The article mentions that the (38) test persons had reported some frustrations with typography, and track-changes during the test.
I’d even go as far as arguing that it’s priced very fairly and rather low compared to software of similar complexity. It’s priced low enough that pretty much any business of any size can justify the cost.
I use OnlyOffice to handle documents and spreadsheets when I need to, but if I was doing that on a daily basis I’d absolutely pay for an Office license.
Best Latvian office suite?
(I am quite aware of the controversy around the suite but I don’t think the controversy has enough meat on its bones for me to care about it, especially when I barely use these applications as it stands. I just really don’t like LibreOffice by comparison in terms of the UI and overall experience.)
https://www.onlyoffice.com XLSX, XLS, ODS, CSV, TXT
https://www.libreoffice.org ods, ots, fods, xlsx, xlsm, xls, xlt, xml, csv, dif, dbf, slk
But I'm much to impressed by Modern CSV
https://www.moderncsv.com CSV, JSON, XML
I like CSV for not trying to be an incompetent version of SQL
Nothing is more compatible with ms office than ms office.
But in terms of features it's not really any different than office 2000. The ribbons were introduced and Excel sheets can be bigger but it's really just the same. There's hardly been any innovation. That's what Microsoft do when they own a market, they just sit back. It happened to internet explorer and it happened to office.
Anyone else would have made a better product if it weren't a non-starter.
As an example: in my job Excel is not used for numbers but abused as a database. It really deeply sucks at that, you need to copy paste vlookups and it chokes on a few hundred thousand rows. On a modern computer that's ridiculous. It doesn't enforce type integrity and sometimes people type over vlookups breaking the formula in that row.
"Formatting as table" is a bit of a workaround and changes a lot more than just "formatting" implies. But it doesn't solve the core issue which is that this is just the wrong tool for the job, period. It just smoothes over some of the ridiculous workarounds.
Any company that cared would either make it do databases better, or would find out why users don't grok the actual database product, ms access, and keep abusing a spreadsheet for this purpose. They would improve the database product so it would be great to use. And port it to all platforms, ms never bothered to port it to Mac.
Access is difficult because it's too closely tied to SQL concepts. And thus a complex 70s mindset hell bent on minimising data storage. This could be so greatly reinvented, wouldn't necessarily have to be an RDBMS. The only reason people screw around with excel is because they know it. Not because it's actually good for this purpose.
Another example: they never fixed the CSV-semicolon issue outside of the US or the ambiguity of translated function names.
As much as I despise Microsoft, I admit that their Office suite is pretty good. Or at least it used to be - the last version I used was 2010 I think. I can't belive that 365 has regressed so much. Seems like shoehorning an Office suite into a webbrowser wasn't a great idea.
But now with AI I guess you could just ask it to debug the issue and it would decompile Word in 5 minutes and pull out the fix.
Not sure what the frustrations with typography were, but I recon they're a lot easier to fix now.
If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?
I’m so confused that anyone would get hung up enough about this to let it block a migration of this size.
Also largely microsoft's doing. They're big on backwards compatibility/legacy support (except sometimes for when it gets in the way of greed) and in doing so have largely trained all those people using Office Products to expect just that. It's part of their entrenchment/momentum strategy.
Doesn't help that American corporate culture in general seems to have adopted (enforced?) that expectation as well. Though that's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg situation so not sure where to score the blame there.
Like the other commenter said, lot of companies depend on loadbearing spreadsheets because it's cheaper than a salary. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, but it happens enough that it's a known market force.
In many ways, recent LLM stuff is just the same process as how Excel took over the world.
You just said why. A migration of this size needs to make sure "nothing happened in the meantime". If it can't, then any issues or lost record or other kinds of data for accountability are brought into question.
>If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?
yet another proprietary format?
And honestly, the true answer is probably much more diappointing than any theory I can throw out. Legacy code is rarely about "what's the best approach for the long term?", so I can only imagine legacy documents being much worse about this.