Comment by dworin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dworin | Hacker News Reader

I've actually tried to run a business on LibreOffice instead of MS Office, and it lasted about two days. If you're in a general business profession that relies on an office suite, not a developer or journalist where you're making simple unformatted documents or basic lists in Excel, LibreOffice doesn't even come close. The same goes for Google Apps, and even Microsoft's own Live Apps. The user interface in MS Office is so much more refined, there's a greater depth of time saving features, and it runs so much faster that spending money on MS Office paid for itself right away.

I've found that I personally have a great deal of cognitive dissonance when it comes to pricing for MS Office. On the one hand, I hate the idea that software that I used to pay for once and have forever I now rent for a potentially greater sum over time. On the other hand, I spend more time in MS Office than any other software I own, except for a web browser (which is usually productivity-detracting, not enhancing). People don't mind paying similar amounts for cloud CRM or project management systems that offer pretty basic functionality, but don't like the idea that Microsoft would move to that model with a much richer offering.

I agree that some users will have a need for MS Office over LibreOffice.

I'm not trying to convert you. But what, apart from the interface, did you find missing in LibreOffice?

I see people saying that the free Office suites don't do what they need, but I don't see what is missing. And I think that might be useful information for the free Office teams.

(Personally: I found search and replace for formatting characters much harder in LibreOffice than it needed to be.)

I'll be honest that 90% of it has to do with the user interface - it's not that LibreOffice can't do what I need to do, it's that it makes things that should be easy really hard. And considering the amount of time I spend in an office suite, if I save a few hours a year, it pays for itself.

There are probably a few features that are in MS Office that aren't in LibreOffice, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. They're edge cases, but they become important when they come up.

Exactly this... I've tried converting a lot of people over especially for home use... in almost all cases some small feature is missing that's greatly important to that one person, that they then fork over the cash for MS Office.

I won't/don't ... LO does what I need just fine. I also take offense to the suggestion that Evernote and OneNote are even in the same league... OneNote is probably the only MS application that I'd fork over a fair price for. I use Evernote because I'm on Mac, Windows, Linux and Android regularly... but loved OneNote a lot more...

I agree with that - I think OneNote is one of the most underestimated pieces of software ever made.

My employer at some point decided to save money by mandating openoffice instead of ms office for anyone who only made documents for internal use (documents, spreadsheets and presentations). I ended up using openoffice for a little over a year, until our team demanded ms office licenses, and it turned me off of the product. I even switched from openoffice to ms office at home, out of sheer frustration with the product.

Simply speaking, openoffice's problem was not a lack of features, it was a lack of quality. Using it was a constant exercise in working around bugs and poorly thought out user interface design. The lasting impression openoffice made on me was a feature-complete product handicapped by decades worth of technical debt. I am glad libreoffice are trying to reverse the trend, and I keep a regular eye on the progress they're making, but I really "get it" now why ms office has no competition.

Do you recall any examples of these bugs and poorly thought out user interface design?

Bullets constantly got confused when you were copy-pasting text (word is no champion here either, but it's a bit more sane). Image paste tended to minutely resize images to be just not a 1 to 1 pixel mapping at 100% zoom, which coupled with a poor image scaling algorithm produced horribly artifacted images on screen no matter what you did. Images were a pain in general, positioning them and putting borders around them never worked right and I opened many a document to find broken images. The change tracking and review tools were painful to use. There were many issues, too many to cover in a comment.

> The user interface in MS Office is so much more refined, there's a greater depth of time saving features, and it runs so much faster that spending money on MS Office paid for itself right away.

How much of that is it you wanting to use a familiar UI rather vs MS having "greater depth" ?

I don't think it has to do with familiarity at all - LibreOffice looks almost identical to what MS Office looked like prior to Office 2007, so it's definitely familiar, and if you look at 'percent of my life using a UI,' is even more familiar.

When the Ribbon was introduced, everyone complained because it was different, but I thought it was a great innovation. Common tasks that used to be buried in menus were brought to the forefront, and really useful actions that few people knew about got exposed so that you didn't need to be a power user to access them. Microsoft invested a lot of time to figure out how people actually used the software and streamline it for them, and it shows in the product.

As a quick example, look at what it takes to change a spreadsheet to print in landscape and fit to a page in Calc vs. Excel. It's a pretty common task for anyone who prints out a spreadsheet, so Excel made it easy. Calc still does it the same way Excel did ten years ago, based on where a programmer would put those options, but not where a user would look for them.

> LibreOffice doesn't even come close.

Your post was very, very light on details.

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