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Comment by savant2 | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less advanced than Google Workspace or Microsoft Office but it would cover all of my needs at work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_s...

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Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.

For layouts and opening docs from other suites, it seems they rely on OnlyOffice, as listed on the marketing page of their Google Drive equivalent [1]. OpenDesk from ZenDiS (German counterpart to this project, also collaborating on La Suite) seems to rely on Nextcloud and Collabora Online for that [2]. Collabora and OnlyOffice are also present in Lasuite Drive's development environment [3].

Docs and Drive aren't the only products in this suite: they also provide alternative for Meet, Chat, GMail or Sheets. I have no doubt that Microsoft and Google products offer more features but my point still stands: a lot of employees (like myself) need productivity tools but only need the core features.

[1] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/fichiers

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesk

[3] https://github.com/suitenumerique/drive/blob/46c9730d1b6d5c4...

Work being done in offices is changing over time. I find myself writing less documents for printing and more for collaborating and sharing directly.

Even though many formal processes still require printable PDFs, we are slowly migrating to something paperless, or at least not paper-centric.

Spot on this is what we aimed for. Office tools were meant to be printed to be shared. Or at least exported. When you think of it it’s really bad for information security. On the plus side doing everything in the browser manipulating jsons is you get to do way better real time collab and can include a lot more interactive content.

Even when using google docs, I dropped the paper format, and at that point it's better to edit/read in a richer editor like Confluence which has better support for interactive widgets, expand zones, code blocks, etc. It's also been better at navigating a tree of documents.

Google docs is still great when you need to make something you mean to print, it just tends to not be that often anymore.

I even use markdown shortcuts to format in google docs nowadays.

> (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc)

Not being Microsoft Office®-compatible does not make something not an office suite. In that case, there is (by design) only one Office® suite in the world

> not a wiki/markdown editor

I was wondering if you meant WYSIWYG editing as opposed to markdown editing, but then you say

> La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence

which is WYSIWYG (the best web-based wysiwyg editor I've ever used, in fact; even if I'd never choose it for being a vendor lock-in that has shown they want to own your data by removing the self-hosted options, maybe with exceptions for giant enterprises idk but at least we had to migrate and it wasn't fun)

so then what are you saying? What makes an 'office suite' an office suite to you?

Not the OP, but I would think most people would expect to see a word processor, a spreadsheet, some kind of presentation tool, and maybe a simple database. That's not just comparing to MS Office, that's LibreOffice as well? La Suite seems to have more and better collaboration tools than LO, but it is also less document-focused, just looking through their repos.

> Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.

In the last 10 years I've been spending much more time at the office consulting and editing confluence and web pages (sharepoint / mkdocs / readme and other markdown based resources) than the cumulative time spent on word, excel, powerpoint and pdf documents. I imagine it is the same for a significant portion of the population.

Also, libreoffice is already a thing and nobody edits office365 documents using the web versions except when their employer can't/don't want to pay the license for the full version or the client is not vailable on their OS (linux users). Libreoffice doesn't have that problem, you only really need storage with sharing facilities, not featurefull web clients for your docs.

markdown is superior in every way.

whatever doesn't map 1:1, imo just trash it.

if you can't do your work using markdown, you should be fired.

if i'm downvoted it is by people who deserve to be fired.

How do you do nested tables in markdown?

For the gaps they'll find, I'm sure they can use open source alternatives considering they're getting away from proprietary software.

If not, they can adapt.

I guess I am a markdown hater, but I don't like it. Markdown feels too much like hand writing your own html, when you have to put in tags, but like html it suffers from lack of layout control, which is why they invented CSS, but you don't get CSS control in markdown. If you start adding that, you end up with LaTex, and I don't know anyone who actually enjoyed writing serious documents in Latex. It was fun in the beginning, but it quickly became tiresome and I found myself not being very productive.

Doing layout is not easy. Programming layouts well requires real expertise, which is why most layout engines expose a gui and let you deal with larger text components graphically. Maybe someone else will come up with a usability innovation here, but I'm not aware of it, and markdown certainly doesn't have that capability.

You do know that you don't need to write markdown syntax right?

There are plenty of UI editors where they give you the basics for formatting and inserting stuff.

Markdown is fairly portable, and with AI it is easy to generate and share as well.

If you scroll a little further down, you'll see that it lists components of an office suite as:

- a word processor - a spreadsheet application - presentation software

This doesn't look like it has any of these

Have you considered that “office suite” has drifted in meaning since Microsoft Office was introduced and things like:

- chat

- video calls

- notion

Might now be more important to an office than word processing or presentation software?

For sure

Maybe those those things may be more important, depending on the office, but IME, that isn't what people usually mean when they say "office suite".

It has two out of the three:

- Word processor: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs

- Spreadsheet: https://github.com/suitenumerique/calc

All _your_ needs at work.

All of this goes out the window when you're dealing with a government bureaucracy that has hyper specific document formatting requirements.

This is a real foundational need of nearly every business at some point. Every court system and government agency has their own rules and they need to be tracked and followed perfectly. There are whole sub-industries around dealing with this for legal documents in MS Word.

For a traditional office suite, you'd want a word processor with somewhat of a decent layout engine in it, a spreadsheet, something for slide presentations, something for rudimentary databases/datasources, and some sort of diagram drawing capability, and all of these integrated together.

By a "decent layout" engine, you'd like the ability to change fonts, add spacing between paragraphs, segment the page into regions, e.g. by changing the number of columns on a page, insert images and diagrams and choose how text wraps around them, create captions for embedded media, set page numbering policies (or navigational policies for web generation), generate table of contents, set table headers, make more complex tables with merged cells and different types of boundaries, generate table of references, generate tabs, then export to a web page, to a pdf, or to whatever other format you want, hopefully all from the same source. Then when you send it out for review, people can attach their comments to portions of the document, you can accept or reject their changes, there is a document revision history, etc.

So for example, you could write up a quarterly report by importing summary financial data into your spreadsheet, doing some basic analysis, export tables to your word processor, generate some bar charts or graphs, draw some boxes and arrows with your drawing program, stick that into your word processor, add some footnotes and hyperlinks, put the same info into a slide presentation. Then if you want, you could save that as a pdf or turn into a webpage, etc.

One time I had to write up documentation for various security certifications, and that was my introduction to the world of Microsoft office. Learning office made the project more fun, I had never used it before and was impressed with the functionality.

That said, I don't think most people who have office suites actually need a full powered office suite. Probably markdown + slack is enough for a lot of people, but I always like a good drawing or diagram.

Most people I know have shifted to google suite, it really has everything you need and is OS independent. But apart from the convenience of being browser-based, it is just another MS Office clone. The google drawing functionality is very basic, I often wish you could integrate something like excalidraw into it.

I am not suggesting this project needs to keep adding clones of MS Office functionality until it turns into Libre Office, but funded by the French government. That would be a waste. Instead, why not make it better? Reimagine it? Look, for example, at excalidraw. It's fantastic. It was really a fresh take on the stuff people were doing with visio.

I think there is lots of room to make a truly modern office suite instead of another MS Office rehash, so I would encourage this project to go its own way and do something interesting if they intend to be a replacement for proprietary office suites like google suite or MS Office.

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