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revolvingthrow | 9 days ago

I wish the excel clones were better. LibreOffice’s UI is extremely dated imo, to the point it doesn’t even let you make a damn table, but at least what’s there works correctly. OnlyOffice is not only missing some pretty basic functionality such as preferences (???), it also inexplicably deleted a single spreadsheet out of a multi-sheet file on two occasions on macOS and generally has some peculiar functionality and ux here and there.

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TurboSkyline|9 days ago

I'm only a light user of office programs, both at work and at home. I have access to M365, but for my personal usage I prefer LibreOffice over MS Office, especially when it comes to spreadsheets. I generally don't mind the UI of the MS suite, but I find it's getting increasingly bloated and slow, and sometimes updates move UI elements around for no benefit that I can perceive. I haven't experienced the same with LibreOffice; it's lighter than MS Office I find it easier to find the options I'm looking for, which I know exist but don't always remember _where_ they live, because of the low frequency with which I use them.

With Excel in particular, there is something I can't put my finger on that I just don't get along with. It's unintuitive in a way that I can't describe, but which I notice about half the time I use it. Sometimes clicking doesn't do what I expect it to do, clipboard contents are lost all the time, scrolling resets or jumps around for reasons I don't understand. I don't have the same issues with LibreOffice Calc, which is why I choose it for my personal work. In fact, I think Google Sheets is the most pleasant to use of the options I've tried, which is something I thought I'd never say about a web-based alternative to a native app...

vikingerik|9 days ago

Regarding Excel's weird warts... Microsoft knows all about them but they're stuck with it for backwards compatibility. The business world has a billion Excel scripts and macros done by barely technical users that all inadvertently depend on the details of things like the scrolling and clipboard behavior. Trying to improve that would break all of that. Same as all the weirdness in JavaScript, Microsoft has to just call it a feature and live with it.

GoblinSlayer|9 days ago

What I experienced with excel is that it provides an ability to edit cells, but then it suddenly jumps to another cell (IIRC when you press arrow keys as a text editor reflex). To disable this behavior click the cell then click the cell content field and edit there.

zetanor|9 days ago

I'm surprised at all the comments deriding LibreOffice's interface on here. It's never given me any trouble (even when making tables) and I've been using it preferentially for 20 years over MSOffice, even when schools or employers are actively paying for my Microsoft subscription. In fact, LibreOffice does something very important a lot better than MSOffice: importing CSV files correctly across locales.

jodrellblank|8 days ago

> “LibreOffice's interface on here. It's never given me any trouble (even when making tables)”

LibreOffice Calc doesn’t have tables in the sense of Excel “insert > table”. People have been looking for it and asking for it for fourteen years in this thread: https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/creating-tables-in-calc/1433

sombragris|8 days ago

Agreed. LibreOffice's sane WIMP interface is a feature, not a bug, when the alternative is to use those horrid ribbon-like interfaces.

phba|9 days ago

Yeah. This is the curse on any legacy software that doesn't enforce strict separation of logic and UI. Any larger change to the UI requires an awful lot of manpower that open source projects usually don't have.

I wonder if it would be possible to extract the spreadsheet data model and logic into a library completely separate from the UI. This would enable a diversity of UIs, and also interoperability between different tools.

karanveer|9 days ago

each time someone sends me an xls or xlsx file, i am scared to open it in libresoft to mess up its formatting or miss something important. I always then rever to gsheet.

nurettin|9 days ago

> LibreOffice’s UI is extremely dated imo

It feels so bland and hard to read. Maybe that's because of java. How did Excel 5.0 look so good?

ahartmetz|9 days ago

There is no Java in core LibreOffice, it just has some weird Java-based extension system because of its Sun history.

LibreOffice uses an extremely dated, also messy, homegrown UI toolkit and has resisted the idea of switching to something last (really) updated this millennium (sic).

yummypaint|9 days ago

I think I've tried every spreadsheet program still being maintained at this point. Try gnumeric, it's a clear cut above everything else.

Mandatory Excel rant: Excel can't be trusted with data destined for publication. It's bloated, buggy as hell, user hostile, and has set genetics research back with its utterly braindead autocorrect. The default plot options are the exact polar opposite of how data are presented in science, and almost impossible to make serviceable. Everything Excel touches ends up looking like a hastily thrown together 6th grade science project. Libreoffice is also riddled with serious bugs and also loses data, but hey it's free and not a decades old flagship product from a multi billion dollar tech company.

Qem|9 days ago

> Try gnumeric, it's a clear cut above everything else.

Gnumeric rocks, even features Montecarlo built-in, I have it installed in my personal machine, but a major limitation is that they stopped providing windows builds, up to the last time I checked, so I can't use it at work.

Betelbuddy|9 days ago

>> Libreoffice is also riddled with serious bugs and also loses data

As a user of Libreoffice for years, me thinks you are doing fud.

ekjhgkejhgk|9 days ago

Hey, I'm very interested in this because LibreOffice annoys me and I can't explain why. It's not the "dated look" that everybody complains about; but I suspect it's related to UX somehow.

Could you articulate why Gnumeric is better than everything else?