Nextcloud, Ionos and other partners are developing an open-source office suite under the project name „Euro-Office“ as an alternative to the market-dominant Microsoft Office.
The two partners are not starting from scratch, but have forked the components of OnlyOffice available as open-source code and want to build on them. In the summer, the software is then intended to replace the previous office component Collabora in Nextcloud and the Ionos Nextcloud Workspace. A ‘technical preview’ is already available on GitHub.
While this is a good news, I think they should move from github, you know microslop copilot…
I hear this argument a lot but no one ever gives details as to what common features excel has vs say libreoffice. I’m really curious, because i’d like to contribute free time in this direction.
What I always find missing in all these Excel vs. other spreadsheet software debates is the rationale for using a spreadsheet in the first place. I work a lot with large corporations, and it’s often the case that they can’t move away from Excel because, in the past, they relied on it to solve a process in a way that—at least today—could and should be handled better. Perhaps we should question the process more often and the Excel alternatives less.
Exactly, spreadsheets themselves are the bottleneck, they worked back in the day but data and analytics have moved well beyond that, but companies refuse to migrate to a modern architecture because the dinosaurs in charge are afraid of change.
As a data consultant, I would say those companies already do question the process, and have done for decades.
Yes there are countless situations where a dedicated system or database could and should replace Excel, but there are just as many scenarios where Excel is ideal, and swapping out a spreadsheet for what would be potentially tens of separate applications across the business, or one absurdly expensive behemoth, to perform tasks that could be done rapidly and clearly in Excel is neither practical nor economically viable for most companies. A spreadsheet is perfect for plenty of situations.
My job is literally to help these companies move to appropriate database solutions, often transitioning away from Excel. But there’s no getting around that a spreadsheet solves (often simple) problems that are impractical with other tools. You can move a company to a supplier’s sector-specific solution and solve huge numbers of issues, but unless that solution exactly meets every aspect of the business requirements, there’s always going to be a fallback and it’s often Excel, for better or worse.
The issue is that a lot of processes need to be understood by people who have no IT background. Your basic office drones need to be able to use it, enter data, and make changes. Every applicant in an office job will be relatively proficient in Excel.
If you move your process to another solution, the majority of your employees will have to be re-trained.
Before Excel existed people had to learn it after it became common, I’m sure if something else replaces spreadsheets people will learn and adapt to it.
Format as table
I’m confused. Excel is a spreadsheet, that’s always in the form of a table.
that downvoter really could have instead done something useful and explain what “format as table” is
A table in Excel will have a name that can be referenced. It will also automatically grow larger when you type in the row under the last row. You can have multiple tables within a sheet. It comes with extensive filters. In LibreCalc you can only set filters but everything else remains static. It’s literally the most used thing in Excel.
You just described the basic functions of a database. People are building a databases in spreadsheets. That’s not a reason to keep using Excel, that’s a reason to have an intervention lol
Edit: this is halfway tongue in cheek. Trying to get office workers to use more and different tools partway through their careers is unfortunately unviable in many industries.
The workflow to set up some basic calculations with ranges formatted as tables is just much quicker. I believe that’s why Excel keeps winning unfortunately. I just tried doing some basic things in LibreCalc and it was very cumbersome unfortunately. At home I don’t mind this, but at work I’d be pissed if I’d lose that functionality. It would seriously hold me back.
I think office workers would love better tools. The problem is that most programs need to be approved by IT
Yep, single most important difference in my view and the reason I pay an Office subscription.
Years ago, one of my buddies tried to open a very long spreadsheet and Libreoffice couldn’t do it. I think the maximum row and columns reached parity in version 7. I think one more cosmetic feature that is missing is the easy to access table and chart style templates.
Its almost always that they’ve been following specific workflows or processes for the last n years and find that particular workflow isn’t directly supported in LO.
Power Query
I can only assume anyone still asking the question “is Excel really that much better than the alternatives?” lacks exposure to Power Query and its prevalence in business.
Anyone reaching for powerQuery in excel should not, and instead be reaching for something like PowerBI.
So, I should use PowerBI when I get a weirdly formatted .txt file with data I want to analyze, get my insights, do calculations on etc. and will never use again after? Thats what I use PQ for, format/ combine data from different sources in a way I can use. I don’t need dashboards or fancy charts someone can click on.
And no, python is not the tool for me. I am not getting paid to learn a programming language, I don’t have time for this at work. I would have to learn and program a lot of python to do what I can do in PQ in a few minutes. I don’t even know, if I am allowed to execute a self written python script on my work PC.
And pay the additional licence? Why?
No actual arguments needed unfortunately. Lazyness, change resistance.
I only have one example and it’s not really a good one: 3-4 years ago I had one specific spreadsheet (that I got from the internet) which I used to help plan some stuff in a videogame I was playing. It had a table with a few hundred items with formulas that would iterate over those items many times.
Excel on the local machine could handle changes to that sheet instantly. Anything else I tried (including excel web) would take several seconds to change any value, sometimes even minutes.
It was probably some problem with the spreadsheet itself, but there was no other similar spreadsheet I could use so at the end of the day I had to use excel if I wanted to plan anything with that tool (but I ended up quitting the game within a few days)
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