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Comment by xaa | Hacker News Reader

I am in (biological) research, and this would be a godsend in the unlikely event it's true. There are a lot of *nix users in research, but paradoxically, MS Word is a virtual requirement for submitting grants and manuscripts, and MS Excel is very commonly used to pass around datasets.

Libreoffice is unacceptably broken in a thousand small ways. The best compromise we have come up with is to edit internal documents with Google Docs until they are almost finished, then polish them in Word.

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> Libreoffice is unacceptably broken in a thousand small ways

Of course, based on my painful experience, MS Word is also broken in a thousand small ways. Whether this breakage qualifies as "unacceptable" I dunno; I guess people are used to it and so have learned to avoid much of it. Yay? ><

In this context, where MS-Word is a de facto standard for various administration, "broken" means "not behaving like MS-Word". Which is perhaps the only test which MS-Word passes with flying colors.

Alas, the post-"Vista-fication" version of MS Office doesn't even behave like MS Office.

Amusing anecdote: I have 2 teenage daughters. They used to complain about having to use Open/Libre Office at home. Then the school "upgraded" Office to the newer Vista/7 compatible version. "See, kids, it does suck, just like Dad said" (I got the "upgrade" at work about the same time). After which, the version at school was so different, anyway, that they just kinda got over it and went "whatever".

I think the difference between your broken and his broken is that his are actual bugs & crashes and yours are actually more like personal preferences and interface differences.

MS Office products are generally rock solid, while OpenOffice/LibreOffice have crashed on me too many times to count. Plus buggy functionality, etc.

I might be wrong, some examples from both sides wouldn't hurt :)

You can't submit PDFs generated via LaTeX?

That depends on the field (and publication), maybe it is less typical in biology? And all the research funding instruments I've used require (or at least very strongly hint) you to use Word for submitting applications.

If LibreOffice docx export does not work correctly (or import missed crucial fields / paragraphs) with the funder's templates, you might get rejected. Academic funding is already so fickle that I wouldn't even try. (Personally, that's always a major hassle, as I have to find a computer with correct version of Word installed and borrow that for some time.)

Many journals allow this; less commonly funding agencies. But most of my collaborators are not programmers and do not know LaTeX, and for a non-programmer it is very difficult to learn.

Besides, I don't love LaTeX. It is a very heavyweight markup and seemingly takes forever to get things "just right".

Completely agree.

I feel that we are condemned to use Windows or OS X in academia, until the day that Office is released for Linux.

This would be very, very big news for me!

I know you're fairly new to HN, but really you don't need to sign your posts. Your username is right above the body of your comment. A signature just adds clutter.

Thanks.

There's crossover office.

Have you tried CrossOver with the latest Office version. I tried when considering if I should buy a Lenovo laptop to run Linux or a new MacBook. Even the most basic functionality did not work smoothly.

Office 2000 ran great on CrossOver Office. I've used it for years. But Office 2000 is very old now.

I'm running it with office 2007. It works perfectly fine.

Office 2007 is not the latest version, though. There have been two versions since then, 2010 and 2013.

Why not just run Office in a VM?

Make a specific Vagrant box and distribute it around the office. Easy peasy.

VMs are a pain to use, especially when you have switch between your VM and your native OS all the time.

Plus, you have two OSes to maintain.

I agree with the maintenance point but as far as the "switching" point, it's worth noting that even the less-fancy VMs have supported guest-OS applications inside standalone host-OS windows for a long time. This is particularly convenient for the case described in which the guest OS is used for only one or two applications.

Best solution so far for me -> VirtualBox + Windows XP (or 7) + your favorite office

Or just use Mac OS X

I use PlayOnLinux, which works quite seamlessly.

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/supported_apps-3-0.html

However, an increasing amount of my documents are in Google Docs/Drive these days. It's only for really intensive spreadsheets I bust out Excel. I can't stand LibreOffice Calc. Even the name (in a dashboard 'calc' clashes with 'calculator' ... duh, I just type 'gcalc' now). Perhaps I'm just too used to Excel, having used it for so long now.

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