Excel is great. I’ve used it pretty much most every day of my working career, which is getting pretty long now. Google’s version is basically the same thing but it’s just slightly different enough to not use it even for personal stuff.
Excel is great. I’ve used it pretty much most every day of my working career, which is getting pretty long now. Google’s version is basically the same thing but it’s just slightly different enough to not use it even for personal stuff.
Indoor? wrote:
Do you people not know about Open Office?
I haven’t used actual Office in probably 9 years. Use OO for on computer stuff and Google for cloud, know lots of people who do similar.
2nd this. Open office is every bit as good as microsoft's office suite. The only annoying thing about it is having to save everything in the right microsoft office file format so others can read it.
Wolf's Bane wrote:
Indoor? wrote:
Do you people not know about Open Office?
I haven’t used actual Office in probably 9 years. Use OO for on computer stuff and Google for cloud, know lots of people who do similar.
2nd this. Open office is every bit as good as microsoft's office suite. The only annoying thing about it is having to save everything in the right microsoft office file format so others can read it.
Drop OpenOffice (no longer developed) and go with LibreOffice. OpenOffice was controlled (bought) by Oracle Corporation (Larry Ellison) which killed it by getting rid of most of the developers. Oracle then tossed the mess they made over to Apache Open Office. But LibreOffice, a fork of OpenOffice, is the true open-source software now.
We have people who try to use the Google stuff, but Sheets is a nightmare compared to Excel. Horribly slow, just not in the same league. Typing a memo in Docs isn't so bad, I guess. I rather like Slides, but I prefer to use a Chromebook for presentations, so that works very well.
I'd be happy if we could get rid of Windows 10. It's a friggin nightmare to support in the Enterprise and the random updates kill stuff on a weekly basis. My computer can't even open a jpg without having troubles. It either won't open or takes 30 seconds. How do you screw up opening the most popular file format in the world? Ask Microsoft.
Thinking about pushing more people onto Chromebooks and using Office Online. Haven't tried it myself but it may be a future solution.
Software markets are natural monopolies. The marginal cost is zero, which means an incumbent can crush a competitor on price if necessary, so nobody bothers to try. Consumers have difficulty switching because they’ve invested time in learning the software. Any new competitor has to worry about compatibility, but nobody else is worried about being compatible with them, so the burden is one sided.
For what it’s worth, I miss Word Pefect. Last time I used it was when I was clerking. I just found it intuitive and fast, but software geeks say that under the hood it was much better designed than Word.
The VB customization, the built in libraries and the ui/ux far exceed Libre and Google Sheets.
Take a close look at sorting, replace functions, unique column values, drag and drop, etc.
CTRL + ALT + Q wrote:
The VB customization, the built in libraries and the ui/ux far exceed Libre and Google Sheets.
Take a close look at sorting, replace functions, unique column values, drag and drop, etc.
Sorting: LibreOffice has done this for years.
Replace Functions: LibreOffice has done this for years.
Unique Column Values: LibreOffice has done this for years.
Drag and Drop: Sorting: LibreOffice has done this for years.
VB customization: LibreOffice has done this for years via it Basic Macros.
Microsoft Office is amazing. Nothing has yet surpassed just how incredible the product is.
Steve Job wrote:
Microsoft Office is amazing. Nothing has yet surpassed just how incredible the product is.
Except for all those companies I bought and crushed.
Secret sauce
LibreOffice wrote:
Wolf's Bane wrote:
2nd this. Open office is every bit as good as microsoft's office suite. The only annoying thing about it is having to save everything in the right microsoft office file format so others can read it.
Drop OpenOffice (no longer developed) and go with LibreOffice. OpenOffice was controlled (bought) by Oracle Corporation (Larry Ellison) which killed it by getting rid of most of the developers. Oracle then tossed the mess they made over to Apache Open Office. But LibreOffice, a fork of OpenOffice, is the true open-source software now.
I take it none of you do anything even slightly advanced in Excel, or have to open Word documents from various sources. I live and breathe Linux day in and day out -- but I flip over to a Windows VM if I need to do anything Office oriented. There is simply no comparison. Libre Office is slow and buggy trash with not even a tiny fraction of the advanced features of Excel. It can't even begin to dream of ascending to the very lowest levels of what Excel with PowerPivot offers.
And then there's Writer, which lacks a tremendous number of Word features, has an awful UI, and absolutely terrible compatibility with the rest of the world. Bigger documents, which I regularly need to work with, either take forever to load, render it completely sluggish, or simply crash it. It's not even worth the effort.
You can love or hate Microsoft as a company, but the fact is that Office is solid and 100% quality and has been for many years now. It's not going anywhere because there's nowhere else to go if you actually need to get something done.
Everything else is sht tbh. Not necessarily because the product is objectively worse, but because my boss is used to excel and hes a boomer.
1. Google is not a software company. The only reason Google docs/sheets/slides exists is so an alternative exists to Microsoft for business/enterprise customers they are trying to get on their platform.
2. It comes down to money. No one is going to invest the time and money to create a better product because to do so would cost tens of millions of $ (at least). You're only hope as the company who tried this would be to hopefully get bought out by Microsoft. It would be really, really tough to convince existing users to migrate.
3. As others have said, it just plain works.
Linux Power User wrote:
LibreOffice wrote:
Drop OpenOffice (no longer developed) and go with LibreOffice. OpenOffice was controlled (bought) by Oracle Corporation (Larry Ellison) which killed it by getting rid of most of the developers. Oracle then tossed the mess they made over to Apache Open Office. But LibreOffice, a fork of OpenOffice, is the true open-source software now.
I take it none of you do anything even slightly advanced in Excel, or have to open Word documents from various sources.
^ A statement of ignorance. I have written macro modules (Excel VB and OL Basic), done advanced lookups using external linked spreadsheets, and never had a problem with converting documents except for pretty formatting. So, if your complaint is that Microsoft's pretty formatting does not convert into open source formats you need to know you do not know what you are doing, and that the incompatibility is intentional on Microsoft's part to keep the Office sheep from straying.
WordPerfect was word processing software that once dominated the Market until about 20 years ago. It was a lot more user friendly than Microfoft Word and was preferred in industries that were document/correspondence heavy (law firms, etc.)
Microsoft Word eventually took over from WordPerfect because moving from a WordPerfect document to a Word document would cause a ton of formatting issues.
LibreOffice wrote:
Linux Power User wrote:
I take it none of you do anything even slightly advanced in Excel, or have to open Word documents from various sources.
^ A statement of ignorance. I have written macro modules (Excel VB and OL Basic), done advanced lookups using external linked spreadsheets, and never had a problem with converting documents except for pretty formatting. So, if your complaint is that Microsoft's pretty formatting does not convert into open source formats you need to know you do not know what you are doing, and that the incompatibility is intentional on Microsoft's part to keep the Office sheep from straying.
I'm sure LibreOffice can do most, if not all of the stuff Excel can do.
I already know how to make Excel do whatever I want. It's not worth the cost savings of not buying an Office license to have to relearn how to do everything. I can use my work PC remotely if I need a spreadsheet, if I were to lose access to that, I would buy office for myself.
I use LibreOffice if I'm on my laptop and don't have an internet connection to log in to my work PC. The UI is painful.
DeBron Lames wrote:
We have people who try to use the Google stuff, but Sheets is a nightmare compared to Excel. Horribly slow, just not in the same league. Typing a memo in Docs isn't so bad, I guess. I rather like Slides, but I prefer to use a Chromebook for presentations, so that works very well.
I'd be happy if we could get rid of Windows 10. It's a friggin nightmare to support in the Enterprise and the random updates kill stuff on a weekly basis. My computer can't even open a jpg without having troubles. It either won't open or takes 30 seconds. How do you screw up opening the most popular file format in the world? Ask Microsoft.
Thinking about pushing more people onto Chromebooks and using Office Online. Haven't tried it myself but it may be a future solution.
The reason JPGs take so long to open on Windows is because your files are living on OneDrive (the "Cloud") whether you want them to, or not. Here's the future.
I lost some side work years ago because I didn't have Office on my computer and so resorted to using Abiword, which was free. The problem was that it messed up some of the formatting. I then got a copy of Office and fixed it rapidly but the damage was done. So, Office is entrenched and even if you use something else, it has to work with Office and there will always be compatibility issues. And MS bundles it, along with other MS products, in most pc's, and if you want something else you have to arrange it yourself instead of having the default.
I can't imagine how anyone can make a better version of excel. It's incredibly easy to use and useful even if you only know really simple formulas and basic formatting.
I try to use LaTeX to write papers and share them with Overleaf, but one of my collaborators doesn't know how to use LaTeX. So we have to do everything in Word. So yeah, +1 to the critical mass argument.
TAA wrote:
I can't imagine how anyone can make a better version of excel. It's incredibly easy to use and useful even if you only know really simple formulas and basic formatting.
Excel makes different versions of Excel every year, some must be better or worse, no?
My primary problem with Excel is that my datasets are too large and Excel is too slow. I do a lot of python, even for spreadsheets that start as Excel.
I could also suggest several features that would be useful. As far as graphs, I've always wished for some sort of scripting output for every graph so that you can quickly reproduce multiple versions of a graph without clicking through a million things. Like let me make one with the mouse gui and then make the next 15 with a script. I also wish you could drag things around inside the graph to eyeball-compare plots manually.