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cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/12592
Originally posted on Reddit
Any accountants use LibreOffice Calc? Is it a good excel replacement? I just downloaded it this week but haven't tested it yet.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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The only thing I really miss from office is Power Query.
For somebody like me with no formal programming knowledge but self taught, it's graphical interface and feature are really hard to replace.
There's also OnlyOffice from Latvia.
Yeah nah. I maybe for light weight every day use yeah. But MS Office is a beast for pros.
And they have excel. Nothing beats excel.
I'm not a pro but all the people I know that use it say excel is the best by far
Yep LibreOffice has felt like a beta for the last 10 years. Whoever makes this suggestion might as well use Notepad, because that's all the functions they seem to need and it's probably more stable than Writer anyways.
"You can't get fired for choosing Intel" Was corporate maxim not so long ago. See where it went.
MS Office is scriptable with basic. LibreOffice, on the other hand, supports basic, python, js, beanshell.
Both software have there advantages. Scientific research is often done on Linux, and they use LibreOffice. In University, we also used it, because they said it has better functions for our use-case.
LibreOffice is a really chunky and ugly piece of software.
During the pandemic, my job handed out Linux laptops with open source software like libreOffice, and after a month, people were secretly using Google Sheets.
Yeah, “upgrade” is a strong word for something that’s ugly as sin and just about as unintuitive to use
It's only unintuitive to you because you memorized how things work in MS Office.
I don’t use office lol
Personally I've had an issue with LibreOffice mainly in that it tends to be more unstable and clunky. It oftentimes goes unresponsive on me and has crashed a time or two when loading larger files, but that may be because I'm running it in Windows so I dunno
I imported a 10,000 line csv and every time I scrolled, half the data wouldn't update. From scrolling.
It's pretty unusable for me.
I haven't used LibreOffice in quite some time in favor of OnlyOffice because of how it handles MS Office formatting. Is the formatting situation better for LibreOffice now?
Lol no. It still lacks many of the formatting tools that MS Office has, and documents originally created in MS will frequently get messed up. I use LibreOffice because it's FOSS, but I'm not going to pretend it's functionally better than MS Office, because it's not by almost every metric.
The reason why OpenDocument format is enforced in MS Office, is because it enforces compatibility. Tell everyone who uses docx to stop promoting a proprietary software, they have the option to save to a neutral file format.
Does it do macros, and does it save in .dotx and DOCX formats?
Yes and yes
I only use this. It got to a point where it is superior to MS Word.
I find Softmaker FreeOffice easier to use, especially if you want a similar UI to MS office, german company but not opensource. Now, I only use it occasionally, I don't know which one is better for heavy users, they have a paid version too.
For some reason I don't fully understand, LibreOffice hides the option to switch the UI in View > User Interface. The option Tabbed seems to resemble MS ribbon-like style.
They should possibly consider to make that a default question on first start-up, like: 'What interface layout feels familiar?'
Now if they could do the same for Gimp. What a UX mess.
Isn't Krita considered the better open source image editor now? I keep meaning to learn it.
Its more for drawing than editing images, so not a complete gimp replacement
I use libreoffice but man libreoffice writer is so finnicky. Formatting is all wonky. Definitely not a 1:1 replacement. It will format things differently than if you opened it in word
I was using Microsoft Word on and off since 6.0 (shipped with Office 4.0), and no version of Microsoft Word was formatting your documents in the same way that the other versions did, and the same version liked to break things on different version of Windows, and sometimes ever on the same version of Windows on the other computer, because locale settings were different.
That being said, Word is a toy that can be replaced with just basically any word processing software (unless you need multiplayer editing from the Sharepoint), it's the Excel which is the true strength of MS Office, and unfortunately it's irreplaceable by anything that isn't purpose-built database processing software.
Excel doesn't do anything very well, but it can do everything that the twisted minds of the upper management can imagine, and in the hands of person experienced enough and mad enough (and you will become mad enough after couple years of VBA) the possibilities are endless.
LibreOffice Calc on the other hand is limited to 1024 columns, which is a hard limit I hit more than once, and external database integrations are real PITA.
LibreOffice Calc on the other hand is limited to 1024 columns, which is a hard limit I hit more than once, and external database integrations are real PITA.
Might be time to learn an actually programming language and take a database course brother
Nah, I'm good :) I don't need to touch anything like that those days, days of anything resembling big data are gone for me. But I know of people who need – and who work in dark basements of „Big 4” with terabytes worth of Excel sheets passed down through the generations of data scientists. No one will ever touch those workbooks, as they make the world go round, and last person that understood how it works retired 15 years ago. These setups will survive humanity, and will be estimating resource and energy prices on the international markets long after we're gone and only entities dealing in resources will be rats and roaches.
No issues with Libre Office, but isn't the point of this scene that homelander really is a downgrade?
He isn't a downgrade, he is stronger using the other guys DNA. He is mentally effed though, as a result of being brought up in a lab and tested on to see his limits.
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I just wish it wasnt so ugly.
I think the look depends a lot on the icon set in use, which can be changed in the settings. Personally I use the Elementary SVG version on my Plasma Desktops, I find those icons to be clearer and neater than the ones in the Breeze pack. Also the default Font Liberation Sans, while a fine font, has a certain look that looks slightly dated somehow. If you change the default style for all documents to some other font, it looks a lot fresher :-)
I prefer LibreOffice's ugliness to Microsoft's strange menus. Anyway they're also available in LibreOffice, in the view menu.
For the rest of the interface you could look into GTK themes, I think LO's looks depend a lot of the theme you use. The interface is pretty customizable, I think.
I'm not a fan of people applying nationalism to open source software. I get this is a reaction to another country's nationalism but it really undermines what open source software is all about.
Yea, The Document Foundation is based in Germany. But Libre Office is an international collaborative open source project, with contributors in many countries.
Open source projects dont have a nationality. Even the ones with organisations based in the USA. And if people really are concerned about US based legal orgs then we should be looking at forking the software.
Its already under open source licences and belongs to everyone regardless of nationality.
TBH, as a New Zealander, highlighting that it's not based or of the US is a huge win.
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So... we supposed to be rooting for Homelander now?
For real. I really hate how all the internet has just decided to meme with homelander like he is a good guy. Any meme I see with him I just assume some sort of malevolence behind it because he is so fucking evil.
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Good marketing point: LibreOffice has NO ENSHITTIFICATION! Great!
Libreoffice is amazing. I had dismissed it ages ago back when I had no reason to boycott the US, but now I tried it again after switching to Linux and it works amazingly good.
There’s no need for MS Office for personal use, though unfortunately for my large corporate employer it probably isn’t going to realistically be considered.
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