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LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

computerworld.com

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Re: LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

#121

Post by yummypaint »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #113

MS office has been removing features, ruining the UI and adding bloat. No wonder people are jumping ship.

This has been the story for 20 years now. It's a case study in what happens when a product has a guaranteed revenue stream and the company has 0 incentive to innovate or improve anything. However, managers still need to have "launches" and leave their grimy fingerprints on the UI so they can pat themselves on the back and advance a rung on the career ladder. From a would-be user's perspective it appears this dynamic is the sole driver of changes to MS office.

Re: LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

#122

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

threatripper wrote: post #48
croes wrote: post #44

Given the number of people who still right align texts with spaces or tab if they are professionals I think for mist people programs like Word and LibreOffice Writer are overkill

These people need an multimodal AI assistant that does geometrically correctly OCR of the page s screenshot and then determines the appropriate number of spaces and sizes for the spaces to accurately right-align the text.

What the fuck?

Re: LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

#123

Post by msh »

prell wrote: post #120

Can you guys recommend an android app which can do simple edits (mostly data entry) on spreadsheet .ODS files stored locally on the device. Right now I use Collabora but UX is not the best and it feels very slow and unresponsive at times. MS Excel requires conversion to xlsx before you can edit and Google Sheets requires to upload to google drive so neither is an option. Any alternatives?

Only office works quite well: https://www.onlyoffice.com/office-for-android.aspx

Re: LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

#124

Post by buovjaga »

baq wrote: post #99

I need a Calc which doesn't suck. I don't necessarily need Excel, but the spreadsheet shouldn't be unusably slow at 100x100 cells with simple calculations and a literal couple of V/XLOOKUPs.

XLOOKUP was implemented last year. Submit a bug report with an example document and the perf issue can be looked into. Calc's performance is being improved constantly.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugReport

Re: LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

#125

Post by buovjaga »

pjmlp wrote: post #77

Yet are the donations also on the rise? I bet they aren't.

Fortunately they are, but TDF's budget is still rather small when considering the scale of the project. TDF is looking to expand its dev team. There's a lot of activity going on with volunteers and interns, but we need more senior devs to tackle the trickier renovations.

Re: LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

#126

Post by laserbeam »

croes wrote: post #44

Given the number of people who still right align texts with spaces or tab if they are professionals I think for mist people programs like Word and LibreOffice Writer are overkill

I dare to say Word is so poorly designed that there are so many ways to screw up formatting... that bad behaviors (like right aligning text with spaces) are inevitable.

For 90% of documents, software like Word was a mistake and you should be using google docs level of detail or markdown or so. And for the rest you want publishing software, not Word :(.

Re: LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

#127

Post by loughnane »

I use libreoffice call to open stuff on my Linux box, but the default formula behavior turns me off.

If I type “=“ into D2 then left arrow to C2 then type “*” I would expect when I next press up arrow it to bring me to D1. But in Calc it brings me to C1. In other words it doesn’t reset to the starting cell after each operation.

I guess I can change it somehow, but that’s been enough of an annoyance that I haven’t switched wholly for on google sheets, though I’d like to.

Re: LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

#128

Post by pjc50 »

eastbound wrote: post #64
jwr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet happened, and operating systems evolve much faster. You could buy a piece of software and run it on MS-DOS 5.0 for a long time if you didn't need networking and the software did what you wanted it to do. You didn't have to update. Today everything is connected to the internet and exposed to threats, so the updates are much more frequent, and OS makers take advantage of this to push additional stuff and e…

That’s only sustainable if we pour a humongous percentage of our GDP in upgrading all software all the time.

Well, yes, that's what's going to happen .. because that churn increases the GDP number.

Re: LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

#129

Post by thebytefairy »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #28
nitrogen99 wrote: post #13

Google docs doesn’t work?

It has the worst commenting and track history I've seen. My company went to Google docs about 5 years ago and I have steadily walked the work product of engineers go downhill because of it.

For what reasons? I've used both and never seen such a thing. In fact I'd argue the simplicity and collaboration features of Google Docs gives it an edge.

Re: LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs

#130

Post by theothertimcook »

UncleSlacky wrote: post #95
fodkodrasz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paint.Net on Windows. Though on Windows there is Paint, that is less capable, but still no equivalent is on MacOS OOTB. (Also the drama around Paint is worth its own bashing). I'd be interested in a similar basic tool as paint for mac and Linux (and possibly also for windows, if MS crappifies Paint, after it has tried to kill it earlier)

Pinta (essentially a reimplementation of Paint.NET) exists for MacOS as well as Linux and Windows: https://www.pinta-project.com/releases/

There are some subtle quirks where pinta just doesn’t play ball in a way that is intuitive to a PDN aficionado.

Photopea is very close but i keep coming back to PDN either VM or RDP

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