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Comment by niggler | Hacker News Reader

We need a real competitor to google docs, especially the spreadsheets.

There is one: Excel (Live) or Excel (Desktop).

Try it if you haven't already by creating a Windows Live account and visiting http://skydrive.live.com and clicking the Create button at the top. You can do Word, OneNote, Excel and PowerPoint.

LibreOffice. It's old-school local app though, not cloud.

There are several other Free Software tools that will provide spreadsheet compatibility, Gnumeric being among my favorite. Also the KDE office suite, KOffice.

I'd like LibreOffice if it wasn't so clunky. It's entirely lacking polish and quality control. It has potential, but it's not there yet.

I'll admit I pretty much only use it when I must for comparability. Otherwise my preference is plain text (vim) over word processors, awk for Excel, with lighter utilities (abiword, numeric, koffice) or specialized tool (lyx) standing in for more specific tasks.

To be honest, I too used the same toolset as you for a long time, but since Office 2007, it's just not been worth it for me. I have to share a lot of documents and information with people who don't understand the UNIX tools so it's not practical.

I'd like to have a longer discussion on the topic with you. Check my user info and shoot me an email :)

They are working on a Web version called LibreOffice Online. I don't know the current state. But last year they already showed a quick demo.

Thanks.

I'd like to have a longer discussion on the topic with you. Check my user info and shoot me an email :)

especially the spreadsheets

Can you expand on that? (I work in this space.)

Googles ability to copy formulas across cells and automatically adjust them relative to their new postion is weak compared to Excel. Basic patterns work, but if you are doing anything complex, Google just doesn't do it.

Also, Google's formating possiblities are very limited compared to Excels. I run into this limitation frequently.

There are numerous other restraints I come up against with Google Sheets occasionally, but these 2 are the ones I miss almost every time I use it.

I have not spent a lot of time with Excel Live, so I am not sure how well it competes.

If you have any examples handy of the kinds of formula copying or formatting you're talking about, I'd love to hear them.

Conditional formatting in Google Spreadsheets is hopeless to the point of not being worth trying. It needs to work on a cell by cell basis, not just column/row. And you need to be able to overload cells with more than one rule.

This kills it for me as well. Also it's incredibly slow and glitchy even on Chrome.

Considering Office costs me less than 10GBP a month over 3 years, and works entirely offline, Google docs doesn't cut it.

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