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Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

> Office EU is a complete cloud-based office suite

Issue is.. if you are a traditional MS Office "poweruser", the last thing you want to do is spend your days in a web browser. These apps should also be available as native apps, similar to MS Word, Excel, Pages, Keynote, etc.

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The vast majority of office use at my work is in the browsers because the files are stored in Sharepoint. It seems to work well enough for basic needs (no macros and fairly simple formulas in excel etc.)

I have a non-technical friend in finance who uses the Desktop versions of Excel for most of their work and they say it crashes nearly every day losing work.

Excel is pretty stable.. I guess it could be those specific sheets doing something odd.

I think it's a factor of things, but Excel isn't as stable as it once was. My friends spreadsheets include:

- Row count ~100k - Column count ~1k - The usual vlookup, etc. formulae. - Oracle extensions that sync tables to databases in the cloud.

Just like in many other cases, in-proc extensions might be easier to implement, or have lower resource demands than OS IPC, but than it has such unpleasent experiences, I bet those Oracle extensions in C, C++, COM, are to blame.

Every time SharePoint/Teams decides to open a document in the browser, I cry a little. Misalignments in Word, broken basic keyboard movements in Excel, terrible performance across the board.

I would rather say that lack of VBA support is an issue, and that it's an insurmountable task for alternative Offices to solve. Yes, and absurd one too.

As a "poweruser", I'd rather prefer to have all software available in the browser, open source, and hackable, than a native-based COM-ridden turd that only became more bloated and slow over the last couple of decades. (Yeah, and don't forget Ribbon UI!)

Unfortunately, Office EU is about politics, and not about hackable open-source software available with a single click.

This is probably not the target audience. Most people just need to write occasional letters and sign some files.

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