A couple of days ago I bit the bullet and dug into the Excel file and figured out how to redesign everything and get it going again. Yay me. I'll admit I don't like the UI in LibreOffice, but I didn't like it very much when I first tried using it (as Star Office) back in the 90s either. Yet I keep coming back to it.
If I'm going to be locked into a format or app, I'd rather it be something like LibreOffice.
In my experience, it’s much stricter than a standard spreadsheet though. It feels a bit like moving from Python to Java.
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...
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...
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.
Gnumeric rocks, even features Montecarlo built-in, I have it installed in my personal machine, but a major limitation is that they stopped providing windows builds, up to the last time I checked, so I can't use it at work.
Could you articulate why Gnumeric is better than everything else?
> 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.
As a user of Libreoffice for years, me thinks you are doing fud.
It feels so bland and hard to read. Maybe that's because of java. How did Excel 5.0 look so good?
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).
I like OnlyOffice. Their desktop apps are much lighter and better looking. They work fine for my light needs. They also do have a LOT more than just desktop apps.
The last time I mentioned them I was informed they are Russian. If that matters to you. It is actual open source software though. Perhaps the EU should fork it. :) (By the way I hadn't checked last time but, wikipedia says Latvian with Russian origin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice. This page does say they are Russian, https://www.en-zdv.uni-mainz.de/2023/05/30/software-onlyoffi... and that they are switching to the open-source version.)
https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/desktop-apps
EDIT: Some more context. A cryptpad developer says
> we consider the OnlyOffice code upstream as "untrusted".
https://forum.cryptpad.org/d/232-onlyoffice-concerns-vendor-...
I think - we need to have software - not subject to political gimmicks - since countries can get into wars with each other & sanction each other etc
remember when Venezuela was sanctioned and they couldn't access Adobe 360 or whatever it's called.
Here's the company info on a Latvian org registry: https://company.lursoft.lv/en/ascensio-system/40103265308
I logged in to the platform, not sharing the names myself, but basically:
* company was registered in Latvia in 2010 (e.g. included in VAT register over here)
* board has 1 member since 2009, registered in Russia (Russian passport)
* has 1 shareholder, Ascensio System Limited in the UK (05718967)
* has one beneficial owner, in 2023 updated data from Russia to Turkey (passport issued in Istanbul)
So yeah, the company is registered over here, seems like they're trying to distance themselves from Russia for obvious reasons. Not sure why the downvotes for the parent comment, that's probably nice to mention.
They might have one official employee but there are a bunch of people active on their github. They might be contractors or employees of a different related company.
Please explain what you mean by this...
My impression is that this is more or less how ISO standards are supposed to work. Personally, I don't want to work in such an environment.
Microsoft Office has a project leadership that believes that Office Open XML is the best and most open office format. That's very convenient for them, considering that Office Open XML is a standardisation of the native file format of that lineage of office suites.
Now, OnlyOffice is presumably something written from scratch, unrelated to those two lineages. They chose to prioritise compatibility with the market leader's standard, and the second place in the market is upset that a competitor isn't favouring them instead.
I think this is a bit silly.
Beyond marketing fluff, I don't think anybody at Microsoft genuinely believes they have an "open office format" or an actual "standardization". Even Apple back in the day had to reverse-engineer the Microsoft formats. [1]
Whether you'd like to denounce OnlyOffice taking part in this masquerade or not is a political issue. But giving Microsoft any form of benefit of the doubt on this matter is historically wrong and, I believe, ethically evil.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45144758
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera...
How do you define dated in this context?
Personally, I quite like being able to use the CUA keyboard shortcuts to access menu items. I like consistency over decades but I appreciate that there are other ways of looking at this.
This kind of UI is a dealbreaker for many new users, especially Gen Zers. How could open source conquer the world without attracting our youngest generations?
They should have bundled GTK like GIMP does. That would make the experience feel much less like it is from the XP era.
(I know these types of comments often get downvoted, but I challenge you to explain why you disagree.)
Ok, all other things being equal: Microsoft is no longer a good arbiter of UI/UX design.
This is extremely well documented.
Old doesn't automatically mean worse, though I understand that people feel that way on an emotional level when they see old "ugly" UI.
It looks ancient, worse than office apps from 20 years ago.
Plus if it runs on Android it must support snackbars.
I have version 25.8.4.2 running here. It looks rather better and most importantly offers me the choice of a ribbon or not and many other choices rather than enforcing a single "opinionated" interface.
Ultimately, the "classic" approach taken is because many users feel that the classic style is more usable and makes them more productive irrespective of their learned habits of the past 20-30 years.
Microsoft did those usability studies on the versions of Office that were current before the ribbon. The ribbon followed those studies as their attempt at a solution.
A few times over the years I've tried to search for usability studies of the ribbon interface because I've never got on with it myself. I find plenty of others asking the same thing online, and everybody points them to those same earlier studies from before the ribbon, while wrongly telling them it's a study of the ribbon.
Those studies are unable to tell us whether or not MS's attempt at a solution actually fixed the problems.
I believe the ribbon was a downgrade in usability terms (but people expect it in office suites, purely because it's seen as looking more modern). And I'd love to see real intensive research to tell me whether my belief is right or wrong.
MS may have done usability studies earlier (say, when they cared about dethroning Lotus 123 and WordPerfect) but that war was long won when the ribbon UI came out, by then they only cared about milking the cash cow.
Anyway, the point is surely that if LibreOffice really wants to attract users from Microsoft Office, then it should do everything possible to optimise that transition?
Offering the option of a UI mimicking the familiar MS Office layout is not a difficult engineering problem. And if it makes users significantly more likely to switch, it should be a high priority to implement.
Honestly, at this stage, thinking of Gimp, FreeCAD, LibreOffice, and Blender, it’s as though there’s a weird group psychology deliberately against offering even decent (let along best-in-class) UIs in the open source world. These are all apps with excellent fundamental underlying engines/tech which are handicapped hugely by their UI/UX. (Yes I know some of these have improved in recent years, but only after far longer without improvements.)
It's already there. It really feels like such criticisms are from people who haven't used it in 10+ years.
I think this is a matter of choice and it is nice that there are choices. As other posters in this little sub-tree have suggested, there are people who value continuity over a period of time.
Congratulations on figuring this out. It's not like the commenter you replied to said, it "feels dated" ... Oh no wait, he did.
A big selling point for me. Needless reworking of familiar interfaces plagues MS Windows ecosystem and I'm glad LibreOffice is displaying healthy conservatism by not fixing what isn't broken.
[1] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=gui...
I'm sure you know that's not true. I'm sure you know that developers hate taking bug reports from users even when those users have support contracts.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/how-do-i-give-fee...
https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-use-the-feedback-tool-in-micr...
b) they have automated crash report and usage telemetry to tell them what isn’t working
TBH I don't think de-big-tech will ever succeed in a capitalistic world.
Edit: Further, the ooxml format was heavily criticised ~20 years ago, back when it was introduced. This is old news.
What should have happened was that ten years ago Apache should have "retired" OpenOffice. That's Apache's terminology for projects which are abandoned. But instead it has limped on for all these years, sucking up valuable effort by users with Apache claiming that it'll be fine somehow.
Surprisingly moving a lot for something dead