Today I did my first advanced spreadsheet on LibreOffice after switching to Linux, and it handled itself pretty well. I had to search for some features on the web at first, but after I got it down, I felt comfortable using it. Also, LibreOffice’s default menu layout is not pretty, but I can find all of the functions with just a click, unlike MS Office’s ribbon menu where I had to click around to find what I was looking for. Sorry for bad English.
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I do a lot of work with CSV files and LibreCalc is so much better for them. You can actually tell it how to delimit the file and to put quotations around each field.
Some programs actually advise against using excel if you’re going to work on a CSV to upload into the program, which is funny considering it’s meant to be the industry standard.
P. S. For anyone that would like to use LibreOffice at work, download portableapps and get it from there. It’s so portable it can get around IT administration requirements
On behalf of cyber and IT, just ask IT to install the thing, please. They can’t really say no to a free app and bypassing restrictions ends badly for everyone. I had a user do that with video editing software… seriously, what could go wrong? Ransomware. Literally ransomware. Lucky for antivirus it stopped it but yeah, please work with IT.
They can’t really say no to a free app
A co-worker was told (verbatim) by the head of IT that " we don’t use open source". So yeah…
Okay maybe I should have said they can’t say no and appear reasonable? Was there a justification or is this guy Joseph Goebbels or something? I bet you didn’t use AI 2 years ago but probably have that running rampant.
I’d love to live in a world where I trust everyone to install software on computers, but Mr Ransomware, albeit not common, is out there waiting to fuck up the business with a portable application he found. He wanted to do something for a colleague, but we all nearly suffered for it.
Install things the right way, and if you can’t, make a case for it and get managers involved. Justify the time saved or the comfort it provides: everyone hates AI, blame it on copilot being in excel.
Bypassing security instead of working with them doesn’t help anyone and it almost always ends badly.
They can and most of the time they do complain about free apps
They can’t really say no to a free app
“No enterprise support” is actually scary for them. I did security, 'way back, but in Unix, and maybe that’s why we were more cool with OSS back then. Windows people love the black-box binaries and fear a lack of pricy support.
I had a user do that with video editing software… seriously, what could go wrong? Ransomware. Literally ransomware.
What app was that? I’m guessing the software was not FOSS.
There was a trend of malware authors making websites to give away free video editors, I think this one appeared as capcut. They patch the binaries or use other techniques and include malicious DLLs.
Edit: you and I both are fine with people installing FOSS from github, but what happens when they get the name for the repo wrong? What happens when they go to the fake site a malware author spun up, that even has all the files they wanted?
Security is there for a reason, sorry, I know we can be annoying and add hurdles to important roles, but people get things wrong. We help with that, and bypassing us means you didn’t give us a chance to save you before you messed up (again I assume everyone on lemmy is a sysadmin Linux user so not ‘you’ but a generic user you).
Wow, I never heard about this malware trend. I guess this kind of crap will only increase with AI’s help…
I agree with LibreCalc and CSV, in some internationalclasses we always had issues with excel saving CSV in actually different formats depending on the machine locale. LibreCalc never had this problem.
offtopic but your english is great :)
Ribbon bar shit, personally I hate the MS ribbon bar. So for me the LO interface is way better. Just depends on what you like and what you learned and know well.
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I recommend giving OnlyOffice a try too. Way better UX/UI than Libre. Compatible with MS Office. No cost.
And coming fresh from a Russian Company with huge russian Government and Army Contracts
it’s not like OnlyOffice is controlled by Putin or something lol
Hm, TIL. I thought they were from the Baltics. For what it’s worth, as far as I can tell the desktop apps never tried to “phone home” from my machine.
Yeah, I thought the main devs were Latvian 🤔
Look better doesn’t mean it’s functionally better.
Indeed, LibreOffice Calc is a near-daily fixture in my operational workflow. The insistence on proprietary, data-harvesting alternatives like Google Docs is… unnecessary. For Debian-based systems, the installation process is straightforward:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa&sudo apt install libreoffice, referencing the official documentation at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Install/LinuxAlmost anytime i want to do something a bit more interesting in Excel i have to look for a solution on the web too. And i am considered one of the better Excel users in my working environment.
You can visually theme it so it looks differently
Yes. Its the obvious choice for desktop.
But if you want web, have you tried CryptoPad.
Collabora used to offer Libre Office online, now it’s their Libre Office fork
Rollapp lets you use LibreOffice online but I don’t think there is collaboration
I am so close to loving libreoffice but trackpad gesture scrolling is broken and it’s kind of not optional on a laptop. With a mouse, I am a big fan.
This works out of the box on KDE (should work on GNOME too), what desktop environment do you use?
Cinnamon, Mint 22. It works, but badly. Two finger scroll does nothing for a second, then jumps to the destination. You don’t see anything in between, which is not how that interaction is meant to go (I start the gesture, realise I overshot the top of page two, then adjust back up, read the top, then keep on scrolling - all without releasing the gesture).
This thread describes it well: https://www.reddit.com/r/libreoffice/comments/enf3p4/touchpad_scroll_speed/
edit: i started digging into this again. I think it’s just sensitivity being way too high within LO. If I go one mm at a time it works as expected. But of course I want to browse docs as comfortably as I browse pages on firefox.
Gesture scrolling? You mean like making clockwise or anticlockwise circles to scroll up or down? I’d have thought that kind of functionality would be handled by the touchpad driver, not individual programs.
nah just two finger scroll. like going down from page 1 to page 2 with a touchpad
I’ve found that a lot of apps with touch gestures need Touchégg to work correctly, could be worth a shot to give it an install. I use a converted macbook, and for any gestures to work with the apple trackpad at all I have to have touchegg, my partner has it on her converted pixelbook go to make the trackpad not feel awful there too.
i’m on mint cinnamon 22 and have touchegg installed. They have this in built Gestures applet but it doesn’t seem to govern the two finger scroll. Touche (separate app) seems similar - its all about 3 and 4 finger gestures. Seems like the two finger scroll is special somehow.
I’m probably misunderstanding as I rarely use word processing software, so I apologise if you talking about something more than the system’s own handling of touchpad scrolling! here’s the settings applet for XFCE, I think every DE will have similar options (it does even offer circular scrolling, but I know you aren’t looking for that):
Right you are - two finger is part of the touchpad device, and everything above is a “gesture”. This is enabled, and it works, but badly. Looks like a known issue: https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/how-to-slow-down-scrolling-speed-on-touchpad/18582
Works on Ubuntu
Yeah; it’s pretty great. It lacks the excel functions, but if you know some python that is a total non-issue.
My first experience with it was that dark theme was bugged and the interface wasn’t intuitive
However, in direct comparison with SoftMaker Office (which, admittedly, is not free software), LibreOffice is inconsistent, sluggish, unstable and less compatible with Microsoft formats.
Wrong info, the Microsoft format is less compatible with everything else.
Formats aren’t compatible. Parsers are.
?
There is Office software that can handle Microsoft formats better than other Office software. Still, Microsoft’s file formats are open.
That’s a sham. Only basic stuff is open standard, the rest is proprietary extensions. Such a format can’t usually be standardized; there’s an entire Wikipedia article about MS’ shenanigans to make it happen. But MS doesn’t even keep to that ambiguous 600-pages standard anymore. Here’s fsfe’ stance to it, calling it a pseudo-standard.
Which results in basic formatting having to be reverse-engineered. Better use Open Document Format.
But MS doesn’t even keep to that standard anymore.
To be fair, LibreOffice had (don’t know if it still has!) problems rendering OpenOffice .odt files in the past.
For me MS Office aren’t compatible with LibreOffice is because MS fault not LibreOffice
I’m all for LibreOffice and Open Source, but I do not agree on this point. Microsoft created the format and application and LibreOffice is a third party that tries to be conform.
Fuck Microsoft. We tried to get a open standard and so they created a competing name and standard to confuse and obfuscate (and wasn’t really a standard anyone could create).
So they can go get bent.
I usually work with MS formats on LO (only because they need smaller space for small files, in larger files, MS formats are objectively bulkier). My observation is that MS messes with formatting of files made on LO, no matter which format you pick… even with whitespace of otherwise plain unfomatted text at times.
It is definitely a MS issue, and it is not about formats they have made public.
How is it Microsoft’s fault that the LibreOffice team fails to properly support its formats? Others can do it.
It’s MS make their format to not compatible with other office software (because monopoly)
Then why can SoftMaker support it well and LibreOffice can’t?
I don’t use SM but probably because MS document format is their priority while LO’s priority is open document format
MS supplied LO translator in MS Office is not very good. That is their issue. MS is not even that compatible betwen versions of their own software.
Except for MS format compatiblity, not my experience, Not sure where MS format compatibility stands now, but that has histically been the biggest issue.
Keep on mind that MS supplied LibreOffice translator is not great either so they have issues too. MS really does not plan on being compatible even between versions of their own software.
There are still a few issues left to fix in my experience.
Huh, I’ve never heard of SoftMaker Office before, good to know it exists. I might check it out.
To add to some of the other comments, I have heard that the issue for LibreOffice is that Microsoft’s own parser isn’t compliant with the OOXML standard that they created. Yet the most important thing is compatibility with Microsoft Office, so you can’t simply build a parser according to the open standard and expect it to work with Microsoft Office. Instead, you need a parser to work the same way as Microsoft’s, which is proprietary. However, admittedly I have never read the OOXML standard or checked MS Office documents for compliance myself.
Therefore, if what I have heard is correct, I would assume that SoftMaker Office has either struck a deal with Microsoft before to improve compatibility, or has simply been better at reverse engineering. Alternatively, what I have heard could be wrong.
Yes
I do wish it had a self hosted docker though. I could see Proton mail and thunder mail adopting it that way, which would be neat.
Is a self hosted docker different from this?
#775#298 060352 @ColdWater
