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Comment by Kwpolska | Hacker News Reader

What viable European alternatives to Microsoft Office are there? Google Docs is also a US-based cloud service. LibreOffice is ugly, its UX is sometimes worse than Office 2003 (especially Calc, where pivot tables have to be blindly configured in a modal dialog, and there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel), and they still haven't implemented automatically downloading updates.

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I like plaintext documents. I think it's the future, since it's compact and LLMs can consume it without having to consume strange tokens.

For typesetting and presentations that have be 'nice' I use TeX and beamer. For the kind of stuff MS users use Excel for I use R.

For presentations that don't have to be nice I use nano, plaintext and then just scale up the text.

>I like plaintext documents. [...] I use TeX and beamer

He probably meant an alternative to Office for companies and average people not tech enthusiasts. Nobody is gonna switch to raw text files and TeX.

I did use this for actual work at a major European software/technology firm though, and nobody complained.

That is, actual presentations made from scaled-up nano, mini-manuals for the team written in plaintext, etc.

I also used it at work in the SW team. Nobody else in the company used it tho. Everyone only used office 365 and that's that.

Stop extrapolating that your niche experience somehow is the norm.

There's a reason why companies prefer to pay for office instead of using raw text and latex files for free.

My point is really that it could easily be the norm though.

There's nothing hard about writing plain text files. You just need to write good English and have some feel for text as a medium.

In some way there's less to learn there than in word, where you can bold things, insert images, etc.

People outside this niche have even less need for complicated functionality. A sales team that writes in word could have written in plaintext, and have had an organised picture of all their doings, with little details, that will eventually be machine-digestable. The only problem is if you want to write mathematics, but then you have LaTeX.

An in-between solution, if you want things a little bit conventional, is markdown.

>My point is really that it could easily be the norm though.

It couldn't and the proof is in the pudding. If it were that easy as you make it seem, we would have done it a long time ago.

Non-tech people hate switching away form office since that's the only thing they know how to use comfortably, especially to janky stuff like latex that's not WYSIWYG and needs to be compiled. Nobody is gonna use that shit.

And non-tech people are the ones who sign the checks that make the purchasing decisions, and those people hate any kind of friction, hence why companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc are so successful.

Your view on things rings like that infamous HN comment form 2007 saying why Dropbox is a useless invention doomed to fail since we can host files locally on git and easily spin up a FTP server to share them if we want to.

Arguably, most people I have encountered don't actually know how to use Microsoft Office in any kind of depth but it is a familiar environment for them. It is like most people don't actually drive a car well as supported by car accident statistics. Most work probably shouldn't be done in the Office suite but rather some information system copying the formalized process. Most text processing should probably decouple content from form a lot more and there certainly are people that do just that but it is not the norm.

>but it is a familiar environment for them

Being familiar with something way bette than needing to learn from scratch. That's the end of the sales pitch.

LibreOffice isn't going to win any beauty pageants, but it does everything you need in an office setting.

Some specialists can't live without MS Excel and all of its extensions (banking), but that's not the common case. Common case is word processing, slide presentations, and task management (in spreadsheets).

MS Excel is the most common case. Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel

> Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel

And that's a problem because it isn't even particularly great software [0,1,2]. Of course all complex calculation tools have bugs, but compare the code quality of Excel with something like Matlab or R and it looks amateurish.

[0] https://www.microassist.com/software-tips/real-world-risks-o...

[1] https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...

Yeah, but it allows amateurs to do quite some stuff and is available everywhere.

All other systems have a way steeper learning curve.

ONLYOFFICE comes to mind, although the "Europeanness" of it can be up for debate. Promises pretty good compatibility with MS formats! AGPL licensed too, which I think is a plus.

Free personal tier, which they host themselves, similar to Google Docs / Sheet: https://personal.onlyoffice.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice

> Based in Latvia, OnlyOffice owner Ascensio System SIA was a subsidiary of Russian-based New Communication Technologies.[2] Due to EU economic sanctions targeting Russia, European organizations that used the commercial version of OnlyOffice were prohibited from doing so.[3]

Thanks, but no thanks.

There is SoftMaker Office from Germany. Never used it though.

https://www.softmaker.com/en

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftMaker_Office

I tested the free version, their Excel equivalent seems fine, although with some strange limitations in the free version (you can edit Tables in Excel documents, but not create new ones, as creating is a paid feature).

I tend to prefer OnlyOffice, if only because it's open-source (unlike SoftMaker), and has better compatibility with MS Office documents.

> there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel

FWIW this is no longer true, the feature is called 'Database Ranges'. However i (sadly) don't disagree LO is still miles behind Excel.

I tested this with LibreOffice 24.2.1.2, and it’s far, far from what Excel tables do. The most basic features of an Excel table (Insert -> Table) are (a) the ability to reference cells in the same row by the name of the column, (b) displaying table headers in the chrome when scrolling, (c) auto-completing formulae until the end of the table, (d) pretty formatting, (e) auto-filtering configured by default. I can’t see any of those with the ranges in LO.

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