Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

I am probably in the minority, but even AbiWord looks way better than this new design - let's have simplistic monochrome icons on our 4k 10-bit displays everywhere! Also, the font on toolbars is sci-fi and not serious-work-like. Huge white spaces everywhere with gradients out of place. I like the new fonts (seems inspired by Yosemite) and the bottom shape panel is nice as well.

View on HN

AbiWord and Gnumeric have always looked better than their LibreOffice counterparts!

Gnumeric is utterly broken on xfce since gnome 3 or something. Invisible check marks, weird gradients everywhere, etc.

Gnumeric is a large steaming pile of dog poo. Do a sort on a largeish file and it will consume all the known RAM in the universe. Do the same operation in Excel and it barely breaks a sweat.

I once had to open a CSV file with about 2,000 columns. Excel failed me, OpenOffice/LibreOffice failed me, only Gnumeric managed to open the file.

I'll admit that I only deal with that many columns on very rare occasions, but it does come in handy sometimes.

In theory Excel can open files with 16,384 columns so it's surprising it failed.

https://support.office.com/en-nz/article/Excel-specification...

I might misremember the number of columns (could have been 20,000 - also, it had many rows), or maybe the 16,384 column limit applies to xls(x) files only, not to importing CSV files.

I remember at first cursing at Excel, then realizing what a ridiculously large number of columns the file had.

Provide a proper test case to the developers and they will likely fix it. I've had extraordinarily nice experiences with bug reports to gnumeric so far.

I like AbiWord, but for some reason it keeps crashing on my Arch Linux system.

Between Libre Calc and Excel, I've always had to revert to Excel for its Pivot Table features. Libre Calc has thus far made a very weak stab at that for me.

I think Libre Calc has a pivot table feature though. Are you missing a feature within the pivot table options?

Yes, Calc does have pivot tables, but it is very limited. Even the number of levels (dimensions) that you can nest was inadequate the last time I checked.

I've found that logging a bug on the AbiSource bug tracker results in fairly prompt attention and, in the case of the pdf export bug I walked into, a prompt fix.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/abiword/+bug/1262375/

http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13586

Thanks. I did like Abiword but for that problem - it's really lightweight and has the core functionality that I need. I'm presently using LaTeX/emacs for my documents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com