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revolvingthrow 3 hours ago

I wish the excel clones were better. LibreOffice’s UI is extremely dated imo, to the point it doesn’t even let you make a damn table, but at least what’s there works correctly. OnlyOffice is not only missing some pretty basic functionality such as preferences (???), it also inexplicably deleted a single spreadsheet out of a multi-sheet file on two occasions on macOS and generally has some peculiar functionality and ux here and there.

TurboSkyline an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I'm only a light user of office programs, both at work and at home. I have access to M365, but for my personal usage I prefer LibreOffice over MS Office, especially when it comes to spreadsheets. I generally don't mind the UI of the MS suite, but I find it's getting increasingly bloated and slow, and sometimes updates move UI elements around for no benefit that I can perceive. I haven't experienced the same with LibreOffice; it's lighter than MS Office I find it easier to find the options I'm looking for, which I know exist but don't always remember _where_ they live, because of the low frequency with which I use them.

With Excel in particular, there is something I can't put my finger on that I just don't get along with. It's unintuitive in a way that I can't describe, but which I notice about half the time I use it. Sometimes clicking doesn't do what I expect it to do, clipboard contents are lost all the time, scrolling resets or jumps around for reasons I don't understand. I don't have the same issues with LibreOffice Calc, which is why I choose it for my personal work. In fact, I think Google Sheets is the most pleasant to use of the options I've tried, which is something I thought I'd never say about a web-based alternative to a native app...

vikingerik 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

Regarding Excel's weird warts... Microsoft knows all about them but they're stuck with it for backwards compatibility. The business world has a billion Excel scripts and macros done by barely technical users that all inadvertently depend on the details of things like the scrolling and clipboard behavior. Trying to improve that would break all of that. Same as all the weirdness in JavaScript, Microsoft has to just call it a feature and live with it.

Betelbuddy 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Excel clones dont corrupt your calculations...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076

https://exceloffthegrid.com/excel-calculate-wrong-results/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...

karanveer an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

each time someone sends me an xls or xlsx file, i am scared to open it in libresoft to mess up its formatting or miss something important. I always then rever to gsheet.

fschuett an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IronCalc to the rescue?

https://www.ironcalc.com/

nurettin an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> LibreOffice’s UI is extremely dated imo

It feels so bland and hard to read. Maybe that's because of java. How did Excel 5.0 look so good?

ahartmetz 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

There is no Java in core LibreOffice, it just has some weird Java-based extension system because of its Sun history.

LibreOffice uses an extremely dated, also messy, homegrown UI toolkit and has resisted the idea of switching to something last (really) updated this millennium (sic).

yummypaint 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think I've tried every spreadsheet program still being maintained at this point. Try gnumeric, it's a clear cut above everything else.

Mandatory Excel rant: Excel can't be trusted with data destined for publication. It's bloated, buggy as hell, user hostile, and has set genetics research back with its utterly braindead autocorrect. The default plot options are the exact polar opposite of how data are presented in science, and almost impossible to make serviceable. Everything Excel touches ends up looking like a hastily thrown together 6th grade science project. Libreoffice is also riddled with serious bugs and also loses data, but hey it's free and not a decades old flagship product from a multi billion dollar tech company.

ekjhgkejhgk an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Hey, I'm very interested in this because LibreOffice annoys me and I can't explain why. It's not the "dated look" that everybody complains about; but I suspect it's related to UX somehow.

Could you articulate why Gnumeric is better than everything else?

Betelbuddy an hour ago | parent [-]

To start, your calculations will be correct unlike with Excel

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076

https://exceloffthegrid.com/excel-calculate-wrong-results/

ekjhgkejhgk 8 minutes ago | parent [-]

From your second link

> Therefore, the problem is not necessarily with Excel. Equally, the problem is not with the IEEE 754 standard either. It’s just the complex nature of the world of mathematics and computing that we live in.

Betelbuddy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>> Libreoffice is also riddled with serious bugs and also loses data

As a user of Libreoffice for years, me thinks you are doing fud.