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Comment by eddiedunn | Hacker News Reader

A number? What are these exactly? I keep hearing people say this, but I can't think of any reasons where I would really need MS Office.

I haven't used Word since Word 97, and I have never come across a use case that Open/LibreOffice, Google docs or Latex couldn't solve for me. I would imagine that the same would apply for most people.

On the other hand, I remember collaborating on many reports using Google docs because that was the only application featuring decent real time multi user editing.

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Serious spreadsheet users - the sort who run overnight calculations. For that job, Excel is simply the best there is. These people then make damn sure everyone else has MS Office too.

LibreOffice Calc sucks, but LO know it, and Kohei Yoshida is working very hard to make it not suck. LO 4.2 will be much faster. Then they just need to recreate VBA ...

Gnumeric is better...

Than LO? I'm sure there's stuff it does faster. Does it do Excel sheets more compatibly?

Or do you mean better than Excel? If it's better than Excel at the sort of sheet I mean, that's important news for the people who run such sheets - they'd be moving to Linux yesterday.

Gnumeric is better than LO and Excel for calculations. You can use several scripting languages (you can use Python, I use a functional, dynamic, term-rewriting language called Pure), it has more statistical functions built in, and is more accurate than Excel.

Regardless, it shouldn't matter what OS. Gnumeric runs on Windows, and I've had Excel running on Linux w/ Wine...

How is it as a replacement for Excel, though? By which I mean, shove in an OOXML spreadsheet with VBA in it. That is the use case that counts as a "substitute" for Excel for the users I'm talking about.

I personally think it's ridiculous that those are the terms people think in. If it's not exactly the same it's not as good, never mind the actual merits.

Thankfully the world is changing, MS products are no longer as essential as they once were. Excel really is the last holdout...

I think it is too, but you get financials to change then we'll be talking.

Technical document preparation. When you're dealing with stuff like tables, graphs, footnotes, appendices... Word makes it easier. I know there's probably a way to reproduce everything in Google Docs, but it's not as easy/automatic.

Heh. I remember the problems I had with moving around graphs, tables and pictures in MS Word. Man that sucked.

Doing references and placing images in Latex, on the other hand, was a breeze once I got a hang of its programmatic behavior.

Maybe it's better in Word now though. As I said, it's been a while since I seriously used it.

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