The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
It's been over a decade since I was a regular, daily Excel user ("power user", frankly). I still, today, haven't seen anything that matches what Excel was already back then.
It has its quirks. It's also damned powerful and optimized.
(I guess that's including its program-ability and the ability to interface it with external functionality via Win32 et al. I remember, for example, referencing IE 4, then 5, in order to "add" regex's to it via VBA scripting. Actually, as I recall that was actually Windows Scripting Host; installing the relevant version of IE at that time in turn caused WSH to also be installed.)
P.S. I was not number crunching during the Lotus heydays. I gather its products had some features that were unparalleled for their time and that Excel may never have fully matched.
P.P.S. As for quirks, I remember one bit of oddity emanating from a formatting function that an older programmer associated with a Fortran convention, when I happened to describe it to him.
Don't know how OO Calc compares to Excel today, but I stopped using it after having an unfixed issue(1) open for a few years that made it impossible to produce a simple line graph with more than about 2000 points without slowing down the program to a halt, whereas Excel didn't even break a sweat.
These are the limitations of Excel alternatives. They look nice on the outside, but fail to understand that users don't use them just for the simple stuff. It is well known that Excel is what really powers many companies, and these are often absurdly complex.
(1) OO Calc insisted on drawing an x-axis label for every single point in a graph, on every redraw.
Shitty cell storage model - it models sheets as individual cells rather than as columns. This makes everything fat and sloooow. Kohei Yoshida is fixing this for LibreOffice, and Calc should get much faster in 4.2. Not as fast as Excel.
LO Basic is not VBA. This is important when people's stuff is written in VBA.
I've tried Open / Libre Office on both Windows and Linux targets. A benchmark: Create a couple columns of, say, 10000 x/y values, and see how long it takes to create a basic scatter plot.
Also, I've noticed that the user interface of Excel is a lot more polished. For instance it's more forgiving of exactly where I put the mouse pointer before clicking -- valuable for me because I get severe eyestrain headaches whenever I have to look too closely at the screen for too long.
I’m by no means an Excel power user, but Apple Numbers provides everything I need in a spreadsheet app. I have native Numbers apps on my laptop, desktop, tablet, and phone (but there’s also a web app). Whenever I save a file on one device, it’s automatically added to all the others. A file created on my laptop can be edited on my phone and vice versa. Also, Apple Numbers imports and exports Excel documents. As a result, I haven’t opened Excel in over a year and I doubt I’ll ever buy another upgrade.
Excel may not be replaceable for everyone, especially if you’re using it in a corporate setting, but for me, I have found I can easily do without. I find Apple Numbers to be way more user-friendly and convenient.
So Numbers is a good, platform-locked spreadsheet editor for simple uses?
Dropbox+Excel seems like it would do the same thing, but even with more flexibility (including version control, document sharing) and supporting even more platforms.
I don't think you can ever consider spreadsheet software to be 'user friendly'. They're spreadsheets.
> Numbers is a good, platform-locked spreadsheet editor for simple uses?
Numbers is not just a spreadsheet editor, it’s a full-fledged spreadsheet creator. Its features are sufficient for all but the most demanding users.
> Dropbox+Excel seems like it would do the same thing
For me, it doesn’t. Just using Dropbox and my stock OS (and providing I don’t use Numbers), I can view Excel files on my phone and tablet but I cann’t create or edit them. I still need to use a third party app and Microsoft doesn’t have an appealing Excel offering for mobile platforms.
> even with more flexibility (including version control, document sharing)
Numbers has version control and document sharing.
> supporting even more platforms.
Numbers is available as native apps for iOS media players, phones, and tablets. There’s also a native app for OS X. For Windows, Linux, and every other platform that can run a modern web browser, there’s a very capable web app, available for free.
Excel is available as native app for Windows and OS X. For Windows Phone it has a very bare-bones app, the Android and iOS versions are a disgrace.
> I don't think you can ever consider spreadsheet software to be 'user friendly'.
Maybe you should try Numbers, especially on a mobile device, and then compare it to Excel.
I was mainly referring to Numbers on iPad, which I use much rather than Numbers on OS X. I do however occasionally use Numbers on iPhone, when I don’t have an iPad or notebook with me. It works fine for looking up information, make small edits, or do some quick calculations (although I mostly use Soulver or WolframAlpha for that).
Excel is a seriously powerful tool, it is quite frankly amazing what can be done in Excel.
I have worked with Excel-based trading systems with tens of thousands of lines of VBA code, controlling systems that trade hundreds of millions of USD.
If Excel stopped working today, by tomorrow the stock markets would likely be in a blood bath, such is the ubiquitousness of Excel in that field.
It is a scary statement, and it is true, and I have friends who write VBA handling millions of pounds, and they concur that you and I should be scared.
Excel's major problem is the ease in which point/click/copy/paste generates errors. There have been several recent cases where off-by-one cell errors have caused authors issues. This was one part of the Duke scandal (the fraud was much worse, but the Excel was sloppy) and put egg on some Harvard Econ prof's faces - to the delight of the UMASS grad student that found it...
That sloppiness is also it's core strength. It allows people without training to slice and dice data. The process is almost never pretty but they're "free" to compute.
Excel is used extensively in the financial and trading fields because for many situations (predominantly RAD and prototyping) it IS the best tool for the job. We are talking about companies with serious amounts of cash to throw around at anything that gives them the slightest edge and with some of the smartest people to work for them. They use Excel because for many situations there is nothing better.
Of course the particular use case I mentioned was probably pushing Excel right to the edge of the envelope and the company was actively developing a .NET replacement for it because everyone recognized this. I have no idea how that turned out but I can say that the Excel system was very impressive and very functional.
How many other software products have entire groups and conferences dedicated to tracking and mitigating the problems they cause? http://www.eusprig.org/
Having problems is not the operative issue. It's userbase. All software has problems; Excel is one of the projects that has a large enough userbase that you can schedule conferences about its problems.
P.S. "EDA" is of course more than one tool, but it's close to the right scope and what jumps to mind right now.
I don't know your pet peeves with Outlook, but I've used Outlook 2007 and 2010 for 5 years now. Outside of an annoying "I've changed my AD password 2 weeks ago and you keep asking me for it" bug, Outlook is pretty solid.
And as one of the comments below said, try Lotus Notes for a while :o)
In my experience Outlook Web Access is so good by comparison that once my former employer upgraded to a recent version, I never used the desktop version of Outlook ever again. For one thing, OWA never had this ridiculous problem of corrupting its OST and PST files every few weeks.
What are your issues with Exchange? Actually, it was Exchange (at least since 2007SP1) that made me start thinking that it was actually possible for Microsoft to produce extremely reliable software.
- it's an overblown, over-engineered piece of shit designed to give "IT managers" and their secretaties a boner and suck them into Microsoft's vendor lock-in hellish groupware who still thinks we're in the 90s (fuck sharepoint, too while we're at it!)
- requires big resources to work faster than a snail (fuck sharepoint again!)
- to deploy it you need to also deploy more microsoft dinosaurs such as AD 2020 with CRAPFIX 9887622 running on Windows NonStandard Edition SP4 (no less!)
- to use more than 10 mailboxes you need a cluster of 10 microsoft certified hardware servers, double it if you want it in 64bit
- the webmail interface (which I had been forced to use in the past because I was using Linux) is ridiculous usability wise, sluggish, multi-message operations are very slow, the filters are a joke compared to procmail or maildrop; .forward does not exist
- some poor bastards confuse it with a proper MTA and leave it facing the internetz directly, most serious deployments I've seen run a nix based installation (qmail, postfix) in front of it and firewall the hell out of it because you can't have it exposed to a network
- sometimes when it breaks not even highly microsoft trained monkeys can fix it unless they sacrifice a couple of chickens to the voodoo gods
- if you want to count on certain mail standards (other than Microsoft's that is) you're pretty much on your own: imap support is shit, exporting to anything other that random m$ tech is not supported
The list could go on and on. That's what I think of Microsoft's "reliable software".
Needless to say, I'll pick e.g. Thunderbird any day over it, although I'm using more and more console based clients nowadays (such as cone or lumail).
Outlook Web Access has a UI just like the actual program, provided you're using a compatible browser. What you're seeing is the fallback presented to incompatible browsers. Upgrade to the latest Internet Explorer. :)
It's really difficult to say whether the replacement for outlook will be a piece of software for the desktop, a web-based solution a la gmail/google calendar, or a powerful iPhone/android/bb app
Big Corp doesn't want its trade secrets on Google's servers, and phones don't have enough interface real estate to contain the full functionality. They work best as satellite devices, in my experience.
As a user in a mixed MS Office + Google Apps + LibreOffice environment, Google's recent work with QuickOffice has been EXTREMELY helpful. My big gripe isn't Excel so much, either, but people who refuse to abandon PowerPoint when all they need to do is create a bullet list.
I absolutely agree. And while I hate VBA, it makes excel that much more powerful. It even makes up for some of the bugs in excel such as absolute references from a different workbook doesn't transpose using the built in transpose function. However, using the built in copy / paste formula functionality, it works fine. In this case, a simple macro which takes 5 mins to write will resolve this otherwise annoying bug.
Although the most annoying thing about Excel is actually the users who insist on using it like a database...
OOo/LO is a straight forward clone of MS Office. It shares all its design weaknesses and adds some of its own. Except foor freedom, I don't see any reason for using it over MS Office.
At home? False premise: It has replaced Word (for me.)
That it has not for everyone or as a whole doesn't strike me as odd in the slightest. There are plenty of reasons to use Word. Aside from the fact that it's solid itself, it also has a metric ton of inertia. Those using it already have the license or pirated copy, already know it, have legacy documents using it, and are generally otherwise are left with very little reason to switch to something merely because it's a "solid alternative."
Not as a Word replacement (never used Word), but Excel and Powerpoint: I switched. It took a couple of months to feel as productive. The first 2 weeks were especially hair pulling.
Much was due to the ribbon interface, which I liked, which LO doesn't have. My mind reverted to menus via Office 2000 which I cut my teeth on as a new graduate years back.
There are some things I still find odd / bewildering:
Right clicking on a block of text I have the options of both 'Text' and 'Character' which have different options. Neither of the contained options contain vertical alignment choices. Tables just feel a pain, zooming in and out as different cells / borders are clicked. Blah blah blah other small things. For my sins, I like VBA (familiar with, rather than romance).
Familiar is the key. It took a small learning curve, and I'm as productive in it as a modern version of MS Office. Much of the learning curve is having been so familiar with MS Office, sometimes things are just done differently, mainly at the UX Level. Integration for a personal and work based workflow is where Linux leaves Windows in the standing-gates was the game changer for me, and why I put myself through the learning curve.
I do feel LO's UI simply doesn't look beautiful, indeed, I feel it looks ugly. Everything is gray, some icons have shadow, some not. I have the feeling a few hundreds of hours on grouping icons, highlighting contrast in dialogue boxes, would make it a lot less 'tired' looking. Mozilla did it, I am sure LO will, and that may be a small but important tipping point.
I switched to NeoOffice several years ago and currently use LibreOffice. Wrote my dissertation on it. And this despite having access to MS-Office for free through a university license.
I tried it because I wanted to try free (as in freedom) software and never felt the need to switch back as it did everything I required of a WYSIWYG word processor. I guess I have just gotten so used to it now that when I use Word/Excel etc (mostly briefly on someone else's computer) I get all confused about their new panel based menu system.
The point is not that they are better but that they are a suitable replacement for all but a very small niche of power users. But people tend to compare the limit cases even if all they'll ever use are the day-to-day functions.
> I haven't yet met a single person who is happier with OOo/
> LO than with Word; if that's true for you you're the first > such person I've heard of.
Hi, I'm one such person. Reason: the ribbon. In the rest, yes, Word is better. But I like standard menubar interfaces and hate the programs that don't let me use them.
I switched several years ago and never looked backed. No problem whatsoever, I produce all my corporate documents with it.
Could you explain what it is that scared you so much? I am the one to scream whenever I'm forced into using anything from the post 2003 MS office suites, which is thankfully extremely rare.
- Word takes < 200 ms to start up on my (blazing fast) laptop.
LibreOffice takes > 2 seconds.
It's outright irritating to say the least.
- Everything else has lags too. File->Save takes > 2 seconds to show me the dialog. In Word it's instantaneous.
- No smooth scroll?? My eyes!!! >___<
- No "Styles"??
- The UI just screams "LINUX", feels freaking hacky, and doesn't feel the way it should. For example:
1. Word highlights text word-by-word; LO does it letter-by-letter. Selections never work the way you intend them the first time.
2. Highlight a piece of text from left to right and then press Left. The cursor is now still on the left-hand side of the previously-highlighted text in Word, but still on the right-hand side in LibreOffice. What the hell???
You raised some great points about the selection UI. Did you file any bug reports for them? For your bad.doc, I think it's a missing font issue. Would you mind posting the file somewhere like Google Docs or Skydrive so we could take a look at it?
For the smooth scrolling, you need to enable it under:
Tools->Options->Writer->View
Unfortunately, it is disabled by default.
I love the idea of Free software, use LO at home, and pushed for it at work. After a pilot LO rollout, we ended up going with MSO 2010 because of LO's poor interoperability with our old Word docs.
Exactly what is the etiquette for filing bug reports? I think of bugs as something not working as intended. Pressing left from a selection taking the cursor one space to the left of its rightmost extent, instead of to the leftmost extent, is stupid, but presumably working as intended. Should I file a bug saying OOo doesn't do HTML syntax highlighting? A bug complaining that in all the years I've had it installed (pre-2009, even), it has never mined one bitcoin for me?
It's called a feature request. If you think bitcoin mining falls under the scope an office suite, please do us all a favor and stay away from their bug tracker.
1. Nope I haven't submitted bug reports, I've just used Word instead.
2. Ah, I think you're right about the missing font, I didn't realize that. I'll get back to you if I find another example, there are a million things I've noticed over time that don't render correctly other than fonts. (EDIT: See my other comment.)
3. Actually, I do have smooth scrolling "enabled", but it doesn't have any effect whatsoever (as of version 4.0.0.3).
That's a .doc file, an un-/poorly-documented format. As noted in the article, it's not simple at all. It is a good argument in favor of Libre and OpenOffice, though: other word processors will be able to open your documents if you decide to switch from them. Just that alone is a big win for anyone thinking long term.
All of your other criticisms other than the speed stuff boil down to "I'm used to MS Word". Which is fine.
I find Word's attempt to highlight word at a time to be extremely frustrating and distracting. Very often in my documents it simply will not properly recognize the boundaries of what I want to select, and small increments of the mouse produce jumps in the selection that were not intended. I think OO's behavior is a lot better in this respect.
> I find Word's attempt to highlight word at a time to be extremely frustrating and distracting.
Use the keyboard if you want to highlight character-by-character.
Word is simply optimizing for the most-common case: copying-and-pasting whole words, sentences, or paragraphs. It's a lot faster when you don't have to hit the exact character boundary of the word -- especially if you're using a touchpad instead of a mouse.
That's very disingenuous. The libreoffice code base is big and complex and hard enough to ramp up on that fixing your personal problems with it would quickly become a full time job, even if you already know all there is to know about programming enterprise software in c++
Draw internals are an absolute mess. I've tried to fix bugs in Draw multiple times and just ended up discouraged.
It took me around 3 months, full-time, to write an import filter for LibreOffice that still only kinda-sorta works. And it depended very little on the rest of the codebase.
I think you underestimate how complicated a modern office suite is, and how much years-old technical debt there is floating around in LibreOffice.
Oh oh oh this would be funny if it weren't so sad. Thanks for illustrating so poignantly the idiocy of free software fanaticism (that is not to say that all OS software is bad or idiotic, I use a lot of it, it's about the cognitive dissonance in this thread).
So, I have this project in which I need to fill an area in a drawing in a proposal for a client. So my options are:
a) Spend $200 (about an hours worth of billable time, or 2 hours during dry spells) on MS Office.
b) Spend 2 x 4 x 10 = 80 hours (which is no where near enough, but let's go with your number) on this feature, then spend again that on finding and convincing the right people to include my patch, on a half-assed implementation which does just enough what I need, and tell my client 'yeah get back to me in 2 months when I have patched my word processor to deliver the functionality I need'.
Choices choices, which one should I choose?
Just that time alone on a single tiny feature would pay for a lifetime worth of MS Office software!
For "just" replacing word (ie: as a word processor with reasonable output considering it's not a DTP package or LaTeX), I think abiword is superior for most use cases (except: "being word" aka compatibility with complex word documents (for simple/ancient documents it reportedly is better than word...)).
If you need/want to insert various objects in various documents (eg: graphs from spreadsheets in documents that dynamically update when the data source update) -- not so much. I could argue that you'd be better off using literate R/LyX -- but unfortunately there's a bit of an UX gap).
I much prefer LibreOffice to MS Office -- but mostly because I don't feel quite as a afraid that my documents are going to go randomly get corrupted at the worst possible moment without any reasonable hope of recovery (documented formats ftw!).
Have you ever been involved in buying software for a company? In my experience, nobody compares the features of different word processing software. In fact, nobody even mentions competing software, as if Word was the only choice.
Now they don't. But they did in the 80s and 90s and guess what, Office won, because it was the best choice. And it's not like they didn't have commercial competitors who couldn't keep up with Microsoft bribes^Wlobbying :)
Nonsense, we're talking about a word processor here and Office/Word has been heavily criticized for it's interface and incremental features (or lack of reasons to upgrade) in each release. Features? 99% of the time you're either writing a letter/resume, reading some lengthy terms and conditions doc or reading someone else's resume.
Office/Word is what they learn in school (lock-in strategy) and Office/Word is what corporate apathy and only "knowing" MS software leads to in the workplace. You work somewhere, you use Office. Period.
How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative? $100K? $1MM? There has to be a dollar amount where you can buy enough developer time to replace it.
LO and other openoffice suites are progeny of StarOffice, originally released in 1985. Even with such a long development history, there are deep compatibility issues which make it unacceptable for the "power users" that comprise the most profitable segment of the market.
And if you really want to go down that rabbit hole of perfect compatibility, it's an absolute clusterf*ck. There are more than than 20 different 100+ page specs (some exceeding 500 pages) needed to properly parse excel files. An incomplete list (which you can find by searching for the keyword):
But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider some of these reasonably active projects (I'm sure I am missing some really good libraries here, so don't consider this a comprehensive list):
>> But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider some of these reasonably active projects
Anything I've ever needed any of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice tools to do have worked fine. I don't think it does anyone service to suggest to projects which keep the proprietary Microsoft Office suite alive.
To successfully replace the office suite, in the beginning you must be able to interact with office files.
Joel Spolsky (member of the office development team) attributed their success to this:
> Microsoft Office ended up beating its competitors because it was able to read and write to file formats other than its own. For example, Excel was able to read files from Lotus, and was able to save the file without losing any information. The important lesson in order to gain market share was that in order for new users to try Microsoft Excel, they had to be able to work with the files their coworkers were creating.
> Lesson: You don’t want your customers to feel locked into using your software. It helps with sales cycles because customers know that they can switch away if they so choose. While customers will be willing to try your product, they think two steps ahead. They want to ensure they can easily migrate to a new system.
To have something objectively better - 100% compatibility with Excel + major limitations and bugs fixed + cross platform - more like tens of billions of dollars.
Excel is 28 years old and for its entire lifetime it has been one of the focal points of Microsoft development. It is also the center of one of the biggest cottage industries in the software world + servers as an SDK for probably hundreds of thousands of in-house developers.
I think such an effort is just an order of magnitude smaller than replacing Windows on desktop systems. And that's saying a lot about Excel :)
"How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative? $100K?"
That is one full time developer for a year, not counting any project management etc. If we say that so far, there has been spend 1000 man years on Open/Libre Office (I'm just making that number up, it has been under development for decades and probably with more than 20 devs working on it, so it's probably more, but let's say 1000, and not even count all the project management / user feedback / documentation work etc); then still you're saying that bringing Libre Office to the level of MS Office is within 0.1 resp 1 % of completion. I hope I don't need to argue how that is prima facie nonsense.
And what happens when you do? Pay them again to keep maintaining the code base? Problem is few products can find a sustainable business model around open source.
More than that, because you have to replicate a lot of Excel's idiosyncracies in order to get compatibility. That's a very challenging task.
When Microsoft was putting Lotus 1-2-3 compatibility into Excel back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, this was a much smaller task than replicating Excel would be today. Lotus 1-2-3 was a much less complex product. Most people were upgrading from 1-2-3 v2.x to Excel, which meant that Excel really only had to be compatible with a product that was originally hand-written in x86 assembly.
So true. Excel can now be seen as some sort of platform rather just some number handling software. There is a real lock in when hundreds to thousands of lines of scripting and data bindings have been written to manage often critical parts of someone's business.
I wonder if there will ever be a shift to a future incarnation of hypercard, or some other mainstream oriented 'programming' platform that would displace Excel.
I'm inclined to believe you're right. I once worked in a large actuarial shop that did a great deal of its own custom software (they had over 100 developers). Excel was the primary tool used by the actuaries.
I would say that Outlook is probably the most unique in the office suite, though feel it really should be spun off and bundled with Exchange again, which is where it really shines. Outlook + Lync are a pretty impressive combination.
Word, Excel, Powerpoint all have viable alternatives in LibreOffice. I also really like OneNote as well. The biggest reason I don't use the MS products more, is that I happen to run Mac, Windows and Linux regularly on my different computers. More of my development work is now targeting Linux than Windows, which leaves me less tied to it.
I'd also like to see the Office org split out, and let free to target non-MS platforms more.. would love a better Office solution for Android. And, I'm sure iPad users would appreciate it too.
Yes, it has quirks! Yet I'll choose Excel over Word when I have a choice (e.g. lists, things in tables). Word is generally frustrating. Excel is generally a good experience.
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