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Comment by Jigsy | Hacker News Reader

Do people hate LibreOffice that much?

I use linux full time on my home PCs, and I want Libre Office to work for me.

I _can’t_ get equivalent functionality of Excel’s tables (named range, but it dynamically expands and applies formulas as you add more data). If you’ve got excel handy, open it up select a range and press control-L to see it.

There are endless forum threads of Libre Office boosters misunderstanding what the feature does and offering the halfway there equivalent.

I want this to work, but everyone uses excel’s feature set slightly differently and something will be missing for everyone. It’s incredibly annoying.

What do you end up using at home?

Most recent example, putting together a pretty basic car shopping spreadsheet I’ve just gotten pissed off and not done it.

Yes it’s petty, yes it means I just don’t do something easy. Yes in the end it’s only my problem.

I’ll probably just do it on excel for the web.

I don't use spreadsheets much anymore, and I end up just writing scripts for everything I would use Excel for. This isn't a brag, in fact it's sort of the opposite; I often miss the simplicity of Excel and I think for a lot of my scripts I would save time if I did them in in a spreadsheet.

One of these days, I should probably go through a tutorial series for LibreOffice and Star BASIC and properly learn it.

Anything ‘real’ I’ll do in R, but my wife is not super keen on that where we’re collaborating on something!

I'm not keen on R even at the best of times :)

If I need to do any kind of number crunchy stuff I usually use Julia right now. I really like Julia, it's a very cool language and platform, but for small things it's kind of overkill. I should really learn how to properly use LibreOffice.

We all have our vices! (It's what I learned first, and feel most confident in).

This has been a nice interaction which is increasingly rare online, thanks.

My dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel. LibreOffice does have an equivalent, but it's different enough to where he would be forced to port over large amounts of his code.

I think he could get over the different interface but I don't completely blame him for not wanting to redo all his work.

yes. It's terrible. I can't believe it's taken this long to still be awful. The mix of Java. The awful UI. If you're on Mac/Windows, you should buy Office. And if you're on Linux, you should use OnlyOffice, or Google Docs

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