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Comment by psim1 | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice almost seemed irrelevant; with cheap to free (*included) tools in abundance, such as MS Office, Google Workspace, Apple Pages/Numbers/Keynote, the need for LibreOffice is not what it once was, back when StarOffice and OpenOffice were liberating people from the tyranny of Microsoft.

Now it's worse than irrelevant, it's a liability.

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It's still the only free as in freedom office suite option I'm aware of. I do try my best to avoid needing such software at all (I prefer to stay inside vim), but it has its uses when dealing with files from other people, or niche stuff like importing XML and saving as a CSV.

For what it’s worth, AbiWord and Gnumeric are still around (but are of course much less capable).

Gnumeric is great. It's the only one that holds up with massive CSV files and remains snappy. So I tend to prefer it. Functions are more limited than Calc though.

About 10 years ago the Ubuntu package manager borked my installation of LibreOffice (or maybe it was OpenOffice then). I only used it for spreadsheets and Gnumeric was able to open the ODS files just fine. There was only one function that I need to change (DaysInYear for handling leap years).

If for any reason I have to go back to it, I think I can.

For context, you cannot export a Google Doc in its native format and import the file later from another account.

That’s the price you pay: Google owns your data. You’ve sold your soul to them.

None of the tools that you mentioned except for LibreOffice and OpenOffice are free-as-in-freedom, and if you’re using Linux on the desktop, then Microsoft Office and the Apple iWork suite are unavailable as desktop applications.

Some of us run unGoogled/M$ Linux systems and want offline functionality. None of those options you mentioned would work for us.

MS office has never been cheap or included

Forced +$30 per seat per month to get people loaded into their proprietary AI

I guess you don’t remember a time when spreadsheets sold for $495 a seat. And that was just the spreadsheet. IIRC, Excel 1.0 retailed for $99.

One source[1] says the first release of Excel (for the Mac, in 1985) had a price of $395, or about $1,200 in inflation-adjusted 2026 dollars.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/history-of-PC

It's $8.30/month. It's cheaper than Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Over 50 years' time that's $4980.

50 years ago you needed about 5 million bucks to get started with electronic spreadsheets on your IBM mainframe

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