I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a professional setting.
In my experience everyone uses MS Office or Google Docs, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users.
I'm sure the situation is different in other parts of the world, where saving on license cost is more important.
It's a bit of a shame that eg governments aren't switching en masse.
But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, and the incompatabilities of Writer with Word make it problematic.
> But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, and the incompatabilities of Writer with Word make it problematic.
I find Calc to be quite complete and quite compatible with Excel files. I deal with way more Excel sheets than I would like to, but I can't remember the last time I ran into a problem with them.
Google Docs on the other hand is quite slow and lacks a lot of features and has the disadvantage of being browser based and a Google product.
YES! This 1000 times! I keep LibreOffice installed on my Windows install solely because of that. In general, Calc has got to be the best in the suite and perhaps the only one that actually has any advantage over MS (besides Draw's PDF editing, but that has no direct MS counterpart).
It amazes me how an open source project can outperform a 40 year old multi-billion dollar app. I think this points to major corruption and incompetence as a result of market monopolization.
It doesn't though, as basically everyone in this comment section can attest to. This is simply one instance where it's better - looking at it closely, this is actually an open-source program supporting a standard open format better than proprietary software that has its own alternative - pretty common when you think about it.
Well, Writer offers sane menus, toolbars and sidebars, unlike Word. Word's are a complete mess, each time I have to use it I'm lost and can't do basic things.
Other than being the „Right Thing“ to use, this is the real killer as Excel frequently can‘t open its own CSV Files. Microsoft seems to hate its users very much.
Calc is good, but Impress is disastrous. Really buggy and lacks a lot of ergonomy compared to Powerpoint. Writer works really well except some weird behavior when switching languages occasionaly.
Yeah, Impress is a mess. I use OnlyOffice for ppt files since I don't really care about performance in a slide editor.
As for Writer, one more problem is that it is sometimes simply unbearably ugly. Just scrolling through a pretty small document creates rendering artifacts everywhere and the font rendering tends to randomly switch between passable and horrendous. If you're lucky though and that doesn't happen for you, it's actually pretty usable (ignoring format compatibility, of course, but that's also MS's fault).
QUERY: is selfserving google feature. But you can probably do it in libreoffice in a way that is less google-selfserving and more portable, by using a macro/script that fetches content.
> QUERY: is selfserving google feature. But you can probably do it in libreoffice in a way that is less google-selfserving and more portable, by using a macro/script that fetches content.
I don't understand how QUERY is a "selfserving google feature". It allows you to write queries over spreadsheet data using a variant of SQL. Anybody else could implement the same idea.
ARRAYFORMULA itself doesn't exist in Excel, but they did recently add support for dynamic/spilled arrays[1]. Which brings it close to (if not at) parity with ARRAYFORMULA.
It's not even close to as handy as QUERY (in ease of use or intuitiveness), but they also recently introduced FILTER[2]. Which can be used in combination with other functions to replicate a subset of QUERY use cases.
My pet list of functions that have me reaching for Sheets are the regex ones[3][4][5]. Excel's search and replace functions support basic wildcards[6], 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.
That said, Excel has had a pretty nifty and powerful ETL tool hidden inside of it for the past ~7 years called Power Query[7]. 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[8] and compressed columnar data store format. 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.
The thing is they were administration (Army, Home Office) and in the last decade a lot of the administration here dropped MS in favour of Libre for economic/political reasons.
And then, just a couple of months ago they dropped Libre and switched to mmm... OnlyOffice. There hasn't been much talk about it -compared to when switching to Libre- but it seems it was decided because they wanted a suite that was available via web but didn't want to go back to MS with O365 or use Google.
Microsoft is just amazing at 'helping' companies chose software. If you're already on a microsoft stack at work, maybe running some in house servers, exchange, some other things, and you're partially in the cloud as well, it's a no brainer to get office as well with it, and teams, and whatever else.
Microsoft has an entire ecosystem that works fairly well. It doesn't make much sense to just use libreoffice when Office just works and comes with the the rest of the pie you are eating.
I'd add a small asterisk here, since MS stuff doesn't actually integrate well. It integrates barely sufficiently while making third-party integration near impossible, so you really don't have much of a choice.
I have been a linux user since about 2006. I didn't really even know anything about the MS stack when I started at LargeCorp a few years ago. I was actually pleasantly surprised how well most things just worked. Teams was a bit shakey at the start, but the office online integraiton was nice, we were able to collaborate, exchange worked out of the box nicely, the phones in the office were even tied into whatever system we had so I could have my number even if i was sitting at a different desk for a week.
I understood why when teams came out they said "okay stop using slack because we now get teams for free". They already have MS every-other-product and now they got another one at no extra cost.
O365 is probably the final nail for any broad deployment of LibreOffice in a largish company. Especially with so many working remote from their own PC's. That's despite the fact that online Word is probably less compatible with regular Word than LibreOffice is :)
Word Online is a mess, but the real killer feature of 365 seems to be collaboration within the standard apps. You get the full power of a well-established desktop app with the convenience of someting like G Docs. Add to that the new-ish diff and merge features for the majority of companies that still rely on sending docs back and forth through email and it seems that LibreOffice really has no way of competing in anything but a highly-regulated and locked-down scenario such as some government offices, where MS's fancy features actually pose a security threat (and a project can't survive from just that).
I've had the same intuitive reaction regarding web office suites, noticing people gravitating to those over the years. Google docs for simple things involving wider distribution, and then to O365 for more complex things with smaller distribution.
At the same time, I've always wondered about the collision of office software with issues around decentralization versus centralization.
For instance, when I've thought about why I resort to the web-based suites, it's usually because of backup and collaboration. 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. 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. Why not transfer the collaboration algorithms to some generic cloud server you specify, or in the context of decentralized storage?
With really large documents and lots of editors, the web suites in my experience can become unworkable. 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. Maybe I'm just missing things, but so far I haven't really seen them.
At least it can render the document correctly in Word Online, last time I gave LibreOffice something complex the fonts and formatting were messy (same goes for Apple’s built in Word previewer, which I’m pretty sure hasn’t been updated since iPhone OS 1.0).
I'm inclined to think this is, almost entirely, a fake objection - just something people feel they have to claim about LO.
Google Docs is absolutely bloody useless at DOCX reading in every way, and messes up quite simple documents, but nobody ever raises this objection.
LO is really fantastically good at reading the fake standard called DOCX. In my experience, it handles it more consistently than MS Word - which is notoriously incompatible with other versions of itself.
Put it this way: I believe this class of objection when the objector links the LO bug, with a test document.
It's almost never the same layout as in proper Word even for simple documents. It's only really useful for shared documents you don't need to print etc.
Yes - LibreOffice Draw. Microsoft has made quite a mess of Visio and Draw is much, much easier to use. My organization is an MS Office shop but that really just means we use Word, Excel, and Power Point. Us techies? We use LibreOffice Draw.
Now that GDocs has become more popular and so people more and more are distributing presentations as PDFs I've also seen more people starting to use Impress. It's usage isn't widespread, but it's trending up.
Word and Excel? I don't see their dominance fading in my organization anytime in the foreseeable future.
That's Draw.io, for those that haven't heard of their new name, and I definitely agree that it's brilliant piece of software. Pretty much the one and only web-based productivity software I enjoy using.
Well yes, and what is VSCode but a web app, hosted locally? :)
I was thinking about the online version when I wrote my comment, as that is what I usually use. My point is that even the browser version is basically perfect, which is rare to see in web apps (including "electronized" ones).
In 2007 my company (a digital agency) had it's last bad Microsoft day. We had a bad Windows update that caused every employee 4-5 hours of downtime. So, that afternoon I asked everyone Mac or Linux. The next day we switched. It worked out largely because OpenOffice (and then LibreOffice) were good enough to let us interop with our customers and vendors.
While I don't love Microsoft, 4-5 hours of downtime due to a bad OS update isn't anything to write home about and is by no mean restricted to Windows, especially in 2007.
Same thing can happen on Mac (Catalina bricking MacBooks via bad EFI update) or Linux (where do I start).
Basically, you have to pick your poison and a sysadmin that withholds updates until all SW apps and packages are tested thoroughly on the company devices before green-lighting the rollout.
Clicking Update each time you get a notification, has the risk of ending badly for your business no matter what OS you choose.
Not true, there are tons of ways in Linux where you can completely recover from a bad update. Either manual backups (even using tar works), BTRFS or ZFS, or something more fancy like NixOS (that I use).
This still doesn't mean there's absolutely no downtime, especially in an enterprise setting where it's usually easier to perform generic rollbacks on Windows than Linux.
I didn't use Windows for 10-15 years. Coming back I was amazed at how often and how long updates took (and how aggressive they got with them). Every few weeks I would have to reboot for an update and it took awhile. For macOS it's like 2-3 times a year. The major update is the only one that takes a significant amount of time.
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. 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).
Linux has way more options for updating. Unless you're updating the kernel you don't have to reboot (I believe there are ways around even that). You install the updates when logged in, so it's a normal reboot and you're not waiting longer. 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.
In my uni, the computers booted over PXE and were often re-imaged, while mounting user files over the network. I imagine it is a rather common setup?
Anyway, since they had groups of similar hardware, software was thouroughly tested before any update was deployed to a given group. This was the case for Linux, and probably for windows as well.
This was a smallish university, with an IT staff of 3-4, mind you, so that's probably not too complex to deploy. There's probably turnkey solutions out there (Red Hat likely has something like this).
Linux makes sense in a company setting IMO, as companies can generally pick the machines their employees will use, so they can vet compatibility and software updates in advance. Of course, more moving parts (different HW/SW combinations) means more difficult testing.
What do you mean? NixOS you basically can reboot in the latest working version, so the downtime is likely minutes at the worse. Also snapshots in Btrfs/ZFS are really fast to recover too, since they're basically a pointer (again, at worse you will have minutes of downtime).
I had updates in Windows take quite a long time to complete, even on SSDs, and in Windows you also can't update the system while running (it must be during reboot). And since you can't use the machine, this can be considered downtime too.
I will add, that currently Ubuntu does that by default, when on ZFS. For users, it will snapshot their homedir every hour, so even if they accidentally delete something, it doesn't need to be catastrophic.
You're right but that wasn't my point. I didn't say you can't recover easily from Linux, I said it's just as likely to break your shit through an update as any other OS.
It isn't though, even when it did, ah let's say 15 years ago I could always repair it when it booted into terminal or with a resqueCD. The same can't be said about Windows, that's usually because GNU/Linux had sane filesystem which Windows never had.
At the time this happened, that was the last straw after losing about 2 calendar days times 21 employees. You know what? We never had it happen again after moving. Not once in the next four years (I sold the company and didn't pay attention after the sale).
> But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel,
This sounds really paradoxical to me: granted Calc isn't Excel, but it has maybe 50% of the features when Google Doc has, I don't know, maybe 3% …
When doing basic things, you are almost always good with Calc, meanwhile Google Doc is like the most minimal spreadsheet you can get.
Keep in mind that the author already states they rarely need an office suite, so needing spreadsheets is an ever rarer occasion. For those kinds of users, Google Sheets is perfectly fine and even has some convenience features that the competition doesn't (for me, those are mainly great checkbox and dropdown support, some fancy "online" formulas that can do things like currency conversion, and linking spreadsheet ranges into Docs).
Both are true, though, if you consider a non-power-user's perspective. Calc is behind Excel and Sheets in usability, but ahed of Sheets (and behind Excel) in "power". You can do more with Calc out of the box, but it's much more annoying to use than Sheets and if you don't need that power, Sheets is the better choice (ignoring philosophical issues).
I would agree that "Calc" has worse usability if you're talking about OpenOffice. I find LibreOffice's Calc to be as usable as Excel because it reminds me of Excel 2003 (and older). Additional anecdata: I asked my wife who hates using Excel and she said that LibreOffice Calc was no different.
I work as Software Engineer but LibreOffice is my first-choice for any Office related task, both at work and at home. The CSV import/export is far better than that of MS Office - and Docs for that matter. Which is exactly what I need, Spreadsheet is the most common tool I need at work. But I also use the other tools, not that often though. Most notable IMHO is the well-working PDF export in Writer that predates any built-in PDF export in Office or Windows by years.
But yes, some "normal" tasks take a few clicks more than in MS Office when you're not used to it. The look&feel is really different and the UI still make this 90s-OSS-hardly-works impression - which is unjustified. On the other hand it is far more powerful than Google Docs and I can check in the files in git which is not an option for Google Docs. FWIW I think there's an online version of it as well now.
Well and my company does, but naturally biased as we're European (meaning, sending over lots of data to Microsoft is a bit more frowned upon) and produce open source software ourself.
Anecdotally, I'm "the Linux person" at my company, so I have LibreOffice on my machine. Everyone else is on Office 365. I rarely need an office suite, and LO does the job for me, but with the online MS Office apps, seems like LibreOffice is further from professional adoption than ever before.
The online collaboration aspect seems to be the killer feature. If I load Excel Online in a browser to edit a file together with someone else, that just works, and it handles simple use cases very well. I suppose the web version of Excel wouldn't deal with complex spreadsheets well, but complex MS Office files are also prone to fail in LibreOffice.
I continue to run LibreOffice because it does what I need, but seems like cloud office suites are now expected to be an option, and the FOSS options there seem to be way behind.
I'm transitioning our small telecom business to LibreOffice. Not sure if that is representative at all. MS Office subscription model makes little sense for us. LibreOffice works well, and I am happy to see predominantly ODTs and ODSs now in the internal circulation. Files in external correspondence still have to be MS Office.
Having a full stable office suite like LibreOffice was probably the final reason I've switched to FreeBSD on my desktop, and haven't looked back.
> I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a professional setting.
Here, also nope. 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).
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. Google has eaten the basics and Microsoft has eaten the advanced users (and R/Py/Julia for even more advanced users), so to speak.
I think they have a lot of users in Africa, Eastern Europe, places like that. If you look at their blogs they also have contributors there and focus some outreach there I think.
I see these two as very different need and usage. Google Docs is for some basic cross department collaboration usage. Which is replaceable only by Office 365 online but not traditional Office itself.
With Office, 2007, 2010, 2013+ ( Anything beyond 2013 is far to new for most Enterprise upgrade and usage ). These group of user aren't going to be switching to anything.
I am willing to bet money there are Trillion dollar revenue today relying on Good old Excel SpreadSheet. From Small family business to large Investment firms using Excel to its limit.
Which is working perfectly fine, DONT FUCKING TOUCH IT.
Even if LibreOffice promise 99.99% of Excel compatibility, are business and Enterprise willing to risk 0.01% of failure? For What? Ideology to not use anything from Microsoft? Or Supporting Open Source?
I have stated this before, the biggest lock-in Microsoft has might not be Windows, but Excel. Companies are more than willing to switch over to Mac as long as Microsoft Excel is on the platform.
( Which is also one reason why I see a slim possibilities of Microsoft one day open sourcing Windows Kernel )
A customer of mine has both Office and LibreOffice on their Macs. They tend to use Word and Excel (not much) but can open odt and ods. However most of their documents are created and stored on several online platforms. Word and Office are not as important as they used to be.
Hi, sorry for complete offtopicness, but would you mind emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you a repost invite for a good submission and we don't have any other way to contact you!
> In my experience everyone uses MS Office or Google Docs, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users.
Of which quite a few in the latter group think that proprietary software is for suckers.
> I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a professional setting.
> In my experience, everyone uses MS Office, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users.
At one job, I recommended OpenOffice for handling some very old files that were in a Lotus format Microsoft Office didn't support. I wouldn't call it gaining traction, but they installed at least one copy.
I have promoted Open/LibreOffice among humanities and social sciences colleagues for around 20 years and have seen zero uptake. The problems are 1) they just accept whatever IT puts on their office machines, and 2) their primary user concern is compatibility. They not only need to stay on Word, but they generally need to be all using the same version. I use only LibreOffice and it does cause problems when exchanging documents.
Additionally both Google Docs and Libre fall down if you are doing more comprehensive data analysis.
Google Docs is functionally pretty close to most of excel, but has significantly more restrictions in terms of row count.
Libre office misses key functionality available in the latest office releases last time I checked. Things like unique(), filter(), let() and more recently lamda() really do change the game.
Out of curiosty, what kinds of things would actually hit the row limit? It's hard for me to imagine a situation where you have enough data points to reach it, but don't have any specialised software to analyze it.
I work in logistics consulting - it’s pretty common to receive orderline data that is a few hundred thousand rows and excel is great at analysing it (eg to build a material flow).
Excel for this is significantly faster and more flexible than any other tool I’ve used.
Also transport data and models can often use many columns. Google Docs limit is actually the active cells used so this then reduces the row limit further.
If we receive data that is a few million rows on bigger formats, we will still use excel, just with PowerQuery / PowerPivot and using measures which works pretty well up to 10 million records or so.
Don't know about the comment author, but in consulting huge excels are quite the normal. Especially when dealing with data driven domains such as energy
As a long-time Linux user, I cannot remember when it was the last time I used LibreOffice.
I have been using the free-but-not-opensource WPS Office for years, and it's great. Lightweight, featureful, works a lot better with Microsoft formats... no reason for me to ever touch LO again.
it's easy to forget, but even for document edition.. legacy can strike hard. My last bout at a court room they were using WordPerfect 12, due to coupling with its template system with the legal doc generator.
Doubtful, everything is going web app these days. Web Assembly will help bridge the performance gap between native apps and webapps, which is really the last pain point.
I tried for a while, but gave up. Using anything but MS Office is swimming upstream. It's just not worth the hassle.
I have been impressed with Google's in-browser compatibility, but it isn't a replacement. It's just nice not to have to fire up Word or Excel and get a quick glance, if that's what I need.
When they switched back they still had something like 40% of workstations running Windows.
I assume they'll make the same discovery as last time: It's not free as in free beer; they'll have to develop the missing pieces themselves if they want it to work.
Yeah, because the efforts to switch all over was constantly messed with, from Balmer cancelling his vacation for a immediate visit with the Mayor, to people complaining that their random exe cannot be installed (which was mainly due to newer stricter policy and every admin can tell you that this is a general complaint).
> to people complaining that their random exe cannot be installed
When it's critical software that's required to get work done it's a legitimate complain. And that's why they were still running Windows in parallels years after "switching"
In my experience everyone uses MS Office or Google Docs, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users.
I'm sure the situation is different in other parts of the world, where saving on license cost is more important.
It's a bit of a shame that eg governments aren't switching en masse.
But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, and the incompatabilities of Writer with Word make it problematic.