It has its quirks. It's also damned powerful and optimized.
(I guess that's including its program-ability and the ability to interface it with external functionality via Win32 et al. I remember, for example, referencing IE 4, then 5, in order to "add" regex's to it via VBA scripting. Actually, as I recall that was actually Windows Scripting Host; installing the relevant version of IE at that time in turn caused WSH to also be installed.)
P.S. I was not number crunching during the Lotus heydays. I gather its products had some features that were unparalleled for their time and that Excel may never have fully matched.
P.P.S. As for quirks, I remember one bit of oddity emanating from a formatting function that an older programmer associated with a Fortran convention, when I happened to describe it to him.
(At least it's not trivial to get it to compile on a modern Linux distro as far as I can tell...).
Not that it's really a replacement for excel for all users, but it was an interesting package.
These are the limitations of Excel alternatives. They look nice on the outside, but fail to understand that users don't use them just for the simple stuff. It is well known that Excel is what really powers many companies, and these are often absurdly complex.
(1) OO Calc insisted on drawing an x-axis label for every single point in a graph, on every redraw.
LO Basic is not VBA. This is important when people's stuff is written in VBA.
I've tried Open / Libre Office on both Windows and Linux targets. A benchmark: Create a couple columns of, say, 10000 x/y values, and see how long it takes to create a basic scatter plot.
Also, I've noticed that the user interface of Excel is a lot more polished. For instance it's more forgiving of exactly where I put the mouse pointer before clicking -- valuable for me because I get severe eyestrain headaches whenever I have to look too closely at the screen for too long.
I’m by no means an Excel power user, but Apple Numbers provides everything I need in a spreadsheet app. I have native Numbers apps on my laptop, desktop, tablet, and phone (but there’s also a web app). Whenever I save a file on one device, it’s automatically added to all the others. A file created on my laptop can be edited on my phone and vice versa. Also, Apple Numbers imports and exports Excel documents. As a result, I haven’t opened Excel in over a year and I doubt I’ll ever buy another upgrade.
Excel may not be replaceable for everyone, especially if you’re using it in a corporate setting, but for me, I have found I can easily do without. I find Apple Numbers to be way more user-friendly and convenient.
Dropbox+Excel seems like it would do the same thing, but even with more flexibility (including version control, document sharing) and supporting even more platforms.
I don't think you can ever consider spreadsheet software to be 'user friendly'. They're spreadsheets.
Numbers is not just a spreadsheet editor, it’s a full-fledged spreadsheet creator. Its features are sufficient for all but the most demanding users.
> Dropbox+Excel seems like it would do the same thing
For me, it doesn’t. Just using Dropbox and my stock OS (and providing I don’t use Numbers), I can view Excel files on my phone and tablet but I cann’t create or edit them. I still need to use a third party app and Microsoft doesn’t have an appealing Excel offering for mobile platforms.
> even with more flexibility (including version control, document sharing)
Numbers has version control and document sharing.
> supporting even more platforms.
Numbers is available as native apps for iOS media players, phones, and tablets. There’s also a native app for OS X. For Windows, Linux, and every other platform that can run a modern web browser, there’s a very capable web app, available for free.
Excel is available as native app for Windows and OS X. For Windows Phone it has a very bare-bones app, the Android and iOS versions are a disgrace.
> I don't think you can ever consider spreadsheet software to be 'user friendly'.
Maybe you should try Numbers, especially on a mobile device, and then compare it to Excel.
Then again, I carry my air on me everywhere I go, so I'll never, ever be editing spreadsheets on my phone. Seems like an odd usecase to me, though.
I have worked with Excel-based trading systems with tens of thousands of lines of VBA code, controlling systems that trade hundreds of millions of USD.
If Excel stopped working today, by tomorrow the stock markets would likely be in a blood bath, such is the ubiquitousness of Excel in that field.
Having worked with some VBA myself, this sounds like a very, very, scary statement.
Apparently a reference to Former Duke Cancer Researcher Anil Potti. [1][2]
> …put egg on some Harvard Econ prof's faces - to the delight of the UMASS grad student that found it...
Likely referring to the Reinhart/Rogoff spreadsheet error discovered by Thomas Herndon. [3]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Potti
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/13/anil-potti-duke-can...
[3] http://chronicle.com/article/UMass-Graduate-Student-Talks/13...
That something is powerful enough to do the job does not mean that it is a good tool to do the job.
Of course the particular use case I mentioned was probably pushing Excel right to the edge of the envelope and the company was actively developing a .NET replacement for it because everyone recognized this. I have no idea how that turned out but I can say that the Excel system was very impressive and very functional.
Each localized version stored function names as localized strings!!! So format was not even compatible across the same version.
https://github.com/python-excel/xlrd/blob/master/xlrd/formul...
Having problems is not the operative issue. It's userbase. All software has problems; Excel is one of the projects that has a large enough userbase that you can schedule conferences about its problems.
P.S. "EDA" is of course more than one tool, but it's close to the right scope and what jumps to mind right now.
Exchange as well.
Notes has the capability to make anyone love Outlook.
Nowadays I would gladly have it back.
And as one of the comments below said, try Lotus Notes for a while :o)
- it's an overblown, over-engineered piece of shit designed to give "IT managers" and their secretaties a boner and suck them into Microsoft's vendor lock-in hellish groupware who still thinks we're in the 90s (fuck sharepoint, too while we're at it!)
- requires big resources to work faster than a snail (fuck sharepoint again!)
- to deploy it you need to also deploy more microsoft dinosaurs such as AD 2020 with CRAPFIX 9887622 running on Windows NonStandard Edition SP4 (no less!)
- to use more than 10 mailboxes you need a cluster of 10 microsoft certified hardware servers, double it if you want it in 64bit
- the webmail interface (which I had been forced to use in the past because I was using Linux) is ridiculous usability wise, sluggish, multi-message operations are very slow, the filters are a joke compared to procmail or maildrop; .forward does not exist
- some poor bastards confuse it with a proper MTA and leave it facing the internetz directly, most serious deployments I've seen run a nix based installation (qmail, postfix) in front of it and firewall the hell out of it because you can't have it exposed to a network
- sometimes when it breaks not even highly microsoft trained monkeys can fix it unless they sacrifice a couple of chickens to the voodoo gods
- if you want to count on certain mail standards (other than Microsoft's that is) you're pretty much on your own: imap support is shit, exporting to anything other that random m$ tech is not supported
The list could go on and on. That's what I think of Microsoft's "reliable software".
Needless to say, I'll pick e.g. Thunderbird any day over it, although I'm using more and more console based clients nowadays (such as cone or lumail).
As a user in a mixed MS Office + Google Apps + LibreOffice environment, Google's recent work with QuickOffice has been EXTREMELY helpful. My big gripe isn't Excel so much, either, but people who refuse to abandon PowerPoint when all they need to do is create a bullet list.
No, not at all like those. Big corps like these: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2013/full_... When someone says "big corp" they do not mean "Jason's Deli".
Although the most annoying thing about Excel is actually the users who insist on using it like a database...
Are you sure? Does it not strike you as odd that OpenOffice/LibreOffice still haven't managed to replace Word?
That it has not for everyone or as a whole doesn't strike me as odd in the slightest. There are plenty of reasons to use Word. Aside from the fact that it's solid itself, it also has a metric ton of inertia. Those using it already have the license or pirated copy, already know it, have legacy documents using it, and are generally otherwise are left with very little reason to switch to something merely because it's a "solid alternative."
I haven't yet met a single person who is happier with OOo/LO than with Word; if that's true for you you're the first such person I've heard of.
Much was due to the ribbon interface, which I liked, which LO doesn't have. My mind reverted to menus via Office 2000 which I cut my teeth on as a new graduate years back.
There are some things I still find odd / bewildering:
Right clicking on a block of text I have the options of both 'Text' and 'Character' which have different options. Neither of the contained options contain vertical alignment choices. Tables just feel a pain, zooming in and out as different cells / borders are clicked. Blah blah blah other small things. For my sins, I like VBA (familiar with, rather than romance).
Familiar is the key. It took a small learning curve, and I'm as productive in it as a modern version of MS Office. Much of the learning curve is having been so familiar with MS Office, sometimes things are just done differently, mainly at the UX Level. Integration for a personal and work based workflow is where Linux leaves Windows in the standing-gates was the game changer for me, and why I put myself through the learning curve.
I do feel LO's UI simply doesn't look beautiful, indeed, I feel it looks ugly. Everything is gray, some icons have shadow, some not. I have the feeling a few hundreds of hours on grouping icons, highlighting contrast in dialogue boxes, would make it a lot less 'tired' looking. Mozilla did it, I am sure LO will, and that may be a small but important tipping point.
The point is not that they are better but that they are a suitable replacement for all but a very small niche of power users. But people tend to compare the limit cases even if all they'll ever use are the day-to-day functions.
> The point is not that they are better but that they are a suitable replacement...
Well then you're just confirming what I already said...
Hi, I'm one such person. Reason: the ribbon. In the rest, yes, Word is better. But I like standard menubar interfaces and hate the programs that don't let me use them.
Could you explain what it is that scared you so much? I am the one to scream whenever I'm forced into using anything from the post 2003 MS office suites, which is thankfully extremely rare.
- LibreOffice can't even show the simplest documents correctly on the same computer: http://i.imgur.com/0glr43F.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/g3a1332.png
- Word takes < 200 ms to start up on my (blazing fast) laptop. LibreOffice takes > 2 seconds. It's outright irritating to say the least.
- Everything else has lags too. File->Save takes > 2 seconds to show me the dialog. In Word it's instantaneous.
- No smooth scroll?? My eyes!!! >___<
- No "Styles"??
- The UI just screams "LINUX", feels freaking hacky, and doesn't feel the way it should. For example:
1. Word highlights text word-by-word; LO does it letter-by-letter. Selections never work the way you intend them the first time.
2. Highlight a piece of text from left to right and then press Left. The cursor is now still on the left-hand side of the previously-highlighted text in Word, but still on the right-hand side in LibreOffice. What the hell???
3. A million other things about the UI doesn't feel normal, e.g. http://i.imgur.com/HM52E9A.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/zTK1zoi.png
I could go on and on, these are just what I found/remembered in a couple minutes of using it again.
For the smooth scrolling, you need to enable it under:
Tools->Options->Writer->View
Unfortunately, it is disabled by default.
I love the idea of Free software, use LO at home, and pushed for it at work. After a pilot LO rollout, we ended up going with MSO 2010 because of LO's poor interoperability with our old Word docs.
http://www40.zippyshare.com/v/24126556/file.html
Try opening it in MS Word and compare it with LibreOffice and you'll see why I ran away screaming:
http://i.imgur.com/4tSWXsn.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/3tBLuff.png
2. Ah, I think you're right about the missing font, I didn't realize that. I'll get back to you if I find another example, there are a million things I've noticed over time that don't render correctly other than fonts. (EDIT: See my other comment.)
3. Actually, I do have smooth scrolling "enabled", but it doesn't have any effect whatsoever (as of version 4.0.0.3).
That's a .doc file, an un-/poorly-documented format. As noted in the article, it's not simple at all. It is a good argument in favor of Libre and OpenOffice, though: other word processors will be able to open your documents if you decide to switch from them. Just that alone is a big win for anyone thinking long term.
All of your other criticisms other than the speed stuff boil down to "I'm used to MS Word". Which is fine.
I find Word's attempt to highlight word at a time to be extremely frustrating and distracting. Very often in my documents it simply will not properly recognize the boundaries of what I want to select, and small increments of the mouse produce jumps in the selection that were not intended. I think OO's behavior is a lot better in this respect.
Use the keyboard if you want to highlight character-by-character.
Word is simply optimizing for the most-common case: copying-and-pasting whole words, sentences, or paragraphs. It's a lot faster when you don't have to hit the exact character boundary of the word -- especially if you're using a touchpad instead of a mouse.
Except this is the common case, so it makes sense to have it on by default.
Add a nonlinear solver to calc? Sure.
Add a fill function into draw? _Maybe_ a two-month after-hours project.
It took me around 3 months, full-time, to write an import filter for LibreOffice that still only kinda-sorta works. And it depended very little on the rest of the codebase.
I think you underestimate how complicated a modern office suite is, and how much years-old technical debt there is floating around in LibreOffice.
So, I have this project in which I need to fill an area in a drawing in a proposal for a client. So my options are:
a) Spend $200 (about an hours worth of billable time, or 2 hours during dry spells) on MS Office.
b) Spend 2 x 4 x 10 = 80 hours (which is no where near enough, but let's go with your number) on this feature, then spend again that on finding and convincing the right people to include my patch, on a half-assed implementation which does just enough what I need, and tell my client 'yeah get back to me in 2 months when I have patched my word processor to deliver the functionality I need'.
Choices choices, which one should I choose?
Just that time alone on a single tiny feature would pay for a lifetime worth of MS Office software!
If you need/want to insert various objects in various documents (eg: graphs from spreadsheets in documents that dynamically update when the data source update) -- not so much. I could argue that you'd be better off using literate R/LyX -- but unfortunately there's a bit of an UX gap).
I much prefer LibreOffice to MS Office -- but mostly because I don't feel quite as a afraid that my documents are going to go randomly get corrupted at the worst possible moment without any reasonable hope of recovery (documented formats ftw!).
Office/Word is what they learn in school (lock-in strategy) and Office/Word is what corporate apathy and only "knowing" MS software leads to in the workplace. You work somewhere, you use Office. Period.
And if you really want to go down that rabbit hole of perfect compatibility, it's an absolute clusterf*ck. There are more than than 20 different 100+ page specs (some exceeding 500 pages) needed to properly parse excel files. An incomplete list (which you can find by searching for the keyword):
MS-XLS, MS-CFB, MS-ODRAW, MS-ODRAWXML, MS-OGRAPH, MS-OFFCRYPTO, MS-RMPR, MS-OVBA, MS-OSHARED, MS-CTXLS, ECMA-376, MS-OLEDS, MS-OLEPS, MS-DTYP, MS-XLSB, MS-OFORMS, MS-VBAL, MS-OAUT, MS-DCOM, MS-XLSX
But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider some of these reasonably active projects (I'm sure I am missing some really good libraries here, so don't consider this a comprehensive list):
https://github.com/tealeg/xlsx (go, xlsx read)
https://poi.apache.org/ (java)
https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx (javascript, xlsx read)
https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls (javascript, xls read)
https://phpexcel.codeplex.com/ (php)
http://www.python-excel.org/ (python, based on openoffice )
https://github.com/randym/axlsx (ruby, xlsx write)
https://github.com/seamusabshere/remote_table (ruby, xls/xlsx read)
Anything I've ever needed any of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice tools to do have worked fine. I don't think it does anyone service to suggest to projects which keep the proprietary Microsoft Office suite alive.
Joel Spolsky (member of the office development team) attributed their success to this:
> Microsoft Office ended up beating its competitors because it was able to read and write to file formats other than its own. For example, Excel was able to read files from Lotus, and was able to save the file without losing any information. The important lesson in order to gain market share was that in order for new users to try Microsoft Excel, they had to be able to work with the files their coworkers were creating.
> Lesson: You don’t want your customers to feel locked into using your software. It helps with sales cycles because customers know that they can switch away if they so choose. While customers will be willing to try your product, they think two steps ahead. They want to ensure they can easily migrate to a new system.
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/05/07/spolsky-on-sof...
Excel is 28 years old and for its entire lifetime it has been one of the focal points of Microsoft development. It is also the center of one of the biggest cottage industries in the software world + servers as an SDK for probably hundreds of thousands of in-house developers.
I think such an effort is just an order of magnitude smaller than replacing Windows on desktop systems. And that's saying a lot about Excel :)
That is one full time developer for a year, not counting any project management etc. If we say that so far, there has been spend 1000 man years on Open/Libre Office (I'm just making that number up, it has been under development for decades and probably with more than 20 devs working on it, so it's probably more, but let's say 1000, and not even count all the project management / user feedback / documentation work etc); then still you're saying that bringing Libre Office to the level of MS Office is within 0.1 resp 1 % of completion. I hope I don't need to argue how that is prima facie nonsense.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
(I realise I'm not answering you. I'm bad at estimates)
More than that, because you have to replicate a lot of Excel's idiosyncracies in order to get compatibility. That's a very challenging task.
When Microsoft was putting Lotus 1-2-3 compatibility into Excel back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, this was a much smaller task than replicating Excel would be today. Lotus 1-2-3 was a much less complex product. Most people were upgrading from 1-2-3 v2.x to Excel, which meant that Excel really only had to be compatible with a product that was originally hand-written in x86 assembly.
I wonder if there will ever be a shift to a future incarnation of hypercard, or some other mainstream oriented 'programming' platform that would displace Excel.
Word, Excel, Powerpoint all have viable alternatives in LibreOffice. I also really like OneNote as well. The biggest reason I don't use the MS products more, is that I happen to run Mac, Windows and Linux regularly on my different computers. More of my development work is now targeting Linux than Windows, which leaves me less tied to it.
I'd also like to see the Office org split out, and let free to target non-MS platforms more.. would love a better Office solution for Android. And, I'm sure iPad users would appreciate it too.
Anyone engaging in any sort of historical research?