My experience with libreoffice scripting was painful: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/37291851878/makin...
Why Microsoft Word must die
21–30 of 387 posts
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#22The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative? $100K? $1MM? There has to be a dollar amount where you can buy enough developer time to replace it.
LO and other openoffice suites are progeny of StarOffice, originally released in 1985. Even with such a long development history, there are deep compatibility issues which make it unacceptable for the "power users" that comprise the most profitable segment of the market.
And if you really want to go down that rabbit hole of perfect compatibility, it's an absolute clusterf*ck. There are more than than 20 different 100+ page specs (some exceeding 500 pages) needed to properly parse excel files. An incomplete list (which you can find by searching for the keyword):
MS-XLS, MS-CFB, MS-ODRAW, MS-ODRAWXML, MS-OGRAPH, MS-OFFCRYPTO, MS-RMPR, MS-OVBA, MS-OSHARED, MS-CTXLS, ECMA-376, MS-OLEDS, MS-OLEPS, MS-DTYP, MS-XLSB, MS-OFORMS, MS-VBAL, MS-OAUT, MS-DCOM, MS-XLSX
But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider some of these reasonably active projects (I'm sure I am missing some really good libraries here, so don't consider this a comprehensive list):
https://github.com/tealeg/xlsx (go, xlsx read)
https://poi.apache.org/ (java)
https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx (javascript, xlsx read)
https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls (javascript, xls read)
https://phpexcel.codeplex.com/ (php)
http://www.python-excel.org/ (python, based on openoffice )
https://github.com/randym/axlsx (ruby, xlsx write)
https://github.com/seamusabshere/remote_table (ruby, xls/xlsx read)
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#23The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
How many other software products have entire groups and conferences dedicated to tracking and mitigating the problems they cause? http://www.eusprig.org/
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#24The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
> there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite Are you sure? Does it not strike you as odd that OpenOffice/LibreOffice still haven't managed to replace Word?
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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#25I think MS Word is fine; they just need to use an open standard document format.
.docx is an open format, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#26The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
> there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite Are you sure? Does it not strike you as odd that OpenOffice/LibreOffice still haven't managed to replace Word?
OOo/LO is a straight forward clone of MS Office. It shares all its design weaknesses and adds some of its own. Except foor freedom, I don't see any reason for using it over MS Office.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#27The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
> there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite Are you sure? Does it not strike you as odd that OpenOffice/LibreOffice still haven't managed to replace Word?
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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#28I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of writers were less technically savvy, happiest writing in Word, or simply wouldn't know how to write in any other format. It makes sense from the publishers point of view to pick one format and stick with it, so they have a consistent editing style and ability, and only have to deal with converting one format into a final publication. I do feel that this is one of those cases where…
Many authors do already do this. I'm not sure if Charles Stross is complaining about having to write in Word, or simply use a workflow where Word is the end output for the author. The latter makes more sense as a complaint than the former, because I know many published authors (writing runs in the family) who use tools like Scrivener to write and then send it on to their agents / publishers as an exported .doc withou…
Publisher's workflow now insists on copy editors using Word with change tracking to mark up submitted manuscripts. The author then gets a copy of the marked-up MS to check. Which means having to use at least a tool compatible with MS change tracking on .doc files. So I'm blissfully Word-free until I hit "compile" in Scrivener ... but after the output file (RTF) goes to the publisher it comes back to me as a Word document with tracked changes and I have to dive into the turbid depths once more.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#29The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative? $100K? $1MM? There has to be a dollar amount where you can buy enough developer time to replace it.
And what happens when you do? Pay them again to keep maintaining the code base? Problem is few products can find a sustainable business model around open source.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#30I think MS Word is fine; they just need to use an open standard document format.
.docx is an open format, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
It's a published format. Open, not so much: to parse .docx properly you've basically got to re-implement Word -- they carefully drafted the standard to make it hard for rival XML processors to work on their files.