Hacker News Reader

Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

Frankly I find the list of reasons to choose Windows is growing ever shorter. I find Windows 10 to be revolting, and the list of reasons to buy it seems to be:

* Games * Industry-specific apps like AutoCAD

99% of Excel users would be satisfied by Google Docs or LibreOffice.

View on HN

I always wonder why people think using Google Docs is more secure and private than Excel and being on Windows. I mean, lets just imagine you're hoping no one is stealing all your data and monitoring you. On one hand, you have Windows and Excel which are closed source and could be sending all that information. On the other hand you have Google Docs hosted on a cloud infrastructure by a company which specializes in searching, indexing, and extracting information from documents. Thanks to technical limitations from it's feature set it records every movement, change, and action forever in the document.

So you run something 10 times worse on a Free OS? You pretty much now only have the option of Libre Office. And to be fair, if Libre Office was good enough you wouldn't have mentioned Google Docs. It works, but it's not Google Docs or Excel.

I have witnessed two different trials of Google Apps for "regular" office workers. In my experience, the number of Excel users satisfied with Google's offering is a lot closer to 0% than 99%.

Change aversion.

Nah, it wasn't just that, although certainly that was one component of it.

Excel has developed into a mini-platform of sorts, where users do all kinds of things with it. Time cards, expense reports, order sheets, office floorpans, generic lists, by-hand Gantt charts, etc etc. And other tools -- even similar ones that are supposed to be 'Excel-compatible' like Apple Pages or Google Sheets -- don't really work with many Excel documents 'in the wild'.

The real killer feature of Excel is Excel-compatibility. That's the only reason I personally use Excel -- because, for various reasons mostly outside of my control, I sometimes have to use documents created in Excel. E.g., my employer's vacation day reporting form is created in Excel by HR, and hell no Google Sheets doesn't work with it. (Actually, even the Mac version of Excel also doesn't work with it -- I fire up VMWare whenever I need to fill one out.)

Nothing other than Excel really works perfectly with Excel documents.

I think that was the biggest reason for the failure of the two Google Apps trials I witnessed.

(But there is also the fact that Excel was massively more feature-packed, reliable, and performant than Google Sheets -- which I think is still the case today. I personally use it because I enjoy the ubiquitous access cloudy-cloud-cloud nature of it, but I don't think that wins for many users, especially those who really mainly just use it at their desk at work anyway.)

There's also Chinese WPS Office.[0] But last I checked its spreadsheet, it was still missing key features.

[0] http://wps.com/

I do agree. And I'll be sticking with Windows 7.

I am indeed mostly happy with LibreOffice Calc, or even Gnumeric. But I'm aware of no other spreadsheet app that calculates on multiple CPU cores. Or gracefully handles spreadsheets well north of 50MB. Windows overall may be revolting, but Excel is a beautiful thing.

Another area hugely lacking in open source is image manipulation. People who think GIMP is a 1:1 replacement for Photoshop have never used Photoshop.

There is also Krita. Definitely worth a try for anyone thinking Gimp is the best Photoshop alternative the FLOSS world has to offer.

I'd rather buy a new mac and photoshop than windows 10.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com