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.
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.
offtopic but your english is great :)
I bring this up often because its so amusing to me.
Last year I did a lot of interviews with developers of popular Steam Deck and Linux programs. All went really well, and were quite fun to do.
One ‘dev’ (I use that term so loosely because I found out GPT is heavily used for their work) freaked out though when they saw my document I sent initially was an .odt file.
Knowing I am a pen-tester, they freaked out and told the public at large I was trying to hack them with a weird file type.
.odt
It still makes me laugh. Anyway, I swear by LibreOffice, I use it daily and love it so much!
if a specific format isn’t requested or required, and the formatted text document is not expected to be edited by the recipient–only read, possibly by computer, or printed, i would default to using a pdf.
Most of these were not on-the-spot interviews. They were very informal questions and answers.
So Writer felt appropriate to me - the questions were there, they can copy to paste elsewhere, or enter their own answers in the document.
That’s funny! If someone was trying to infect my PC via e-mail, I would expect them to be sending pdf files.
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.
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A lot of what Linux lacks is UI design, and at least 50+% of that is just because of what we got used to using other products.
Absolutely 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.
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
It’s very good but M$ make every attempt to avoid making it interoperable with Word
M$ loves locking users into their totally bulls*it ecosystem with deliberately broken “standards.” LibreOffice, on the other hand, actually respects open formats like ODF and doesn’t treat interoperability as a threat. Word still can’t properly open documents it didn’t create, unless you pay the vendor tax and pray the formatting survives…
I think they deliberately mess with the formatting text in exported to “word doc” format files from LibreOffice too.
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/Linux(Is debian considered a “debian-based” distro?)
Debian users, ignore the above. Debian explicity warns against using ubuntu ppa
The correct way to get libreoffice in debian is just to apt install libreofffice… It’s already in the main debian repos
You can visually theme it so it looks differently
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.
My first experience with it was that dark theme was bugged and the interface wasn’t intuitive
Yes. Its the obvious choice for desktop.
But if you want web, have you tried CryptoPad.
Collabora used to offer Libre Office online, now it’s their Libre Office fork
Rollapp lets you use LibreOffice online but I don’t think there is collaboration
Yeah; it’s pretty great. It lacks the excel functions, but if you know some python that is a total non-issue.
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.
That’s my exact distro/de combo. Never had any issues with trackpad use that weren’t also there with the win10 that came on the thinkpad. Which was just that it’s prone to detecting even the lightest accidental taps and over reacting. Maybe it’s device specific?
Edit: by device specific, I mean that it isn’t every touchpad w/Libreoffice’s issue, rather something that’s wonky with some range of hardware and not others
Aha. This would make more sense - couldn’t imagine this was happening on every laptop. Then I should add my device details to a github issue. Thanks for letting me know.
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
Works on Ubuntu
Yes
I do wish it had a self hosted docker though. I could see Proton mail and thunder mail adopting it that way, which would be neat.
Is a self hosted docker different from this?