Hacker News Reader

Comment by grogenaut | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't get my spouse to try till her computer died, I installed it and said try for a day, I had to use linux to fix the computer (not a lie). See how it goes. She's a gimp wizard now (odd sentence). And very flexible on oses. The only killer app for her is excel on windows. "mac excel is crap". yes honey, yes it is.

View on HN

I don’t know enough about the advanced parts of Excel so I am a little curious; is the browser version of Excel crappy?

The browser version is limited in the ways you’d expect. The Mac OS native version is limited in ways you can’t comprehend. Until you realize they’re fighting apple for enterprise contracts.

yeah there are big limitations on the browser version compared to desktop excel, but mostly in power user areas.

Which for an application like Excel, is really the only stuff that matters.

Because Excel is actually pretty awful software. But! You can use it as a database and application and hack something together and throw it on a shared drive somewhere.

If you lose that second stuff, there's no reason left to use Excel.

Has she tried LibreOffice Calc?

yes, it's not excel for windows. it's different. if she's hitting those differences she might as well a) run excel in a vm or b) learn another tool like sheets that's more acessible/sharable, or python.

it also doesn't work with some of her old workbooks or with her mom's copy of excel

Have you tried LibreOffice Calc? It’s so quirky and different from proper Excel. I would never recommend this to a family member, no matter how much better Linux is to Windows. In fact, the office suite is probably the only reason I might consider not recommending Linux.

I mean, it gets the job done but nothing is convenient. The UI looks like a Christmas tree and still everything you need to do is found several sub-menus down in confusing dialogs, like in Excel pre-ribbon times. And for the love of god, please don’t say that ribbon spoiled everything, that discussion was boring even 10 years ago. Since then, state of the art has evolved beyond that.

For small scale household data, the web version of excel is good enough and has an easier UI. For larger scale, duckdb and some python.

Fwiw, I fully agree with you. Any MS Office between 2000 and 2013 was consistent and easy to use with some experience. LibreOffice is not. It has such a strange UI and has needlessly complicated or convoluted ways to do things. It feels like waterfall/checklist software where everything "is technically possible".

I switched to OnlyOffice even though its capabilities are extremely limited for any non-trivial use case.

> Have you tried LibreOffice Calc?

It's my daily driver ever since...

> ribbon spoiled everything

Reply on news.ycombinator.com