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.
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.
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.
It’s nothing to do with fear, it’s down to cost, practicality, experience and security.
The one thing these people are not afraid of is change. Every senior management resource within every medium to large business wants to implement change.
exactly this. Spreadsheets are so simple to understand that people think and communicate in spreadsheets. Managers don’t understand how much they fucking love them. Its like a cult. They make everybody meet 5 times a week to look at various spreadsheets together. And don’t see how ineffective they often are.
“we have a problem? Ok lets make a spreadsheet! Oh, the problem wasn’t solved yet? Ok then look at the spreadsheet every week now!”
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.
Format as table
Yep, single most important difference in my view and the reason I pay an Office subscription.
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.
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)
No actual arguments needed unfortunately. Lazyness, change resistance.
My answer isn’t going to be helpful, because I can’t remember specifically what I was doing, but even for a small personal project a year ago, I tried to do something I consider basic, and OnlyOffice (what I was trying out at the time) couldn’t handle it and was ridiculously slow.