Thread

1. fbn79 · 1790334206 · focus · HN ↗

   The highest problem is the office suite. If you think Libreoffice/Collabora can replace Microsoft 365 without friction the project could be a success. Honestly I do not think so as of today.

   1. tombert · 1790341198 · focus · HN ↗

      Yeah, especially Excel.

      LibreOffice Sheets doesn’t compete with Excel 2024, it competes more with Excel 2003. Granted, this is fine for a lot of (most?) people but it’s still not a “replacement” in my mind.

      I ended up just building a Nix Flake to properly run Excel. At least then the operating system itself isn’t MS.

      1. bormaj · 1790353960 · focus · HN ↗

         Where would you say the gaps are? As someone who has been in an environment of excel power users for several years, the quality of that program has declined YoY due to all the excess bloat that MS stuffs into that thing. The plugin/macro ecosystem is one aspect that comes to my mind.

         1. tombert · 1790360982 · focus · HN ↗

            Yeah, there’s no VBA support anywhere. LibreOffice has their own scripting thing, and it works ok but it’s not compatible with the VBA and VBA stuff broadly doesn’t work there.

            Even without the VBA though, it’s missing basically any feature added in 2019 like Lambda and filter and dynamic arrays.

            I wouldn’t consider myself a power user, I would say I am a “high level basic user”, and even I have noticed the shortcomings. And this is also coming from a dude who very much wants a FOSS thing to succeed over Microsoft.

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