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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but LibreOffice remains a pale shadow of Microsoft Office. For personal use, I'd take it over Google Docs, but not Office. And Office is actually pretty inexpensive for a personal license.

Also, you might moan about cloud lock-in, but collaboratively editing documents in Office 365 is a vast improvement over emailing documents around and clumsy manual version management[0]. I would never go back.

[0] Incidentally, collaboration is the one advantage that GDocs used to have over Microsoft Office, but that's long since gone. Office is so much more capable than GDocs that I find it baffling that people still choose the latter. The only thing Google does better, at least in some ways, is email: becuase Gmail's search is better, and it doesn't bog down overall in the many ways that Outlook does. Teams, as much as it pisses me off on a daily basis (and it really does), is still far better and more reliable than Hangouts.

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Sorry, but LibreOffice remains a pale shadow of Microsoft Office.

While I tend to agree, the premise here is mainly 'is a poster child' and not 'is at least as good or better than alternatives'. Just looking at LibreOffice without comparing it, it is quite impressive what it can do. And even when comparing it, in a way it is still fairly impressive if you look at the resource thrown at it vs MS Office.

Pretty much the same goes for Audacity actually: go back 2 decades (well, a bit less) and compare it with the closed-source alternatives which existed back then and for anything but the simplest features it just wasn't usable. But it's steadily getting better and overall: indeed fairly impressive even though it is probably still quite behind professional packages.

Well, the post I was responding to actually said that they thought these OSS products were at least as good as comparable commercial offerings which, in the case of LibreOffice, is entirely untrue.

That's not to say when LibreOffice is viewed on its own merit's it's not a worthwhile product. And it might well be the best option on Linux... but Linux is a tiny minority of the desktop market.

On Audacity I tend to agree with you. I keep it installed even though I also have Ableton simply because, as a basic sample editor, or where I need to do a format conversion, or a quick top and tail, or some normalisation, it's actually the better tool for those kinds of jobs.

You can even use it as a multitrack recorder and sequencer at a push, but it definitely starts to fall apart as compared to commercial offerings at that point.

Still, as a sample editor, it's a great tool.

Well, the post I was responding to actually said that they thought these OSS products were at least as good as comparable commercial offerings which, in the case of LibreOffice, is entirely untrue.

I stand corrected, I did misread that.

In some areas MS Office is still far behind LO. Especially when it comes to not like a noob styling everything directly via bold, italic, font size and so on buttons, but actually making things a style, and keeping the document free from direct styling.

Maybe LO is a touch more difficult to use, but in functionality, I would choose it every time over MS Office. Especially the Office 365 versions suck. They are sooo buggy. One example: Move your selected cell in online MS Excel quickly using 2 arrow keys, like down + right or up + right. Sometimes it will simply delete cell content. wtf.

> In some areas MS Office is still far behind LO. Especially when it comes to not like a noob styling everything directly via bold, italic, font size and so on buttons, but actually making things a style, and keeping the document free from direct styling

With Libreoffice lacking a proper Outline Mode (no, the Navigator doesn't count), I find style-powered document structuring difficult to do in Libreoffice whereas I pretty much live in Microsoft Word's Outline Mode.

So it doesn't duplicate something you've spent many hours mastering.

That's what most of the complaints I see about LibreOffice (and many other free software alternatives) end up being, and while I understand why that makes it difficult to switch that's not really a fault of LibreOffice.

I would agree for some features, but for this specific feature I have to share this criticism. I work with Libreoffice almost exclusively (and I really like most of it), but the "Navigator" really isn't very good, it doesn't help me navigate my documents or style well - so much so that I usually avoid using it in the first place.

Disagree on the comparison - at least if you only use the web platforms. Word for web is miles behind the experience of using Google Docs, with many settings you simply can't change.

I think the desktop versions are a different story though, if you have access to those.

> Also, you might moan about cloud lock-in, but collaboratively editing documents in Office 365 is a vast improvement over emailing documents around and clumsy manual version management[0]. I would never go back.

This is not a good argument against cloud lock-in. All of that could be done and still allow perpetual local use.

One big problem with MS-Office is that it defaults to proprietary formats (xlsx, docx and the like) but LibreOffice defaults to Open Document Format. So with LibreOffice you can avoid getting locked in to a particular office suite.

No, docx et al are open - not only are they xml, they are standardized by ECMA and ISO. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

As of 2018-09-09 though:

> While Office 2013 and onward have full read/write support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict, Microsoft has not yet implemented the strict non-transitional, or original standard, as the default file format yet due to remaining interoperability concerns.

From the very Wiki article you linked. I guess this means, that when you implement the standard to its fullest, you can still have issues opening MS Office documents, because they themselves do not adhere to the standard.

Not saying that any of the competition has it, but last time I tried Office online I couldn't edit styles. Have they fixed that yet? I would consider styles to be fairly fundamental to the Word experience

That limitation still exists. You can merely use standard styles, create a new one "from selection" and delete such created styles.

> but collaboratively editing documents in Office 365 is a vast improvement over emailing documents around and clumsy manual version management[0]. I would never go back.

Both workflows suck compared to git.

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