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Comment by chewxy | Hacker News Reader

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

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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/

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 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 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...

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.

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