid than any other spreadsheet software I've tried (including Excel)—the charts are more stable and more configurable, and there are options for more of them (e.g. histograms, which are something I frequently want and Excel just doesn't support, or at least didn't used to). Downside: once you've got a spreadsheet with really informative charts, it's sometimes hard to share, because saving it as .xlsx breaks some of them. :(

Oh, another nifty feature of gnumeric: if you save it in its uncompressed format, it's literally .xml (good both for version control and for scripting certain kinds of things)

If I have to use a spreadsheet, I prefer Gnumeric. I don’t have any solid evidence, it just seems less buggy generally.

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