Abykus – A free spreadsheet application for windows | Hacker News Reader

Abykus – A free spreadsheet application for windows

abykus.com

47 pointsRalfWausE15 comments

Neat tool! On a related note while I love LibreOffice and the like, I recently wanted to make some authentic Word Art so I grabbed a copy of Office 97 from archive.org. I was beyond pleasantly surprised, not only did it install without issue on Win 10 LTSC, it does everything instantly and the whole thing is 140mb. What the fuck have we been doing for the last quarter century?

If you think office 97 is fun at 140mb you should give Geoworks' Ensemble a look.

Thanks for the suggestion I hadn't heard of it before! I may check it out for funsies, thought in 2024 i think it requires a VM while Office 97 runs natively on modern windows.

Marketing and adding features to eke out more sales in a space where tiny edge case populations are last remnants of growth it would seem.

I have been amazed over the years how much I can do of everyday work using simple lightweight alternatives. This is good example. Wordpad and Write were fine for quick docs or editing. I used ONLYOffice until found out was Russian based business .

Must admit though that office365 online editions now are "good enough" for everyday work and desktop quality of office tooling needed rarely in my work.

I can only speak anecdotally but it certainly feels to me that 99% of users regularly only use 1% of the features of modern Office applications, and that there is still a place for these lightweight applications.

> What the fuck have we been doing for the last quarter century?

Mostly looking for ways to keep selling people the same product over and over again.

Cool to see a variety of non-cloud apps still out there. Main advantage of Abykus seems to be its small size (3MB!) and portable nature compared to LibreOffice Calc.

Considering that the website looks from the 2000's and that it says Abykuns runs "on all versions of Microsoft Windows (95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7/8).", I'm not sure one can say that there is a "variety of non-cloud apps still out there".

It's only non-cloud because it comes from an era before the cloud.

>It's only non-cloud because it comes from an era before the cloud.

And it's still out there, so the previous commenter's statement holds.

But there's still plenty of non-cloud applications that originated more recently and are still under active development, along with all of the traditional software that's continued under active development and widespread usage, but falls under the radar of the current-moment hype train, which vastly exaggerates the extent of migration away from desktop apps to the cloud.

On the page http://www.abykus.com/screenshots.htm there is a link using the text “planner” that refers to a page http://www.abykus.com/retirement.htm that apparently doesn’t exist.

This makes me sad since I wanted the Amortization Schedule spreadsheet that is said to be available on that page.

It's strangely free as in beer, not as in speech. I wonder what the logic is for that.

Also, "Windows" needs to be capitalized in the title.

In the About page the author mentions he has taken off market now but will still give free to interested parties.

Can it save the result as a xlsx? (or something that Excel can understand easily?)

How easy is to copy&paste a block of cells from/to Excel?

It's a free and very small light tool. Try it?

The problem to use an unusual program is if my data will be traped in it or if I can share it with my coworkers that use Excel or Goodle Docs. There is a nice old post about it by Joel Spolsky https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/03/strategy-letter-ii...

About triying a random program: You mean launching a virtual machine with Windows, intaling the program, Excel, a thowaway Google acount, try cut&paste, close the virtual machine and burn it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com