Your first paragraph is similar to the scenario that I was talking about...using a hammer for every job....when really a screwdriver might have been a better tool....You aren't an actuary by any chance are you?Really is a combination of two factors:I have done some pretty complex spreadsheets on LibreOffice and found it to be quite fine. Equally; (albeit; some time ago) I've worked on big MS sites where users had loads of issues with Excel when doing more advanced stuff. Actuaries in particular; used to constantly; "break" it.
For serious work I vastly prefer Excel running native rather than Office365. LibreOffice read/writes Excel, which works fairly well some simple spreadsheets, however runs into issues with complex sheets with macros or VB functions. For that at home I fall back on browser based even though the GUI sucks. For an OS perspective I am Windows free at home for more than 25 years, still run Windows at work since we are a Microsoft shop.because they were attempting to do things that were really on the edge of what Excel was designed for at the time...but didn't want to wait for the painfully slow design process that would have been required for we IT folks to produce a "system" to do what they wanted.
They would then expect us to attempt to debug their vast spreadsheets...It was an absolute nightmare.
![:shock:]( "Shocked")
The thing is though....What you describe is not typical of "most users" and that is what is being discussed here. I would suggest that in fact few users do that sort of thing....or even have the faintest idea how to for that matter!...and for those users...LibreOffice is certainly perfectly acceptable.
I do complex stuff at work, as we have fallen into the popular trap of trying to solve all problems with Excel. I also have a fair number of spreadsheet based processes that have Excel, plus macros, plus VB providing a solution. Doing this in LibreOffice would be tough. Secondly, due to this dev work I am much more familiar with Excel, so it becomes the complex problem spreadsheet hammer I reach for.
OTOH, I use LibreOffice at home, both for "regular" personal stuff and for things like being the treasurer for my son's sports team. Works great. I am in complete agreement that many (most?) spreadsheets users only touch the bare surface of Excel's capabilities and LibreOffice would work just fine. The use paradigm is very similar.
For simple spreadsheets i have no issues taking LibreOffice developed stuff into Excel, or Excel into LibreOffice.
I think that you are right in saying that the familiarity aspect is a big factor...I've experienced many issues in the past when users have been migrated between various software packages..They frequently claim that they cannot do a certain function with the new package, when in reality it's often a case of understanding what it is that they are trying to do and explaining how that is done on the new platform. It's not uncommon for the same functionality to even be called something different....presumable for marketing reasons.
Libre office does do macros...though they are not the same as office and it also supports various programming languages...but not VB of course, which is proprietary. IIRC, you can use Python and Javascript for example.....But of course, there is a learning curve there.....
I think that we probably also agree that (thankfully!!... from a support perspective...
) not that many users use more than a tiny fraction of the functionality of most of these big office suites. Those that do are probably not the target audience for the Pi5 anyway....Statistics: Posted by kip_the_elder — Wed Jan 29, 2025 8:17 am