<story><title>Bye Bye Microsoft Office, Hello LibreOffice</title><url>https://easydns.com/blog/2019/11/25/bye-bye-microsoft-office-hello-libreoffice/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chadash</author><text>Software engineers opining on Excel vs LibreOffice strikes me as pretty funny. Imagine someone who programs sporadically asking why anyone would pay for intelliJ or Visual Studio.&lt;p&gt;Even if Excel is just marginally better than LibreOffice, if you use it day after day to do your job, the $150&amp;#x2F;year cost is basically nothing (especially when enterprise software that does a lot less can routinely charge $1000&amp;#x2F;user&amp;#x2F;year). Meanwhile, It Just Works™. Plus, it&amp;#x27;s a huge pain to learn something new or deal with the aggravation of compatibility issues. Any LibreOffice document will tend to open up nicely in Word or Excel because otherwise, it&amp;#x27;s worthless if you want to share it with others. But the opposite definitely isn&amp;#x27;t true.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lucb1e</author><text>You should read the post.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; if you use it day after day to do your job, the $150&amp;#x2F;year cost is basically nothing [...] [Excel] Just Works™.&lt;p&gt;From the post:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;  It’s not that I’m cheap either, I just want something that works according to my preferences, not Microsoft’s.&lt;p&gt;See the post for details about what&amp;#x27;s wrong with Microsoft&amp;#x27;s Office offering.&lt;p&gt;The author even goes on to say:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I took the $319 I was about to spend on an Office license and I donated it to the LibreOffice project, and will just continue to do so every time I have to go through this process.&lt;p&gt;I really don&amp;#x27;t think they&amp;#x27;re as cheap as you make them out to be.&lt;p&gt;And I agree with the sentiment. I&amp;#x27;d also be fine to pay for it, but I don&amp;#x27;t want to have to struggle with emulation layers to get Microsoft&amp;#x27;s crap to work on a non-Microsoft supported operating system (it&amp;#x27;s not as if I can compile it myself), when there is a perfectly fine alternative that does not rely on being a monopoly. If someone has a layout issue with my document, the solution is very simple. If someone has a layout issue with Microsoft-made documents, they expect the other party to pay over a hundred bucks just to open one document (it doesn&amp;#x27;t happen more than once a year to me, so they&amp;#x27;re asking me to pay that for one document). This scheme only works if there is a monopoly because those people wouldn&amp;#x27;t actually themselves pay for two or three licenses just to open other people&amp;#x27;s documents.&lt;p&gt;For me, LibreOffice also works better (ever tried opening a CSV in Excel? It comes out wrong 90% of the time and I don&amp;#x27;t know how, or if, you can change it; LibreOffice Calc just gives you a dialog with the csv settings and a preview of the result), in part because I&amp;#x27;m used to it and no longer used to newer Office versions, it aligns with my ideology more, and on top of all that it&amp;#x27;s free.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Even if [one] is just marginally better than [the other], if you use it day after day to do your job&amp;quot; then indeed it&amp;#x27;s a no-brainer to use LibreOffice instead of pay money for an inferior product.</text></comment>
<story><title>Bye Bye Microsoft Office, Hello LibreOffice</title><url>https://easydns.com/blog/2019/11/25/bye-bye-microsoft-office-hello-libreoffice/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chadash</author><text>Software engineers opining on Excel vs LibreOffice strikes me as pretty funny. Imagine someone who programs sporadically asking why anyone would pay for intelliJ or Visual Studio.&lt;p&gt;Even if Excel is just marginally better than LibreOffice, if you use it day after day to do your job, the $150&amp;#x2F;year cost is basically nothing (especially when enterprise software that does a lot less can routinely charge $1000&amp;#x2F;user&amp;#x2F;year). Meanwhile, It Just Works™. Plus, it&amp;#x27;s a huge pain to learn something new or deal with the aggravation of compatibility issues. Any LibreOffice document will tend to open up nicely in Word or Excel because otherwise, it&amp;#x27;s worthless if you want to share it with others. But the opposite definitely isn&amp;#x27;t true.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robocat</author><text>&amp;gt; the $150&amp;#x2F;year cost is basically nothing&lt;p&gt;The cost is a lot higher for Linux developers - you also need a Windows licence and to spend significant time managing a VM (I did that, no more).&lt;p&gt;I boot Linux for my dev machine (because Windows costs me more time).&lt;p&gt;I actually like Excel.&lt;p&gt;(Word and Outlook are toxic waste as far as I am concerned: they frustrate me more than they serve me).</text></comment>