Hacker News Reader

Comment by wildmXranat | Hacker News Reader

At first, OpenOffice Calc and Writer were a nuisance that I had to learn to use. Then they became second nature, LibreOffice is now my most recommended piece of software to all my clients along with Thunderbird etc. Now, I find that LibreOffice handles all of my workload much better than Office did. Especially when dealing with international text encoding.

I realize that there is a huge, existing market that requires Office, but I wonder how many of those could go through a transition and arrive at a better place without it.

View on HN

You'd be surprised at how many engineering companies (research and otherwise) use Excel. I'd argue that it is used more than Matlab or any other programming language/environment in some fields (like Mech Eng).

Now that is just a small subset of all the little corporations that use it for bookkeeping and what else (those could probably get by with libreoffice) and every other major company in the world.

Microsoft was also smart in moving to docx and xlsx because libreoffice doesn't support that very well and now has an even better reason for people to avoid switching, I'd like to assume they don't support the open formats for this same reason.

Seconded. For many people, its their only foothold into the world of macros and programming, even if its via VBA horribleness.

After having used OpenOffice for years, I finally decided I hate it. Maybe it's just OpenOffice for Mac, but Writer produces output that is just ugly. It's not wrong, just devoid of whatever it is that makes text look decent. I assume the kerning is bad.

I talked with a friend who found OpenOffice on her own when her computer at work didn't of MS Office, and found it highly unsuitable. In addition to ugly output, she needed document revisions which Writer apparently doesn't support. Even worse, opening MS Office documents resulted in strange, minor things happening. (No surprise there, but it doesn't really encourage people to stay with the product) Interestingly, she said the same thing I thought when I first saw OpenOffice back when it was StarOffice: instead of producing a better Office, they tried to copy MS Office and failed.

Libreoffice has a much better chance (better governance etc) ... give it 5..10 years..

Except Excel. Microsoft Excel outpaces LibreOffice by many many many many lightyears. It's pretty much the only reason why I have Virtualbox on all my linux machines

I might not be an Office Excel power user, although I'm not sure, thus can be blind to those critical features. What are the things that you can't live without in Calc ?

Ohboy, let's go:

* Calc's pivot tables is clunky, while working on Excel 2010 is like working on butter with a hot knife. No, it's not a "getting used to" thing.

* Basic stuff like filter/sorting tools: Excel has a far better flow that helps you get the job done faster

* DataNitro

* Charting in libreoffice is broken. I use ggplot for most of my day jobs, but sometimes when you need to pull up a quick chart, LibreOffice serves to only nerf your speed. Again, not one of those "getting used to" thing

* Try pivot-tabling a 1M row csv in Calc.

* VBScript (though that's now more and more subplanted by DN)

* Analysis tools - Excel is just so much richer.

These things LibreOffice is better than Excel:

* CSV (excel's a little clunky with CSV import)

* regex search

EDIT: formatting

One more thing Calc is better than Excel: It doesn't screw with your Microsoft Windows 7 windows. Multiwindow in Excel is just broken. Is Excel 2013 any better there?

Anyway, I agree with everything else you said, it matches exactly my experiences with Calc.

That being said I'd prefer Apple to push their iWorks applications over better OOffice - their technological basis is by far the best - the outcome of each click and each edit is completely predictable, the whole rendering engine works consistantly across all three products, so do hotkeys. They're just lacking a lot of sugar on top like the features you mention.

Yes, multi window finally works as it should in Excel 2013. That alone was a reason for me to update the second it was released.

Ahh finally I can have peace of mind. Thanks for that hint.

I'm starting to appreciate Google Spreadsheets more. Hear me out: javascript in the spreadsheet. Today my boss needed me to make a get request from one of our spreadsheets when some column is edited. I just love that you can do that. Maybe Excel does something to this nature, I have no idea.

Google Refine (now Open Refine) [1] is something that is also useful for data analysis and munging.

[1]: http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/

hear hear. its the one single reason why Linux doesn't have too much traction in the non-Engineering workplace.

Google Docs and Presentations are good enough - there is simply nothing close to Excel and VBScript.

note: by this i mean interoperability more than anything else.

Over the last two years I have moved away from Excel, Word and PowerPoint to R/Sweave/LaTeX/beamer/git as fast as possible. I got so sick of version changes in VBA breaking code, 3rd party modules that were locked and couldn't be fixed, and binary files that suck up space in version control. I see my coworkers using spread sheets and PowerPoint files where databases and complete, reproducible reports should be used. Tremendous amounts of tacit knowledge is buried on network shares and forgotten. I find the community support for R/RStudio/LateX/git much better than Microsoft's support.

Oh I do use R + Numpy a lot too, but Excel has really been indispensible.

I agree with you about spreadsheets being used where databases make more sense though.

I much prefer libreoffice and gnumeric to excel. Last I looked, of the three only gnumeric could do colored scatter plots, though this was a while ago...

Writer is fine, Calc is somewhat ok for light spreadsheet users.

but

Presentations? That thing (whatever it's called) is just unusable IMO. Way too many clicks to do anything, crap looking standard templates, crap looking animations. Powerpoint completely blows it out of the water and let's beter not speak about Keynote.

So any manager / engineer / researcher probably won't be happy with LibreOffice, since presentations are just a fact of life and you need to be able to get them done quickly.

Funny you say that. I've moved my presentation workflow entirely to HTML5+JS. d3 is amazeballs and should be used at every available instance (and so is raphael)

Interesting. May I ask you for a few estimates?

How much preparation did you put into your templates approximately?

How long does it take you to do a quick one-off?

How long for a professional looking presentation for public speaking?

Mine may not apply to yours.

In presentation to clients, I write reports/presentations per scenario/campaign. I use your bog standard Initializr+Bootstrap, the visualizations have been previsualized on ggplot, and then translated into d3 where it makes sense.

How long does it take? 2 - 5 days per report/preso. Like I said, it mayn't apply to everyone. I have the luxury of time.

I don't usually do the presentation (can't recall when I did one). Speaking in public (even to normal people on a non presenter basis) terrifies me

Oh. Ok. 2 days is actually at the high end of what I do, and this is for a 50min presentation. Of course, the visuals are usually based on work I already did before - instead of designing stuff with pen and paper I usually begin drawing my ideas directly in a quick Keynote presentation, that way I can show it to other people / at internal meetings easily.

I'd be interested to see one of your presentations though, in case they're not all confidential. I think your approach might make sense for product launches for example - where it needs to look even more professional than the junk I do. If you're interested I could also send you an example Keynote file if you have a mac, just to see the quality difference.

Nah they're not product launches. They're client-side reporting that is presented.

Unexpectedly, I moved away from PowerPoint without needing a PowerPoint clone. I started using prezi for fun, just because it's different and ended up taking all my presentations there. You have to be careful not to be too flashy, but it's a very cool application, if you can live with the lockin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com