With Excel in particular, there is something I can't put my finger on that I just don't get along with. It's unintuitive in a way that I can't describe, but which I notice about half the time I use it. Sometimes clicking doesn't do what I expect it to do, clipboard contents are lost all the time, scrolling resets or jumps around for reasons I don't understand. I don't have the same issues with LibreOffice Calc, which is why I choose it for my personal work. In fact, I think Google Sheets is the most pleasant to use of the options I've tried, which is something I thought I'd never say about a web-based alternative to a native app...
excel 2003 did 95% of what "modern" excel does without most of those issues...
LibreOffice Calc doesn’t have tables in the sense of Excel “insert > table”. People have been looking for it and asking for it for fourteen years in this thread: https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/creating-tables-in-calc/1433
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076
https://exceloffthegrid.com/excel-calculate-wrong-results/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...
I wonder if it would be possible to extract the spreadsheet data model and logic into a library completely separate from the UI. This would enable a diversity of UIs, and also interoperability between different tools.
It feels so bland and hard to read. Maybe that's because of java. How did Excel 5.0 look so good?
LibreOffice uses an extremely dated, also messy, homegrown UI toolkit and has resisted the idea of switching to something last (really) updated this millennium (sic).
If you want to see my efforts, I have a number of branches on github:
Phase 5 can be located here:
https://github.com/chrissherlock/libreoffice-experimental/tr...
Check the source here:
https://github.com/chrissherlock/libreoffice-experimental/tr...
in particular keep an eye on:
https://github.com/chrissherlock/libreoffice-experimental/tr...
Mandatory Excel rant: Excel can't be trusted with data destined for publication. It's bloated, buggy as hell, user hostile, and has set genetics research back with its utterly braindead autocorrect. The default plot options are the exact polar opposite of how data are presented in science, and almost impossible to make serviceable. Everything Excel touches ends up looking like a hastily thrown together 6th grade science project. Libreoffice is also riddled with serious bugs and also loses data, but hey it's free and not a decades old flagship product from a multi billion dollar tech company.
Could you articulate why Gnumeric is better than everything else?
> Therefore, the problem is not necessarily with Excel. Equally, the problem is not with the IEEE 754 standard either. It’s just the complex nature of the world of mathematics and computing that we live in.
Some earlier spreadsheets such as Multiplan used it (but not in the IEEE variety) because it was all soft-float for most users anyway.
As a user of Libreoffice for years, me thinks you are doing fud.
Gnumeric rocks, even features Montecarlo built-in, I have it installed in my personal machine, but a major limitation is that they stopped providing windows builds, up to the last time I checked, so I can't use it at work.