![]() ![]() We have trialled LibreOffice before, but the results were dismal: even though LibreOffice (to its advantage) approaches Microsoft compatibility, we still experienced some minor bugs (were reported and subsequently fixed) and missing features (in the sense that PowerBI and others were providing, plus real-time collaboration which Microsoft has a decent solution) means that even considering and removing training costs from the computation, it would not justify changing from Microsoft Office (or even GDocs) to LibreOffice for us. There are GDocs users, and then MS Office users (there is a tendency that GDocs users here are using the office suite for its relative ease of use while MS Office users do tend to use the bits that are relevant to their needs (for example, Excel automation and advanced formatting found in Word which is good enough to not justify spending more in InDesign and similar applications). > I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a professional setting. For large installs we booted straight off the network (PXE) which means unless you hit an undiscovered hardware or weird hardware config issue, you can test offline or rollback 100s of machines with a reboot. You install the updates when logged in, so it's a normal reboot and you're not waiting longer. Unless you're updating the kernel you don't have to reboot (I believe there are ways around even that). What was annoying was they removed shortcut keys to access "safe mode" or "recovery mode." You now let Windows detect it had a failed boot (surprise, it didn't in my case). I've had more bad updates with Windows when dabbling than using Linux/macOS full-time-but I'm willing to chalk that up to personal experience. The major update is the only one that takes a significant amount of time. Every few weeks I would have to reboot for an update and it took awhile. Coming back I was amazed at how often and how long updates took (and how aggressive they got with them). Maybe I'm just missing things, but so far I haven't really seen them. I personally think there's some big opportunities for something like LO or another open-source office suite to really shake things up in terms of decentralization features. With really large documents and lots of editors, the web suites in my experience can become unworkable. Why not transfer the collaboration algorithms to some generic cloud server you specify, or in the context of decentralized storage? It just seems like there should be tractable ways to provide the same backup and collaboration services without having the software all sitting on MS (or Google) servers. But when I think about it, there's no reason that you can't just specify some cloud-based automatic backup in a desktop app, and it's been puzzling to me that LibreOffice or someone similar doesn't try to integrate some kind of decentralized file sharing stuff like syncthing into the editing workflow. Google docs for simple things involving wider distribution, and then to O365 for more complex things with smaller distribution.Īt the same time, I've always wondered about the collision of office software with issues around decentralization versus centralization.įor instance, when I've thought about why I resort to the web-based suites, it's usually because of backup and collaboration. I've had the same intuitive reaction regarding web office suites, noticing people gravitating to those over the years. ![]() For anyone with a development background, you can easily ramp up on Power Query's language and do 90% of the work you need to do there, and obviate the need for complicated and fragile formulas to begin with. This is essentially an entire app-within-an-app (and is a data processing engine in many Microsoft data products), complete with it's own programming language and compressed columnar data store format. That said, Excel has had a pretty nifty and powerful ETL tool hidden inside of it for the past ~7 years called Power Query. Excel's search and replace functions support basic wildcards, but anything more sophisticated than that quickly becomes infeasible, impractical, or impossible to replicate using Excel function built-ins and requires dropping writing into Javascript or VBA to write up a custom function. My pet list of functions that have me reaching for Sheets are the regex ones. Which can be used in combination with other functions to replicate a subset of QUERY use cases. It's not even close to as handy as QUERY (in ease of use or intuitiveness), but they also recently introduced FILTER. ![]() Which brings it close to (if not at) parity with ARRAYFORMULA. ARRAYFORMULA itself doesn't exist in Excel, but they did recently add support for dynamic/spilled arrays. ![]()
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