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Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#111

Post by PeterRRodwell »

xwolfi wrote: post #61

No, it was years ago that I tried in a small startup and it just wouldn't scale as much as MS stuff. It's mostly Excel that needs to be top notch or you waste time massaging data to make the libre office Calc thing accept it. I like Google a little bit for its ability to remote code the spreadsheet and the sharing feature, but now in a large financial institution, Excel works perfectly fine. I suppose the Word and Po…

I work on very large (>300 pages) and very complex Word documents containing graphics, table of contents, index, footnotes, end notes, bibliographies, etc. I also have to work on Excel and PowerPoint files. I have tested LO with these multiple times as each new release appears and have always run into format compatibility problems. To be fair, these problems are slowly getting fewer but they’re still enough to make LO impossible for my work. This doesn’t mean that MS Office is perfect. After all these years, Microsoft still can’t make search and replace the same for Word, Excel and PowerPoint and the spelling checker in Word is brain dead (“replace all” doesn’t, for example). If the compatibility problems go away, I’ll probably switch to LO but until then I’ll continue with MS Office because that’s what my clients use.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#112

Post by andrewshadura »

cosmodisk wrote: post #105

The total cost of having Office 365 from everyone in the business will probably be less than 10K a year. There are 20 times more features than Libre Office or any other would offer+ things work fairly smoothly.

What are those features?

Also, what makes you think LibreOffice doesn't give users smooth experience?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#113

Post by gtf21 »

candyman wrote: post #17

Given how precious and valuable time is I don't really get the aversion to using Microsoft or something similar. Pricing has come down so much that it's less than people spend on coffee. If you are working on something worthwhile it doesn't seem worth the effort to avoid using mainstream, productive and cheaply available commercial software.

I don't mind M$ Office, but a small proportion of the team (including me) use Linux. I have no aversion to paying (we pay Google, for example) but I like open source, would like to contribute (financially) to LibreOffice or whoever is relevant if we do go down that path, and think that the only way this stuff gets mainstreamed is if companies, y'know, mainstream it.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#114

Post by gtf21 »

sys_64738 wrote: post #64

What is LibreOffice's collaboration tools like? GSuite was awesome for multiple people editing at the same time and it allows for great synergy in that regard.

This is the big problem for us -- we do a lot of collaborative editing. I know there's something called Collabora I think but I haven't tried it.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#115

Post by breadloaf »

I am using both for my business. Libre Office has excellent Draw program, I like it more than Visio.

But LO Calc is bad, or at least was when I was trying it last time. It has been creating broken tables especially where filters / conditional formatting is involved and was endlessly crashing on attempt to create graph from 2 channel scope (cca 2*2000 X-Y values). OTOH in Excel I can have table with more than 30k lines with filters, sorting calculations and everything works swiftly. No, I am not going to fool around with a database.

In Word vs Writer scenario is not anything really appealing to me as I don't use them too much. So I am neutral on those.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#116

Post by gtf21 »

pabs3 wrote: post #96

To those who are using LibreOffice: Are you donating towards the cost of maintenance and development? If not, what changes could they make to convince you to do that?

If we go down this path we would donate as a company (and probably pay for support / fixes). I have no aversion to paying for good software, I'm just worried about switching an entire business over to bad software (I barely use office tools as I prefer plaintext formats and programming directly).

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#117

Post by gtf21 »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #68

I would argue that the office suite is less relevant than the data. Any suite only exists for it's output. If you use a generic format then you can convert to specialised ones as required. If you save in a proprietary format, be prepared for vendor lockin. Say HTML5 for docs, some form of CSV/YAML for spreadsheets etc you get the idea. Keep your data, then your suite decisions flow from that.

Yeah that's a nice dream and if I had my way everyone would write docs in LaTeX but I have sales people and ops people who need to be productive, and don't really care to learn to store things in HTML or CSV/YAML (the latter doesn't support the complicated models we run in Excel anyway).

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#118

Post by gtf21 »

devit wrote: post #29

In general "Office" applications are a bad solution to any problem, so not using them at all is best. For text, Markdown with inline semantic HTML if necessary and CSS stylesheets if needed is better, since it properly separates style and presentation unlike word processors. For modelling, Jupyter-like notebooks are much better than spreadsheets since they properly label objects, don't make everything a 2D grid, and…

Like some other posters, this is a great dream, but just like I'm not going to teach all my sales, ops, etc. people to write docs in LaTeX and do version control with git, I'm not going to take them off "Office" suites without incurring an enormous productivity burden for zero gain.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#119

Post by gtf21 »

cosmodisk wrote: post #105

The total cost of having Office 365 from everyone in the business will probably be less than 10K a year. There are 20 times more features than Libre Office or any other would offer+ things work fairly smoothly.

Which features, for example? I've used both and never found LibreOffice particularly lacking for features (at least those I might use).

This isn't about cost, but as I said elsewhere:

> I have no aversion to paying (we pay Google, for example) but I like open source, would like to contribute (financially) to LibreOffice or whoever is relevant if we do go down that path, and think that the only way this stuff gets mainstreamed is if companies, y'know, mainstream it.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone successfully used LibreOffice for their business?

#120

Post by gtf21 »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #38

What OSes do you use? What field are you in? Do you share documents outside the company? How much do you use comments, especially @tagged comments? Do you need versioning? Fo you need collaborative editing? What file storage do you use? How much do you all author documents, presentations, spreadsheets? Do your users use laptops directly or do they use keyboards and mice? But really, probably none of that matters. If…

I think I was probably not clear in my original post, because you're not the only person to mention this, but it's really not about cost for me (I will happily pay for LibreOffice support, fixes, and donations) -- I'm on Linux, we're a construction tech startup, and yes we share _lots_ of documents, do a _lot_ of collaborative editing, and I would quite like to have versioning but we don't actually use that very much.

Sadly O365 seems no-go on Linux :(

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