I am not an MS Office user, but I have seen the effect of format lock-in with Google Sheets. A few months back I began a project to de-Google my life, which went pretty smoothly until I tried to download my spouse's accounting spreadsheet from Google Sheets to Excel format. Both LibreOffice and Excel could open it, but nothing worked correctly. So for several months, I kept that one Google Sheet live until I could come up with an alternative. When I created the original file in Sheets, I was blindly using all sorts of features and capabilities (including Google Forms) that simply have no direct analog in other products.
A couple of days ago I bit the bullet and dug into the Excel file and figured out how to redesign everything and get it going again. Yay me. I'll admit I don't like the UI in LibreOffice, but I didn't like it very much when I first tried using it (as Star Office) back in the 90s either. Yet I keep coming back to it.
If I'm going to be locked into a format or app, I'd rather it be something like LibreOffice.
I wish the excel clones were better. LibreOffice’s UI is extremely dated imo, to the point it doesn’t even let you make a damn table, but at least what’s there works correctly.
OnlyOffice is not only missing some pretty basic functionality such as preferences (???), it also inexplicably deleted a single spreadsheet out of a multi-sheet file on two occasions on macOS and generally has some peculiar functionality and ux here and there.
I'm only a light user of office programs, both at work and at home. I have access to M365, but for my personal usage I prefer LibreOffice over MS Office, especially when it comes to spreadsheets. I generally don't mind the UI of the MS suite, but I find it's getting increasingly bloated and slow, and sometimes updates move UI elements around for no benefit that I can perceive. I haven't experienced the same with LibreOffice; it's lighter than MS Office I find it easier to find the options I'm looking for, which I know exist but don't always remember _where_ they live, because of the low frequency with which I use them.
With Excel in particular, there is something I can't put my finger on that I just don't get along with. It's unintuitive in a way that I can't describe, but which I notice about half the time I use it. Sometimes clicking doesn't do what I expect it to do, clipboard contents are lost all the time, scrolling resets or jumps around for reasons I don't understand. I don't have the same issues with LibreOffice Calc, which is why I choose it for my personal work. In fact, I think Google Sheets is the most pleasant to use of the options I've tried, which is something I thought I'd never say about a web-based alternative to a native app...
Regarding Excel's weird warts... Microsoft knows all about them but they're stuck with it for backwards compatibility. The business world has a billion Excel scripts and macros done by barely technical users that all inadvertently depend on the details of things like the scrolling and clipboard behavior. Trying to improve that would break all of that. Same as all the weirdness in JavaScript, Microsoft has to just call it a feature and live with it.
What I experienced with excel is that it provides an ability to edit cells, but then it suddenly jumps to another cell (IIRC when you press arrow keys as a text editor reflex). To disable this behavior click the cell then click the cell content field and edit there.
I'm surprised at all the comments deriding LibreOffice's interface on here. It's never given me any trouble (even when making tables) and I've been using it preferentially for 20 years over MSOffice, even when schools or employers are actively paying for my Microsoft subscription. In fact, LibreOffice does something very important a lot better than MSOffice: importing CSV files correctly across locales.
Yeah. This is the curse on any legacy software that doesn't enforce strict separation of logic and UI. Any larger change to the UI requires an awful lot of manpower that open source projects usually don't have.
I wonder if it would be possible to extract the spreadsheet data model and logic into a library completely separate from the UI. This would enable a diversity of UIs, and also interoperability between different tools.
each time someone sends me an xls or xlsx file, i am scared to open it in libresoft to mess up its formatting or miss something important. I always then rever to gsheet.
I think I've tried every spreadsheet program still being maintained at this point. Try gnumeric, it's a clear cut above everything else.
Mandatory Excel rant: Excel can't be trusted with data destined for publication. It's bloated, buggy as hell, user hostile, and has set genetics research back with its utterly braindead autocorrect. The default plot options are the exact polar opposite of how data are presented in science, and almost impossible to make serviceable. Everything Excel touches ends up looking like a hastily thrown together 6th grade science project. Libreoffice is also riddled with serious bugs and also loses data, but hey it's free and not a decades old flagship product from a multi billion dollar tech company.
> Try gnumeric, it's a clear cut above everything else.
Gnumeric rocks, even features Montecarlo built-in, I have it installed in my personal machine, but a major limitation is that they stopped providing windows builds, up to the last time I checked, so I can't use it at work.
Hey, I'm very interested in this because LibreOffice annoys me and I can't explain why. It's not the "dated look" that everybody complains about; but I suspect it's related to UX somehow.
Could you articulate why Gnumeric is better than everything else?
> Therefore, the problem is not necessarily with Excel. Equally, the problem is not with the IEEE 754 standard either. It’s just the complex nature of the world of mathematics and computing that we live in.
The IEEE 754 standard covers decimal floating point arithmetic, too. Decimal floating point avoids issues like 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 not being equal to 0.3 despite usually being displayed as 0.3. Maybe it's reasonable to use that instead?
Some earlier spreadsheets such as Multiplan used it (but not in the IEEE variety) because it was all soft-float for most users anyway.
There is no Java in core LibreOffice, it just has some weird Java-based extension system because of its Sun history.
LibreOffice uses an extremely dated, also messy, homegrown UI toolkit and has resisted the idea of switching to something last (really) updated this millennium (sic).
I don't like any of the libreoffice/openoffice behemoths. I only ever used them because there wasn't anything better/comperable, so I will stay away from that discussion.
I like OnlyOffice. Their desktop apps are much lighter and better looking. They work fine for my light needs. They also do have a LOT more than just desktop apps.
The last time I mentioned them I was informed they are Russian. If that matters to you. It is actual open source software though. Perhaps the EU should fork it. :) (By the way I hadn't checked last time but, wikipedia says Latvian with Russian origin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice. This page does say they are Russian, https://www.en-zdv.uni-mainz.de/2023/05/30/software-onlyoffi... and that they are switching to the open-source version.)
I logged in to the platform, not sharing the names myself, but basically:
* company was registered in Latvia in 2010 (e.g. included in VAT register over here)
* board has 1 member since 2009, registered in Russia (Russian passport)
* has 1 shareholder, Ascensio System Limited in the UK (05718967)
* has one beneficial owner, in 2023 updated data from Russia to Turkey (passport issued in Istanbul)
In 2024 their turnover was short of 3 million EUR, seems like profit wise in 2024 they're 1 million EUR in the red. Also not sure if the site is busted, but shows the number of employees as 1.
So yeah, the company is registered over here, seems like they're trying to distance themselves from Russia for obvious reasons. Not sure why the downvotes for the parent comment, that's probably nice to mention.
Following that up in the UK companies registry, the director of Ascensio System Limited started using a service address in London since May 2025. The same filing, however, notes that his usual residential address has remained unchanged, and appears to be in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
The beneficial owner is Onlyoffice Capital Group Pte. Ltd in Singapore.
It all seems surprisingly murky - you'd normally expect a relatively small organisation to have a more straightforward structure, even allowing for its international nature.
Playing devil's advocate for a second. It might be easier for a single person company to open up a bunch of legal entities in different places where taxes etc are more favorable. In the Russian case guy might just be wanting to be able to accept payments. Or maybe he's making sure he has somewhere to go in case of trouble. I would be very unsurprised if he took advantage of the "$250K real estate purchase gets you full citizenship and you can even rent or sell the place" scheme of Turkey to live there.
It seems overkill for what is actually a pretty tiny company - I doubt they would be big enough to trigger those sort of incentives, at least for the UK and Singaporean entities (Latvia or Turkey might, I suppose, be different - but then why bother routing it through the UK?).
I'd guess that the happy case is going to be that, yes, this structure was forced on them as a by-product of sanctions or similar negative trade policies. But I'd be worried that the software business is actually a front for something else, which would suggest that OnlyOffice might be more vulnerable to changes in legal climate than most other projects of that size.
They might have one official employee but there are a bunch of people active on their github. They might be contractors or employees of a different related company.
Feels like a complex situation to me - I like that there's all sort of software out there, esp. if there are improvements to UI/UX, but also I think that the OpenDocument formats are nice to support when possible and push as defaults (while they unfortunately might be a bit confusing to casual users who are used to MS ones).
I tried OnlyOffice and it seemed okay, even if I daily drive LibreOffice most of the time. It's nice that it's open source, but I also understand the people who are cautious about stuff coming out from Russia - I wouldn't hate on software for being developed by people from there, but it also presents an obvious risk.
Whatever you think of their origin, this shows we need better sandboxing of desktop apps. An office tool does not need access to the internet, and it does not need to access any files other than office files.
This is very true. I wouldn't want it to be like IOS or Android where the user itself is sandboxed and has to jump through hoops to do anything but it would be nice to be able to sandbox apps if the user wants.
It is not. Desktop and mobile apps local (first? only?). I was thinking it's electron too (can still be) but the desktop repo shows a ton of C++ for some reason.
It doesn't matter to me personally if it's open source. (There does seem to be some binary blobs involved in their software according to the cryptpad dicussion link I posted above. That I do not like).
I only mentioned it because it is a "thing" even though it is not my thing.
How does LibreOffice handle ODF standardization? If they want to add a new feature that result in changes how things are formatted visually, write they papers to update the ISO standard for ODF, working with other office suite implementers to achieve interoperability, wait a couple of years for the new standard with the changes getting published, and finally turn on the feature for users?
My impression is that this is more or less how ISO standards are supposed to work. Personally, I don't want to work in such an environment.
Pretty much, and yes, this is not a desirable path for progress.
But communists have an absurd love for bureaucracy, and their need to control is unlimited, so they'll argue to the death about stupid shit instead of, you know, actually competing.
Another big issue is that Apache Software Foundation should admit that the OpenOffice is dead and just redirect the site to the LibreOffice instead. Currently, they just damage the open source by allowing downloading effectively abandonware that doesn't represent the quality of the open source office software: people download OpenOffice, find many problems (that long gone in LibreOffice), decide that open source office is bad, and go to the proprietary alternatives.
I thought PDF won this, why do we care? If I send a document to someone, it is PDF. If I'm working on a project with someone, we can agree on our tools together.
Keep blasting, I do not care. I like OnyOffice. It feels very light and fast and handles my very limited and light usage with grace. LibreOffece in my opinion does not come close by feel.
The 'fake open-source' debate is interesting, but OnlyOffice is still the best free alternative for anyone coming from MS Office. LibreOffice has a great mission, but their UI feels dated and the formatting issues with DOCX/XLSX files are still a deal-breaker for me.
Personally, I quite like being able to use the CUA keyboard shortcuts to access menu items. I like consistency over decades but I appreciate that there are other ways of looking at this.
That looks exactly like an office app should look like. Basic interface patterns, clear distinctive visual areas and borders, all in the tradition of a classical graphical user interface. And yes, classical GUI more or less peaked in the early 2000's and it has generally been a downhill from there because the irresistible need of the industry for offering "something new" every few years.
Excuse me word processors are meant to have a ribbon, backstage view and where in LibreOffice is a sidepanel for me to talk to LibreLM to do agentic editing?
Plus if it runs on Android it must support snackbars.
"You are running version 7.0" - why not try some screenshots from this decade?
I have version 25.8.4.2 running here. It looks rather better and most importantly offers me the choice of a ribbon or not and many other choices rather than enforcing a single "opinionated" interface.
Me: I started off with the likes of Wordperfect and Wordstar, Lotus 123 and Quatro Pro, Harvard Graphics, and rather a lot more and that's just on MS's efforts. I've also taught PageMaker, CorelDraw and a lot more stuff that I have forgotten.
I am (probably) rather older than you and that does not make either of us "right" or "wrong".
However, I have been an IT trainer on and off for 30 odd years and I have seen how all the differing design paradigms and UI efforts have scarred end users.
Have you ever noted how awful all and I mean ALL UIs are generally awful? I'll give you two examples - Apple and KDE, that came up for me recently:
Apple tablet or phone: Print something. This is from memory but the UI is so shit it doesn't matter if I get it wrong. Press the rectangle with an up arrow, select a printer, press the word Print (next to the other icon that might do something)
KDE: I can't be arsed at this point to bother. There are things that are not intuitive.
If LO doesn't work for you then that's fine - buy something that does. For me, I create some horrendously complicated documents and it does work OK and believe me - I know how to stress an application - its my job and has been for some years. I also find it easier to teach people how to use LO as opposed to MSO.
That's just me. I'm sure you have some anecdotes of your own.
Maybe try installing a current version and seeing for yourself, there's multiple UI styles to chose from now, even one that is meant to mimic the MS "ribbon".
It looks great using Plasma. If the comparison and "problem" is the lack of a "ribbon" menu, etc., then you are missing the whole point of Office alternatives: they are free, open source, but most importantly, they are usable. That is, they do not eschew usability and function for the sake of change, pure aesthetics, or a company's latest foray into some new gimmick.
Ultimately, the "classic" approach taken is because many users feel that the classic style is more usable and makes them more productive irrespective of their learned habits of the past 20-30 years.
Microsoft did usability studies on real people to determine the ribbon interface is better. This is back in the days when software companies cared about objectively verifiable results.
No, they did not (or if they did, they didn't publish it). If I'm wrong, please give me some links because I'd genuinely love to see it.
Microsoft did those usability studies on the versions of Office that were current before the ribbon. The ribbon followed those studies as their attempt at a solution.
A few times over the years I've tried to search for usability studies of the ribbon interface because I've never got on with it myself. I find plenty of others asking the same thing online, and everybody points them to those same earlier studies from before the ribbon, while wrongly telling them it's a study of the ribbon.
Those studies are unable to tell us whether or not MS's attempt at a solution actually fixed the problems.
I believe the ribbon was a downgrade in usability terms (but people expect it in office suites, purely because it's seen as looking more modern). And I'd love to see real intensive research to tell me whether my belief is right or wrong.
Yeah, that's exactly it - there were all those history blogposts, full of very interesting stuff, but all about before the ribbon was in active use. (Pity about the image rot.) No usability studies of the ribbon itself.
Parts of those blog posts were unintentionally revealing of the groupthink of an enclosed bubble of people who couldn't see the wood for the trees. A great example is this piece about moving menu entries around so you couldn't build muscle memory, and had to take the time to look for what you wanted:
> First, remember that we're analyzing this with 20/20 hindsight... there was a lot of excitement (not just at Microsoft) about "auto-customization"... to present exactly the right UI for the person at hand. Now, it's easy to say that today people are generally against this idea... but we know that mainly through trying... the adaptive UI in Office 2000
As I recall it, the vast majority at the time - users, reviewers, UI/UX writers - considered its downsides to be completely obvious and were firmly against it. Its designers were apparently the only ones who needed 20/20 hindsight to see that.
> I remember thinking that the thought process behind the ribbon was very solid
I agree, the historical research, and the work on identifying the problems, was very solid. But the massive criticisms of the ribbon suggest it was not an entirely successful attempt at a solution.
I've seen it said that there's no way Microsoft would have neglected to carry out major usability studies on such a major UI change, and that the fact that nothing's been published, after all the blogposts and talks beforehand, suggests they chose to bury a bad result. No idea whether there's any truth in that of course, but it does sound plausible.
As a techie with no horse in this race I've always found the ribbon very usable. It has a layered shortcut system that is much logical than the legacy one, it still supports the legacy shortcuts (Alt-d, f, f forever!) and the number of commands now easily accessible for sure is higher than with the old menus.
Only no, it’s not and everyone reviled it when it came out but we’ve been stuck with it ever since.
MS may have done usability studies earlier (say, when they cared about dethroning Lotus 123 and WordPerfect) but that war was long won when the ribbon UI came out, by then they only cared about milking the cash cow.
It looks awful and undiscoverable on a standard Mint/Cinnamon install.
Anyway, the point is surely that if LibreOffice really wants to attract users from Microsoft Office, then it should do everything possible to optimise that transition?
Offering the option of a UI mimicking the familiar MS Office layout is not a difficult engineering problem. And if it makes users significantly more likely to switch, it should be a high priority to implement.
Honestly, at this stage, thinking of Gimp, FreeCAD, LibreOffice, and Blender, it’s as though there’s a weird group psychology deliberately against offering even decent (let along best-in-class) UIs in the open source world. These are all apps with excellent fundamental underlying engines/tech which are handicapped hugely by their UI/UX. (Yes I know some of these have improved in recent years, but only after far longer without improvements.)
>Offering the option of a UI mimicking the familiar MS Office layout is not a difficult engineering problem. And if it makes users significantly more likely to switch, it should be a high priority to implement.
It's already there. It really feels like such criticisms are from people who haven't used it in 10+ years.
Well, if that's the case, I take (that part of) it back and I'll fire up Mint later to explore. Thanks. It wasn't an obvious option when I tried LibreOffice a few weeks ago, but maybe I should have explored further.
My experience is less than two years old. I have the impression that those who defend it have a UI taste that is stuck in the 2000s. The same people who also point at UIs that are barely usable and ugly from a modern perspective like Windows 2000 and say "this was the pinnacle of UI".
Perhaps it's that well-known psychological effect where people self-report higher productivity when using an interface they find more visually appealing, whereas studying them proves the opposite is true.
Well 'ancient' to me in the context of computer interaction means punched cards (mechanical punches!) and a card reader, upper case only, so these terms are relative I suppose.
I think this is a matter of choice and it is nice that there are choices. As other posters in this little sub-tree have suggested, there are people who value continuity over a period of time.
LibreOffice on Windows still uses native Win32 controls. While you could call that a stylistic choice, even Microsoft has abandoned it for new apps.
This kind of UI is a dealbreaker for many new users, especially Gen Zers. How could open source conquer the world without attracting our youngest generations?
They should have bundled GTK like GIMP does. That would make the experience feel much less like it is from the XP era.
(I know these types of comments often get downvoted, but I challenge you to explain why you disagree.)
A big selling point for me. Needless reworking of familiar interfaces plagues
MS Windows ecosystem and I'm glad LibreOffice is displaying healthy conservatism
by not fixing what isn't broken.
LibreOffice constantly works on improving the import of the DOC/DOCX/XLS/XLSX/etc formats, thus if something doesn't work for you, it's better to file a bug in their bugtracker[1].
The site is making ordinary users (other than developers) shy away from submitting bug reports. Come on, you need to make a whole account in Bugzilla for you to report bugs? The best thing would be to have a "Report bug" window directly in the program that lets the user send complaints without hazzle!
The best thing for users maybe. A special kind of hell for the people investigating. And since there are numerous non paying users vs only so many people who have the skills to fix things...
It's incredibly useful to know what problems your users are facing. It doesn't necessarily mean fixing any one particular bug, rather should help prioritize future work.
Of course the developers only want to interact with other developers, never those stinky users who don't even know the proper technical jargon for the bugs they're finding. But that doesn't mean we should pander to developer wishes.
I'm sure if the "stinky users" have a support contract then someone will be happy to look at any kind of report and try to triage or reproduce. Otherwise the least they can do is figure out Bugzilla signup.
The case being discussed here is LibreOffice. Yes in general that is also true, but non paying users don't contribute anything. If they paid at least there's an expectation of fixes. Or at least the money can be used to hire a separate support team.
Eh, I think as an open source solution you definitely want to grab as many users as possible by using the most popular office file format. And then maybe you can do something different.
TBH I don't think de-big-tech will ever succeed in a capitalistic world.
Honestly? Office automation suites have had their day, along with the people who use them. It's high time people learned to produce documents of typographic quality by writing in markup languages, it doesn't really matter if it's raw LaTeX or some DSL, and it's time the majority learned "the power of text": full-text searchable, easily manipulated, versionable, and manageable, compared to those monsters born in another era with the sole intent of letting untrained secretarial staff use a desktop computer.
Anyone who doesn't get that simply doesn't have enough IT skills to work in this day and age; it's time to say it loud and clear.
> the sole intent of letting untrained secretarial staff use a desktop computer.
I dont like this "skill issue" rhetoric. The barrier of entry being lower is good for everyone, if you dont directly use simple tools, then you will still benefit from others in society using it to produce information and what not. Also how do you propose spreadsheets work with markup?
Office provides far more than just typographic quality. They provide spell check and grammar check which is what most people care about. Many people creating latex, as far as I know, are using text editors which are missing those features or are quite limited.
Actually office suites fails to provide typographic quality. Fails also to provide useful computation and presentation tools for the modern time, spell checking and (limited) grammar checking are not their exclusive as well.
Essentially ALL features of all office suites I know are sub-par to most other classic tools born before them, and they also are limited and limiting.
LibreOffice, descendent of OpenOffice, descendent of StarOffice, has a project leadership that believes OpenDocument is the best and most open format. That's very convenient for them, considering that OpenDocument is a standardisation of the native file format of that lineage of office suites.
Microsoft Office has a project leadership that believes that Office Open XML is the best and most open office format. That's very convenient for them, considering that Office Open XML is a standardisation of the native file format of that lineage of office suites.
Now, OnlyOffice is presumably something written from scratch, unrelated to those two lineages. They chose to prioritise compatibility with the market leader's standard, and the second place in the market is upset that a competitor isn't favouring them instead.
I think this is an unfair take. ODF is an actual file format, while OOXML is a serialization format for Microsoft Office specifics, as debated here 6 months ago. [0]
Beyond marketing fluff, I don't think anybody at Microsoft genuinely believes they have an "open office format" or an actual "standardization". Even Apple back in the day had to reverse-engineer the Microsoft formats. [1]
Whether you'd like to denounce OnlyOffice taking part in this masquerade or not is a political issue. But giving Microsoft any form of benefit of the doubt on this matter is historically wrong and, I believe, ethically evil.
What is an “actual file format”? Every file format is a serialisation of some kind of data-model. I'm sure the OpenDocument data-model might be simpler and cleaner in some ways than the Office Open XML one. But for something with the complexity of an office document, you can't escape the fact that every file format is full of assumptions about the application interacting with it. I find the examples in the article from [0] unconvincing, it reminds me of arguments about programming language syntax.
(I do not doubt that the OOXML standard is a mess though.)
I'm sorry you were not convinced. Of course a "file format" could be anything. I personally am convinced that a standard file format (filed for ISO) should have proper semantics that precisely escape assumptions about the application's internal state and framework.
That's why administrative interop formats are standardized XML files with a schema and not a random Oracle SQL export from any given entity with their custom database layout.
Correct. I simply placed it for historical context on Microsoft being hostile to competition, interoperability and free software for much longer than OOXML has existed.
Indeed, the basic point is fine - just 2 competitors standing up for their own choice - but the use of the words "and most open format" ruins the GP's point and perhaps is the reason for the downvotes. There's no way one can argue that Microsoft believes their format is the most open.
I do see your point but i think your giving Microsoft to much credit. I wouldn't trust their commitment to their own open format. I think Onlyoffice supporting it is unfortunate, but necessary
Which, to be fair, isn't technically dead. Apache OpenOffice, the rotting corpse of OpenOffice.org now maintained by Apache, released 4.1.16 just a few months ago.
What should have happened was that ten years ago Apache should have "retired" OpenOffice. That's Apache's terminology for projects which are abandoned. But instead it has limped on for all these years, sucking up valuable effort by users with Apache claiming that it'll be fine somehow.
I am not an MS Office user, but I have seen the effect of format lock-in with Google Sheets. A few months back I began a project to de-Google my life, which went pretty smoothly until I tried to download my spouse's accounting spreadsheet from Google Sheets to Excel format. Both LibreOffice and Excel could open it, but nothing worked correctly. So for several months, I kept that one Google Sheet live until I could come up with an alternative. When I created the original file in Sheets, I was blindly using all sorts of features and capabilities (including Google Forms) that simply have no direct analog in other products.
A couple of days ago I bit the bullet and dug into the Excel file and figured out how to redesign everything and get it going again. Yay me. I'll admit I don't like the UI in LibreOffice, but I didn't like it very much when I first tried using it (as Star Office) back in the 90s either. Yet I keep coming back to it.
If I'm going to be locked into a format or app, I'd rather it be something like LibreOffice.
Your use case (specifically with Forms) seems aligned with Grist, which is also open source and has been adopted by the French government.
In my experience, it’s much stricter than a standard spreadsheet though. It feels a bit like moving from Python to Java.
Did you try exporting it in the OpenDocument (.ods) format?
I wish the excel clones were better. LibreOffice’s UI is extremely dated imo, to the point it doesn’t even let you make a damn table, but at least what’s there works correctly. OnlyOffice is not only missing some pretty basic functionality such as preferences (???), it also inexplicably deleted a single spreadsheet out of a multi-sheet file on two occasions on macOS and generally has some peculiar functionality and ux here and there.
I'm only a light user of office programs, both at work and at home. I have access to M365, but for my personal usage I prefer LibreOffice over MS Office, especially when it comes to spreadsheets. I generally don't mind the UI of the MS suite, but I find it's getting increasingly bloated and slow, and sometimes updates move UI elements around for no benefit that I can perceive. I haven't experienced the same with LibreOffice; it's lighter than MS Office I find it easier to find the options I'm looking for, which I know exist but don't always remember _where_ they live, because of the low frequency with which I use them.
With Excel in particular, there is something I can't put my finger on that I just don't get along with. It's unintuitive in a way that I can't describe, but which I notice about half the time I use it. Sometimes clicking doesn't do what I expect it to do, clipboard contents are lost all the time, scrolling resets or jumps around for reasons I don't understand. I don't have the same issues with LibreOffice Calc, which is why I choose it for my personal work. In fact, I think Google Sheets is the most pleasant to use of the options I've tried, which is something I thought I'd never say about a web-based alternative to a native app...
Regarding Excel's weird warts... Microsoft knows all about them but they're stuck with it for backwards compatibility. The business world has a billion Excel scripts and macros done by barely technical users that all inadvertently depend on the details of things like the scrolling and clipboard behavior. Trying to improve that would break all of that. Same as all the weirdness in JavaScript, Microsoft has to just call it a feature and live with it.
that's not 100% true
excel 2003 did 95% of what "modern" excel does without most of those issues...
What I experienced with excel is that it provides an ability to edit cells, but then it suddenly jumps to another cell (IIRC when you press arrow keys as a text editor reflex). To disable this behavior click the cell then click the cell content field and edit there.
I'm surprised at all the comments deriding LibreOffice's interface on here. It's never given me any trouble (even when making tables) and I've been using it preferentially for 20 years over MSOffice, even when schools or employers are actively paying for my Microsoft subscription. In fact, LibreOffice does something very important a lot better than MSOffice: importing CSV files correctly across locales.
> “LibreOffice's interface on here. It's never given me any trouble (even when making tables)”
LibreOffice Calc doesn’t have tables in the sense of Excel “insert > table”. People have been looking for it and asking for it for fourteen years in this thread: https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/creating-tables-in-calc/1433
Agreed. LibreOffice's sane WIMP interface is a feature, not a bug, when the alternative is to use those horrid ribbon-like interfaces.
IronCalc to the rescue?
https://www.ironcalc.com/
Thanks for the mention! That's indeed the plan
Excel clones dont corrupt your calculations...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076
https://exceloffthegrid.com/excel-calculate-wrong-results/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...
Yeah. This is the curse on any legacy software that doesn't enforce strict separation of logic and UI. Any larger change to the UI requires an awful lot of manpower that open source projects usually don't have.
I wonder if it would be possible to extract the spreadsheet data model and logic into a library completely separate from the UI. This would enable a diversity of UIs, and also interoperability between different tools.
each time someone sends me an xls or xlsx file, i am scared to open it in libresoft to mess up its formatting or miss something important. I always then rever to gsheet.
I think I've tried every spreadsheet program still being maintained at this point. Try gnumeric, it's a clear cut above everything else.
Mandatory Excel rant: Excel can't be trusted with data destined for publication. It's bloated, buggy as hell, user hostile, and has set genetics research back with its utterly braindead autocorrect. The default plot options are the exact polar opposite of how data are presented in science, and almost impossible to make serviceable. Everything Excel touches ends up looking like a hastily thrown together 6th grade science project. Libreoffice is also riddled with serious bugs and also loses data, but hey it's free and not a decades old flagship product from a multi billion dollar tech company.
> Try gnumeric, it's a clear cut above everything else.
Gnumeric rocks, even features Montecarlo built-in, I have it installed in my personal machine, but a major limitation is that they stopped providing windows builds, up to the last time I checked, so I can't use it at work.
>> Libreoffice is also riddled with serious bugs and also loses data
As a user of Libreoffice for years, me thinks you are doing fud.
Hey, I'm very interested in this because LibreOffice annoys me and I can't explain why. It's not the "dated look" that everybody complains about; but I suspect it's related to UX somehow.
Could you articulate why Gnumeric is better than everything else?
To start, your calculations will be correct unlike with Excel
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076
https://exceloffthegrid.com/excel-calculate-wrong-results/
From your second link
> Therefore, the problem is not necessarily with Excel. Equally, the problem is not with the IEEE 754 standard either. It’s just the complex nature of the world of mathematics and computing that we live in.
The IEEE 754 standard covers decimal floating point arithmetic, too. Decimal floating point avoids issues like 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 not being equal to 0.3 despite usually being displayed as 0.3. Maybe it's reasonable to use that instead?
Some earlier spreadsheets such as Multiplan used it (but not in the IEEE variety) because it was all soft-float for most users anyway.
Excel the one who decided to use only 15 digits. It is an Excel problem...
> LibreOffice’s UI is extremely dated imo
It feels so bland and hard to read. Maybe that's because of java. How did Excel 5.0 look so good?
There is no Java in core LibreOffice, it just has some weird Java-based extension system because of its Sun history.
LibreOffice uses an extremely dated, also messy, homegrown UI toolkit and has resisted the idea of switching to something last (really) updated this millennium (sic).
I am currently trying to wrangle this UI. It is called VCL and it was initially created in the early 1990s.
If you want to see my efforts, I have a number of branches on github:
Phase 5 can be located here:
https://github.com/chrissherlock/libreoffice-experimental/tr...
Check the source here:
https://github.com/chrissherlock/libreoffice-experimental/tr...
in particular keep an eye on:
https://github.com/chrissherlock/libreoffice-experimental/tr...
Link to the actual source: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/02/16/why-odf-...
I don't like any of the libreoffice/openoffice behemoths. I only ever used them because there wasn't anything better/comperable, so I will stay away from that discussion.
I like OnlyOffice. Their desktop apps are much lighter and better looking. They work fine for my light needs. They also do have a LOT more than just desktop apps.
The last time I mentioned them I was informed they are Russian. If that matters to you. It is actual open source software though. Perhaps the EU should fork it. :) (By the way I hadn't checked last time but, wikipedia says Latvian with Russian origin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice. This page does say they are Russian, https://www.en-zdv.uni-mainz.de/2023/05/30/software-onlyoffi... and that they are switching to the open-source version.)
https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/desktop-apps
EDIT: Some more context. A cryptpad developer says
> we consider the OnlyOffice code upstream as "untrusted".
https://forum.cryptpad.org/d/232-onlyoffice-concerns-vendor-...
> The last time I mentioned them I was informed they are Russian.
Here's the company info on a Latvian org registry: https://company.lursoft.lv/en/ascensio-system/40103265308
I logged in to the platform, not sharing the names myself, but basically:
In 2024 their turnover was short of 3 million EUR, seems like profit wise in 2024 they're 1 million EUR in the red. Also not sure if the site is busted, but shows the number of employees as 1.So yeah, the company is registered over here, seems like they're trying to distance themselves from Russia for obvious reasons. Not sure why the downvotes for the parent comment, that's probably nice to mention.
Following that up in the UK companies registry, the director of Ascensio System Limited started using a service address in London since May 2025. The same filing, however, notes that his usual residential address has remained unchanged, and appears to be in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
The beneficial owner is Onlyoffice Capital Group Pte. Ltd in Singapore.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
It all seems surprisingly murky - you'd normally expect a relatively small organisation to have a more straightforward structure, even allowing for its international nature.
Playing devil's advocate for a second. It might be easier for a single person company to open up a bunch of legal entities in different places where taxes etc are more favorable. In the Russian case guy might just be wanting to be able to accept payments. Or maybe he's making sure he has somewhere to go in case of trouble. I would be very unsurprised if he took advantage of the "$250K real estate purchase gets you full citizenship and you can even rent or sell the place" scheme of Turkey to live there.
It seems overkill for what is actually a pretty tiny company - I doubt they would be big enough to trigger those sort of incentives, at least for the UK and Singaporean entities (Latvia or Turkey might, I suppose, be different - but then why bother routing it through the UK?).
I'd guess that the happy case is going to be that, yes, this structure was forced on them as a by-product of sanctions or similar negative trade policies. But I'd be worried that the software business is actually a front for something else, which would suggest that OnlyOffice might be more vulnerable to changes in legal climate than most other projects of that size.
Downvotes are probably for not liking openoffice.
They might have one official employee but there are a bunch of people active on their github. They might be contractors or employees of a different related company.
Feels like a complex situation to me - I like that there's all sort of software out there, esp. if there are improvements to UI/UX, but also I think that the OpenDocument formats are nice to support when possible and push as defaults (while they unfortunately might be a bit confusing to casual users who are used to MS ones).
I tried OnlyOffice and it seemed okay, even if I daily drive LibreOffice most of the time. It's nice that it's open source, but I also understand the people who are cautious about stuff coming out from Russia - I wouldn't hate on software for being developed by people from there, but it also presents an obvious risk.
Whatever you think of their origin, this shows we need better sandboxing of desktop apps. An office tool does not need access to the internet, and it does not need to access any files other than office files.
This is very true. I wouldn't want it to be like IOS or Android where the user itself is sandboxed and has to jump through hoops to do anything but it would be nice to be able to sandbox apps if the user wants.
Judging by description, it's cloud first with an electron client.
It is not. Desktop and mobile apps local (first? only?). I was thinking it's electron too (can still be) but the desktop repo shows a ton of C++ for some reason.
does them being Russian matter ?
I think - we need to have software - not subject to political gimmicks - since countries can get into wars with each other & sanction each other etc
remember when Venezuela was sanctioned and they couldn't access Adobe 360 or whatever it's called.
It doesn't matter to me personally if it's open source. (There does seem to be some binary blobs involved in their software according to the cryptpad dicussion link I posted above. That I do not like).
I only mentioned it because it is a "thing" even though it is not my thing.
>They also do have a LOT more than just desktop apps.
Please explain what you mean by this...
Mobile, web, collaboration etc. Check out their top level git org.
How does LibreOffice handle ODF standardization? If they want to add a new feature that result in changes how things are formatted visually, write they papers to update the ISO standard for ODF, working with other office suite implementers to achieve interoperability, wait a couple of years for the new standard with the changes getting published, and finally turn on the feature for users?
My impression is that this is more or less how ISO standards are supposed to work. Personally, I don't want to work in such an environment.
Pretty much, and yes, this is not a desirable path for progress.
But communists have an absurd love for bureaucracy, and their need to control is unlimited, so they'll argue to the death about stupid shit instead of, you know, actually competing.
The only clean solution would be to force ISO to admit their mistake (or malicious intent) and rescind the "Open" Office XML format for good.
What's wrong with the format?
It's not really open[1].
[1] https://fsfe.org/activities/msooxml/msooxml.en.html
Another big issue is that Apache Software Foundation should admit that the OpenOffice is dead and just redirect the site to the LibreOffice instead. Currently, they just damage the open source by allowing downloading effectively abandonware that doesn't represent the quality of the open source office software: people download OpenOffice, find many problems (that long gone in LibreOffice), decide that open source office is bad, and go to the proprietary alternatives.
And yet it was OnlyOffice that enabled me to get rid of MS Office and finally switch to Linux fully.
I thought PDF won this, why do we care? If I send a document to someone, it is PDF. If I'm working on a project with someone, we can agree on our tools together.
Keep blasting, I do not care. I like OnyOffice. It feels very light and fast and handles my very limited and light usage with grace. LibreOffece in my opinion does not come close by feel.
I also use it, but I would not call it light and fast.
The 'fake open-source' debate is interesting, but OnlyOffice is still the best free alternative for anyone coming from MS Office. LibreOffice has a great mission, but their UI feels dated and the formatting issues with DOCX/XLSX files are still a deal-breaker for me.
"...their UI feels dated"
How do you define dated in this context?
Personally, I quite like being able to use the CUA keyboard shortcuts to access menu items. I like consistency over decades but I appreciate that there are other ways of looking at this.
Take a look at these screenshots: https://libreoffice.en.uptodown.com/mac
It looks ancient, worse than office apps from 20 years ago.
That looks exactly like an office app should look like. Basic interface patterns, clear distinctive visual areas and borders, all in the tradition of a classical graphical user interface. And yes, classical GUI more or less peaked in the early 2000's and it has generally been a downhill from there because the irresistible need of the industry for offering "something new" every few years.
Excuse me word processors are meant to have a ribbon, backstage view and where in LibreOffice is a sidepanel for me to talk to LibreLM to do agentic editing?
Plus if it runs on Android it must support snackbars.
What is a snackbar?!
"You are running version 7.0" - why not try some screenshots from this decade?
I have version 25.8.4.2 running here. It looks rather better and most importantly offers me the choice of a ribbon or not and many other choices rather than enforcing a single "opinionated" interface.
What do you mean by version 7.0? I'm running Version: 26.2.0.3 and it still looks dated after I did my best to configure the interface.
You say dated and I say useful. Who is "right"?
Me: I started off with the likes of Wordperfect and Wordstar, Lotus 123 and Quatro Pro, Harvard Graphics, and rather a lot more and that's just on MS's efforts. I've also taught PageMaker, CorelDraw and a lot more stuff that I have forgotten.
I am (probably) rather older than you and that does not make either of us "right" or "wrong".
However, I have been an IT trainer on and off for 30 odd years and I have seen how all the differing design paradigms and UI efforts have scarred end users.
Have you ever noted how awful all and I mean ALL UIs are generally awful? I'll give you two examples - Apple and KDE, that came up for me recently:
Apple tablet or phone: Print something. This is from memory but the UI is so shit it doesn't matter if I get it wrong. Press the rectangle with an up arrow, select a printer, press the word Print (next to the other icon that might do something)
KDE: I can't be arsed at this point to bother. There are things that are not intuitive.
If LO doesn't work for you then that's fine - buy something that does. For me, I create some horrendously complicated documents and it does work OK and believe me - I know how to stress an application - its my job and has been for some years. I also find it easier to teach people how to use LO as opposed to MSO.
That's just me. I'm sure you have some anecdotes of your own.
The screenshot you linked literally says that "You are running version 7.0 of LibreOffice for the first time"
Office apps from 20 years ago looked better than office apps now.
And from 32 years ago as well - MS Office 4.0 as an example.
Maybe try installing a current version and seeing for yourself, there's multiple UI styles to chose from now, even one that is meant to mimic the MS "ribbon".
It looks great using Plasma. If the comparison and "problem" is the lack of a "ribbon" menu, etc., then you are missing the whole point of Office alternatives: they are free, open source, but most importantly, they are usable. That is, they do not eschew usability and function for the sake of change, pure aesthetics, or a company's latest foray into some new gimmick.
Ultimately, the "classic" approach taken is because many users feel that the classic style is more usable and makes them more productive irrespective of their learned habits of the past 20-30 years.
LibreOffice also has a ribbon toolbars mode, it's 5 seconds to switch if you prefer it under View > User interface.
Microsoft did usability studies on real people to determine the ribbon interface is better. This is back in the days when software companies cared about objectively verifiable results.
No, they did not (or if they did, they didn't publish it). If I'm wrong, please give me some links because I'd genuinely love to see it.
Microsoft did those usability studies on the versions of Office that were current before the ribbon. The ribbon followed those studies as their attempt at a solution.
A few times over the years I've tried to search for usability studies of the ribbon interface because I've never got on with it myself. I find plenty of others asking the same thing online, and everybody points them to those same earlier studies from before the ribbon, while wrongly telling them it's a study of the ribbon.
Those studies are unable to tell us whether or not MS's attempt at a solution actually fixed the problems.
I believe the ribbon was a downgrade in usability terms (but people expect it in office suites, purely because it's seen as looking more modern). And I'd love to see real intensive research to tell me whether my belief is right or wrong.
The studies I can't point you to, but there were lots of blogs by the lead Office UX person at the time, Jensen Harris.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/
Unfortunately those blog entries have been destroyed because the images are no longer there.
I read all of them, they were at least 6-7 and quite detailed and I remember thinking that the thought process behind the ribbon was very solid.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/the-...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ye-o...
etc - you can find all of them there plus many other related blog entries.
Yeah, that's exactly it - there were all those history blogposts, full of very interesting stuff, but all about before the ribbon was in active use. (Pity about the image rot.) No usability studies of the ribbon itself.
Parts of those blog posts were unintentionally revealing of the groupthink of an enclosed bubble of people who couldn't see the wood for the trees. A great example is this piece about moving menu entries around so you couldn't build muscle memory, and had to take the time to look for what you wanted:
> First, remember that we're analyzing this with 20/20 hindsight... there was a lot of excitement (not just at Microsoft) about "auto-customization"... to present exactly the right UI for the person at hand. Now, it's easy to say that today people are generally against this idea... but we know that mainly through trying... the adaptive UI in Office 2000
As I recall it, the vast majority at the time - users, reviewers, UI/UX writers - considered its downsides to be completely obvious and were firmly against it. Its designers were apparently the only ones who needed 20/20 hindsight to see that.
> I remember thinking that the thought process behind the ribbon was very solid
I agree, the historical research, and the work on identifying the problems, was very solid. But the massive criticisms of the ribbon suggest it was not an entirely successful attempt at a solution.
I've seen it said that there's no way Microsoft would have neglected to carry out major usability studies on such a major UI change, and that the fact that nothing's been published, after all the blogposts and talks beforehand, suggests they chose to bury a bad result. No idea whether there's any truth in that of course, but it does sound plausible.
As a techie with no horse in this race I've always found the ribbon very usable. It has a layered shortcut system that is much logical than the legacy one, it still supports the legacy shortcuts (Alt-d, f, f forever!) and the number of commands now easily accessible for sure is higher than with the old menus.
Only no, it’s not and everyone reviled it when it came out but we’ve been stuck with it ever since.
MS may have done usability studies earlier (say, when they cared about dethroning Lotus 123 and WordPerfect) but that war was long won when the ribbon UI came out, by then they only cared about milking the cash cow.
It looks awful and undiscoverable on a standard Mint/Cinnamon install.
Anyway, the point is surely that if LibreOffice really wants to attract users from Microsoft Office, then it should do everything possible to optimise that transition?
Offering the option of a UI mimicking the familiar MS Office layout is not a difficult engineering problem. And if it makes users significantly more likely to switch, it should be a high priority to implement.
Honestly, at this stage, thinking of Gimp, FreeCAD, LibreOffice, and Blender, it’s as though there’s a weird group psychology deliberately against offering even decent (let along best-in-class) UIs in the open source world. These are all apps with excellent fundamental underlying engines/tech which are handicapped hugely by their UI/UX. (Yes I know some of these have improved in recent years, but only after far longer without improvements.)
>Offering the option of a UI mimicking the familiar MS Office layout is not a difficult engineering problem. And if it makes users significantly more likely to switch, it should be a high priority to implement.
It's already there. It really feels like such criticisms are from people who haven't used it in 10+ years.
Well, if that's the case, I take (that part of) it back and I'll fire up Mint later to explore. Thanks. It wasn't an obvious option when I tried LibreOffice a few weeks ago, but maybe I should have explored further.
My experience is less than two years old. I have the impression that those who defend it have a UI taste that is stuck in the 2000s. The same people who also point at UIs that are barely usable and ugly from a modern perspective like Windows 2000 and say "this was the pinnacle of UI".
> UI taste that is stuck in the 2000s
> UIs that are barely usable... like Windows 2000
Words fail me.
Perhaps it's that well-known psychological effect where people self-report higher productivity when using an interface they find more visually appealing, whereas studying them proves the opposite is true.
The "Notebookbar" ribbon interface has been there since 2017, and was available even in Debian Stable since 2019.
It's not quite identical to MSOffice due to Microsoft's patents, but is pretty close. Perhaps you just didn't spot it in the UI preferences?
Well 'ancient' to me in the context of computer interaction means punched cards (mechanical punches!) and a card reader, upper case only, so these terms are relative I suppose.
I think this is a matter of choice and it is nice that there are choices. As other posters in this little sub-tree have suggested, there are people who value continuity over a period of time.
> are relative I suppose. > A matter of choice
Congratulations on figuring this out. It's not like the commenter you replied to said, it "feels dated" ... Oh no wait, he did.
Looks like a completely normal office application to me. Do you have an example of what you think they should look like?
LibreOffice on Windows still uses native Win32 controls. While you could call that a stylistic choice, even Microsoft has abandoned it for new apps.
This kind of UI is a dealbreaker for many new users, especially Gen Zers. How could open source conquer the world without attracting our youngest generations?
They should have bundled GTK like GIMP does. That would make the experience feel much less like it is from the XP era.
(I know these types of comments often get downvoted, but I challenge you to explain why you disagree.)
> even Microsoft has abandoned it for new apps.
Ok, all other things being equal: Microsoft is no longer a good arbiter of UI/UX design.
This is extremely well documented.
Old doesn't automatically mean worse, though I understand that people feel that way on an emotional level when they see old "ugly" UI.
Microsoft is doing cloud services, not apps. Old apps are the only decent thing left in windows.
> their UI feels dated
A big selling point for me. Needless reworking of familiar interfaces plagues MS Windows ecosystem and I'm glad LibreOffice is displaying healthy conservatism by not fixing what isn't broken.
LibreOffice constantly works on improving the import of the DOC/DOCX/XLS/XLSX/etc formats, thus if something doesn't work for you, it's better to file a bug in their bugtracker[1].
[1] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=gui...
The site is making ordinary users (other than developers) shy away from submitting bug reports. Come on, you need to make a whole account in Bugzilla for you to report bugs? The best thing would be to have a "Report bug" window directly in the program that lets the user send complaints without hazzle!
The best thing for users maybe. A special kind of hell for the people investigating. And since there are numerous non paying users vs only so many people who have the skills to fix things...
It's incredibly useful to know what problems your users are facing. It doesn't necessarily mean fixing any one particular bug, rather should help prioritize future work.
Of course the developers only want to interact with other developers, never those stinky users who don't even know the proper technical jargon for the bugs they're finding. But that doesn't mean we should pander to developer wishes.
I'm sure if the "stinky users" have a support contract then someone will be happy to look at any kind of report and try to triage or reproduce. Otherwise the least they can do is figure out Bugzilla signup.
> I'm sure if the "stinky users" have a support contract then someone will be happy to look at any kind of report
I'm sure you know that's not true. I'm sure you know that developers hate taking bug reports from users even when those users have support contracts.
The case being discussed here is LibreOffice. Yes in general that is also true, but non paying users don't contribute anything. If they paid at least there's an expectation of fixes. Or at least the money can be used to hire a separate support team.
Creating an account on bugzilla is much easier than on the same github, and it is also used in many projects, so registration makes sense.
Interesting that this is a take, because MS Office (and all MS products) don't include such button.
a) Yes they do:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/how-do-i-give-fee...
https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-use-the-feedback-tool-in-micr...
b) they have automated crash report and usage telemetry to tell them what isn’t working
Also free and great at MSOffice file compatibility is FreeOffice from SoftMaker:
https://www.freeoffice.com/
Does Microsoft Office exist now? Looked like they've entirely rebranded it to Microsoft 365 Copilot App (according to office.com)
Openoffice had afaik not an big change in years and Libreoffice had quite a lot of changes that improved Msoffice support.
I also missread Only as Open
Eh, I think as an open source solution you definitely want to grab as many users as possible by using the most popular office file format. And then maybe you can do something different.
TBH I don't think de-big-tech will ever succeed in a capitalistic world.
Honestly? Office automation suites have had their day, along with the people who use them. It's high time people learned to produce documents of typographic quality by writing in markup languages, it doesn't really matter if it's raw LaTeX or some DSL, and it's time the majority learned "the power of text": full-text searchable, easily manipulated, versionable, and manageable, compared to those monsters born in another era with the sole intent of letting untrained secretarial staff use a desktop computer.
Anyone who doesn't get that simply doesn't have enough IT skills to work in this day and age; it's time to say it loud and clear.
> the sole intent of letting untrained secretarial staff use a desktop computer.
I dont like this "skill issue" rhetoric. The barrier of entry being lower is good for everyone, if you dont directly use simple tools, then you will still benefit from others in society using it to produce information and what not. Also how do you propose spreadsheets work with markup?
Office provides far more than just typographic quality. They provide spell check and grammar check which is what most people care about. Many people creating latex, as far as I know, are using text editors which are missing those features or are quite limited.
Actually office suites fails to provide typographic quality. Fails also to provide useful computation and presentation tools for the modern time, spell checking and (limited) grammar checking are not their exclusive as well.
Essentially ALL features of all office suites I know are sub-par to most other classic tools born before them, and they also are limited and limiting.
LOL, have you tried to maintain any sort of huge table using markup?
LibreOffice, descendent of OpenOffice, descendent of StarOffice, has a project leadership that believes OpenDocument is the best and most open format. That's very convenient for them, considering that OpenDocument is a standardisation of the native file format of that lineage of office suites.
Microsoft Office has a project leadership that believes that Office Open XML is the best and most open office format. That's very convenient for them, considering that Office Open XML is a standardisation of the native file format of that lineage of office suites.
Now, OnlyOffice is presumably something written from scratch, unrelated to those two lineages. They chose to prioritise compatibility with the market leader's standard, and the second place in the market is upset that a competitor isn't favouring them instead.
I think this is a bit silly.
I think this is an unfair take. ODF is an actual file format, while OOXML is a serialization format for Microsoft Office specifics, as debated here 6 months ago. [0]
Beyond marketing fluff, I don't think anybody at Microsoft genuinely believes they have an "open office format" or an actual "standardization". Even Apple back in the day had to reverse-engineer the Microsoft formats. [1]
Whether you'd like to denounce OnlyOffice taking part in this masquerade or not is a political issue. But giving Microsoft any form of benefit of the doubt on this matter is historically wrong and, I believe, ethically evil.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45144758
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera...
What is an “actual file format”? Every file format is a serialisation of some kind of data-model. I'm sure the OpenDocument data-model might be simpler and cleaner in some ways than the Office Open XML one. But for something with the complexity of an office document, you can't escape the fact that every file format is full of assumptions about the application interacting with it. I find the examples in the article from [0] unconvincing, it reminds me of arguments about programming language syntax.
(I do not doubt that the OOXML standard is a mess though.)
I'm sorry you were not convinced. Of course a "file format" could be anything. I personally am convinced that a standard file format (filed for ISO) should have proper semantics that precisely escape assumptions about the application's internal state and framework.
That's why administrative interop formats are standardized XML files with a schema and not a random Oracle SQL export from any given entity with their custom database layout.
That link for Apple reverse-engineering Microsoft formats is talking about before Microsoft OOXML existed.
Correct. I simply placed it for historical context on Microsoft being hostile to competition, interoperability and free software for much longer than OOXML has existed.
Indeed, the basic point is fine - just 2 competitors standing up for their own choice - but the use of the words "and most open format" ruins the GP's point and perhaps is the reason for the downvotes. There's no way one can argue that Microsoft believes their format is the most open.
I do see your point but i think your giving Microsoft to much credit. I wouldn't trust their commitment to their own open format. I think Onlyoffice supporting it is unfortunate, but necessary
OnlyOffice isn’t a „rival“ to LibreOffice as TFA says, because the former has been dead for a long time.
Edit: Further, the ooxml format was heavily criticised ~20 years ago, back when it was introduced. This is old news.
Are you thinking of OpenOffice instead of OnlyOffice?
The last release was only 3 months ago and they have 30 git repos with commits in the last 24 hours.
Maybe they are confused with OpenOffice?
Which, to be fair, isn't technically dead. Apache OpenOffice, the rotting corpse of OpenOffice.org now maintained by Apache, released 4.1.16 just a few months ago.
What should have happened was that ten years ago Apache should have "retired" OpenOffice. That's Apache's terminology for projects which are abandoned. But instead it has limped on for all these years, sucking up valuable effort by users with Apache claiming that it'll be fine somehow.
> dead
Surprisingly moving a lot for something dead
https://helpcenter.onlyoffice.com/docs/docs-changelog.aspx