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.
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/Linuxofftopic but your english is great :)
Linux has a bit of a design lacking but the functionality is there.
Define lack of design. You mean theming? because Linux has way more customizable theming options than the proprietary alternatives, to fit all kinds of subjective tastes.
You mean usability? it’s the one system that you can rice up to do absolutely whatever you want to do to fit your workflow, you can configure any key to automate literally anything a desktop can do.
The catch is that you actually do have to get your hands dirty if you want to mold the system to your liking… as opposed to being your own tastes the ones molding to adapt to whichever the designer of the OS decided should be the new tacky fashion or workflow.
I think he mispelled Windows.
Windows 11 is literally a part copy of KDE. Even the webpage got copied till they removed the evidence. It is KDE from Linux that got copied because the Windows User Interface was shit af.
But they still lack a lot for my taste. KDE seems to be the winner for me
A lot of what Linux lacks is design, and at least 50+% of that is just because of what we got used to using other products.
Absolute true. We mimicked bad design out there for compatibility, but then it became comfy and now cannot be changed.
Having said that, the ribbon must die. Let’s not hold MSOffice (post-97) up as the ideal for anything at all, okay?
Depends on the Desktop/Theme your using really.
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
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.
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…
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.
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.
They can and most of the time they do complain about free apps
They can’t really say no to a free app
What? At my workplace there’s a bunch of stuff we aren’t allowed to install that’s free with the reasoning being security concerns.
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.
and libreoffice still has a ribbon interface if you like that.
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
Almost 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.
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I recommend giving OnlyOffice a try too. Way better UX/UI than Libre. Compatible with MS Office. No cost.
Look better doesn’t mean it’s functionally better.
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.
“Headquartered” in Latvia. But really it’s Russian.
Yeah, I thought the main devs were Latvian 🤔
Honest question: who would use a non-collaborative standalone spreadsheet in 2025? I don’t get it.
Not you obviously
I don’t need to share everything, everytime. Do you ?
Context is important:
“in August 2023, OnlyOffice announced a restructuring, placing Ascensio System SIA under the ownership of a British company, which is in turn owned by a Singapore-based holding company”
Its also open source and can be audited still.
I might uninstall because of this though as didnt even know.
My single personal spreadsheet is (uh) a CSV that I edit with
vim. I don’t want to have to fire up a monstrous GUI app just to view a table. But sure, count me as eccentric in this way.Most of the spreadsheets I deal with are for work. For what I consider obvious reasons, they’ve been cloud-hosted for literally decades now.
Your initial response got peoples’ backs up because of its dismissive tone and (it seemed to me, as you hadn’t provided context) apparent advocacy for web-based tools like O365 or GSheets.
Many office application users wouldn’t consider vim as an “office application”, as they have their word processing app, their spreadsheet app, their email app, their chat app, their file explorer/manager, maybe something other than Notepad as a text editor, etc, and don’t really know much beyond some of what each of them can do.
The fact that vim (or Emacs or vim/nvim with plugins, or LazyVim or Doom Emacs) can do all of those things would blow many minds.
But the setup effort and learning curve is still there, and also requires that they have sufficient permissions/policy to be able to install things.
Your initial response got peoples’ backs up because of its dismissive tone and (it seemed to me, as you hadn’t provided context) apparent advocacy for web-based tools like O365 or GSheets.
The pernicious side of social media in microcosm. To say “it’s not collaborative” is somehow understood as shilling for big tech. Always the worst possible interpretation of every remark.
Agreed as to vim.
Yeah, so you do use them, so you get it. Just most people use spreadsheets cause they know it and seem simple to them ! For me, I try to not use online spreadsheets for personal financial stuff. I only use online spreadsheets if the project has meaning in being shared. I quite like grist for this, really handful tool
There is a difference between “cloud-hosting” (= storing your documents on other people’s computers) and “collaborative editing” (= working on the same file at the same time).
Yes yes. The issue here being that in the real world nobody much is doing the latter. But we’re getting off topic, LibreOffice is neither.
LibreOffice can perfectly work with files stored on other people’s computers.
Yes, in theory, although tricky to set up. What it cannot do, at least not without fiddly modules, and even then nowhere near as well as the cloud competition, is any kind of collaborative document editing. Which is where the world is at today.
You said “in the real world nobody much is doing the latter”.
Honest answer: People who would create spreadsheets for themselves.
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You can absolutely collaborate with Collabora Office
Yes, true.
Not sure why you got downvoted, it is a fair question. Real time multiuser editing is a powerful feature. That said it is really only needed a small fraction of the time for specific types of collaboration. Also, it can cause problems as well. Libreoffice Calc meets most of my home spreadsheet needs: calculating mortgage rates and future value of investments and such.
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
The formats are “quasi-open”. There’s still a lot of proprietary stuff in them. Or undocumented or poorly documented things. MS didn’t really want it to be an open standard.
Being compatible with them requires a lot of work to reverse engineer the formats. Some companies make licensing deals with ms to get access to better docs but must keep their code closed. Something libreoffice can’t do.
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.
