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Comment by PopsiclePete | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice? Is this still....a thing? Is the OSS community still trying to beat MS at this meaningless game? What's wrong with Google Docs? First thing I do in Ubuntu is uninstall this cruft. A fat client office suite, how quaint and 1997-like.

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It is

  * In country where google doc is blocked
  * In country/places where your connection speed is too slow
  * In places where you have no connection at all
  * For documents too big
  * For people that are used to it  
  * For people that care about freedom etc. (regardless of your opinion on it)

etc. etc.

For people who don't trust outside companies (known to work with governments) with their confidential and/or expensive data.

    * For people and businesses who don't want their data in Google's hands subject to US laws.

If you think Google Docs is a real alternative to LibreOffice, you haven't even tried 1% of LibreOffice features. You probably don't need the other 99%, but some people do.

A native app that opens .doc/.xls/.ppt files is a useful thing for a large number of people.

Can LibreOffice edit MS Office files non-destructively now? I'm impressed with the improvements lately, but I'm still too scared edit shared .docx files at work based on bad experiences with OpenOffice in the past.

I wrote a paper recently with some colleagues who use MS Word (common in some fields), mailing around .docx files in the usual manner, and it seemed to work ok. Obviously not a detailed test, but we exercised a reasonable number of features without breakage: a two-column document with stylesheet, a number of figures, several equations, and a reference section with auto-updated numerical references.

More pertinently, it does work better than using google docs. Assuming, of course, you can't get folks to agree to lose features and just move completely to google docs.

Yeah, in my experience Google Docs is mainly useful if you treat it as an editor for lightly formatted (RTF-style) documents, not as a Word-compatible editor. If I really needed Word-on-the-cloud I'd probably use Microsoft's "Word Online", which is a lot more compatible than Google Docs (and also free).

Pretty much. Preserving stuff LO doesn't understand, for roundtripping, is also a thing as of the last couple of years (the Interop GrabBag). If you have a failure and a reproducible test case, file a bug - there's significant improvements in OOXML support every release, and LO really does dive on these bugs and kill them.

> What's wrong with Google Docs?

The Google part.

I sometimes have to open customer documents - CSV and Excel - containing confidential details. Nothing may leave the company.

I used google docs today because I thought I would be writing a quick, loose thing that's not worth digging out libreoffice (or god forbid, tex) for, and I'd made good experiences with google spreadsheets.

In retrospect I should have switched to a real program the first time it happened, but every time I "printed" (saved to pdf) a draft, the page break in my two-page document would be off by a line or two compared to what the web app was showing me, so I had to rejiggle stuff to make it fit. (Forced page break didn't really help because it was orphaning entries in a short list.)

>What's wrong with Google Docs?

It's proprietary SaaSS.

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