How to run PowerPoint and Excel? I'm stuck with these for work?
I've used Linux for 25+ years and my reaction is always to do my best with the options I have, but in those cases when it's not enough I just say "I'm sorry but I can't edit this document" or "sorry but some of the formatting was lost when I saved this in libreoffice".
The thing is that I'm a senior Linux specialist so people accept my excuses because they generally need my work.
What new features are Microsoft bringing out that are that critical for LibreOffice et al to catch up with?
I can’t think of much which I use that wasn’t already available in Office 95 which was released 30 years ago.
Aside from OOXML (which isn’t nearly as open as the name suggests) and the ribbon bar (which i personally hate), there hasn’t really been any big innovations.
The only features I can think of are:
- better security model for marcos. But that was only needed because MS Office was insecure to begin with so not really relevant here either
- Unicode support
- more rows in excel (though generally once you start reaching that point, the memory footprint of Excel becomes too great to make working on that spreadsheet practical)
The real issue with LibreOffice isn’t new features. It’s the subtle rending and parsing quirks when working on OOXML documents. But that’s likely Microsoft’s fault and thus OOXML working as intended.
I don’t doubt there’s been plenty of new features. But are they significant enough that users on older versions or non-MS suites are left longing for the latest version of Excel?
I just don’t think there is much innovation left. Or at least not without changing the UX and/or paradigm significantly. Neither of which have happened.
Albeit I wouldn’t say they’re significant enough that LibreOffice would struggle to keep up.
But it is nice to see that Excel is still working on basic quality of life features.
I'm not even sure this is true. Isn't there some company (or more) like Collabora behind most of the dev work right now?
A office specific winapps fork : https://github.com/eylenburg/linoffice/
That is what we are supposed to do at work.
Or try running via Wine.
You could also try LibreOffice or OnlyOffice and see if the documents are readable / writable.
Failing all that the web versions might work just fine.
Excel really depends - if you're using it as a glorified document with a table, then libreoffice will do fine. If you need compatibility and more advanced features, or your whole company runs on excel like a financial corp - there's no alternative. VM in that case.
I use ~~Office 365~~ the Microsoft 365 Copilot App online all the time on Debian at work.
As far as compatibility goes, OnlyOffice is fairly good at it, more geared towards MS-compatibility than LibreOffice, which is more of its own thing (and pretty good at that).