Use LibreOffice
LibreOffice is as good as Word. Which sadly means there are still no really good document editors out there.
Yeah but it’s free.
Also there may be no good document editors but there is a good typesetting language.
Only Office > Libre Office
$150 a year, you mean
And unwanted AI features!
Software as a disservice.
People aren’t paying for Word, they’re paying for Excel and getting all the other goodies included.
Yeah, LibreOffice is fine for home use, maybe even really small businesses that don’t have to trade spread sheets with external customers, but Excel is the killer app.
Calc’s a fine spread sheet program, but it’s frustrating as hell after using Excel for 30+ years. You can’t trust that it will properly import an Excel sheet and it sure won’t do macros.
100% for real. I simply can’t do freelancing Excel work with LibreOffice because I know the 1:1 compatibility falls apart quickly. Basic formulas are about as far as I can trust it.
The main problem with LibreOffice as a whole is the vast install base of MS Office. If you can work from the beginning in LibreOffice and store things as ODTs and ODSs, you’ll have a fine time. The second you need to work with someone who uses MS Office or deal with legacy documents made in Office, it beats your chin on the floor.
LibreOffice Writer has eaten comments on documents several times for me. Word handles comments much better.
That’s fair. Imagine if people invested that much time into calc. A person can dream…
The problem is everyone expects Calc to be Excel, including full compatibility with reading and writing of Excel’s file formats. As Excel is a constantly moving target, following that path means you’ll forever be a second-rate Excel that’ll never quite be fully compatible.
I find Calc to be a fine spreadsheet program myself, though I’m hardly a power user. If you want to use Excel, then just go use Excel.
This is a valid point for sure. If I didn’t receive ms office for free I’d use LibreOffice. I do use it on a personal level though.
Is there a decent FOSS alternative to excel? Libre has been my goto for years because I never needed anything more, but just in the last week I have a new client with some more rigorous needs, and I REALLY dont want to bite the buellt on 365
I will just leave this here in case you need to go the MS route.
I went over the powershell script out of boredom,
Found thistry { [void][System.AppDomain]::CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies(); [void][System.Math]::Sqrt(144) }Anyone knows why they are trying to do 2 tasks that actually do nothing?
A line immediately after that: “Windows Powershell failed to load .NET command. Aborting…”
So presumably some of those commands will fail if .NET is missing.
Beautiful. Thank you.
Not that I know. Grist and Proton Sheets are worth checking out.
Depending on your exact needs a more specialized tool like SmartSheets or AirTable (browser based, subscription) can be good. WPS office is a little better than Calc in some ways, but no full replacement for Excel.
Exactly. Excel is the workhorse. The combo between Exchange and Outlook is the other major major strength of MS Office.
LaTeX supremacy has entered that chat
TGFM - Thank God for Markdown
Seriously, though. 9 times out of 10, markdown has all the formatting I need for the task at hand. On the rare occasion I need something more, I’m glad I have access to Apple Pages, but it comes with its own set of unique challenges.
I miss the Steve Jobs era of iWork.
I won’t say it was the best (why were there no pivot tables in numbers?? And why is the current implementation shit requiring manual refreshes that you can’t rely on?), but the software worked very uniformly and was straight forward.
If he hadn’t died he would still be yelling at them to make keynote and numbers work, and he probably wouldn’t have missed the collaborative editing boat.
iWeb was pretty sweet too.
I got so frustrated trying to use Word to write a document at work that I just gave up and wrote the whole damn thing in LaTeX. Lots of nested bulleted lists (or worse, numbered lists) and Word do not play nicely.
Sucks to be the guy who has to edit it when I’m gone.
You know it’s bad when I prefer a nice markdown editor to word lol
I’m preferring pen & paper over here.
To each their own, I’ve had to come back to hand written notes and even I can’t understand them 💀
You can’t understand other people’s handwriting? Or you can’t even understand your own handwriting?
I meant my own lol
Used Microsoft Works in the early 2000’s. Only discontinued in 2009 apparently.
At one point, Microsoft was maintaining three different word processors.
- Word, the top of the line component of the flagship Office product
- Works, their “for home and small business” product that was honestly good enough for basically everyone, to the point you have to ask why anyone would buy Office, which is almost certainly why Works got canned, and
- Wordpad, because a GUI OS is basically useless without a rich text editor.
Want to edit the header just on page 6? Or feel like being sexy and having a single page in landscape or a different size?
Easy! Just make a bunch of separate documents, export them as PDFs, and merge them in Adobe Acrobat.
I agree lots of things about word sucks. But FYI single page landscape is achieved by using two section breaks. It’s not ideal, but its somewhat understandable given how styles are prioritized. I’ve tried others that work well, but they also suffer on things that word does well that we take for granted.
The way it should be handled is to just let me rotate a single fucking page. It’s 2025 and there is zero excuse for that bullshit.
Like I said, I agree it sucks. I’ve had the exact same thought many times.
As someone that recalls using Word 5.5 in DOS for a book report in 5th grade, as with all things, the peak has come and gone.
IMO, the enshittification curve started about 2010ish when MS demanded internet connectivity for features that didn’t work. Saving PDFs was its peak. RIP Word 2007, which I used well into 2015.
This why LibreOffice called out Microsoft for using “complex” file formats to lock in Office users
You using complex file formats for vendor lock in
Me using complex file formats because my code base is shite.
We are not the same
The real miracle isn’t Word’s features, it’s how it’s still the default after decades of collective pain.
Who knew being a monopoly and anti competitive would be so profitable.
So many open source options out there that if you think MS word is the only options out there then you’re not looking hard enough.
Do you really think the multi billion dollar company I work for is going to switch?
You ain’t paying. Why do you care?
Word works fine and has just about every feature business users needs. This stuff hasn’t been true in a long time.
Word has long since become a low value comodity. Why pay at all when Libre Office does everything well for free.
Thanks to US enshittification, governments and corporations around the world are de-americanizing their tech stacks. FOSS for the win.
Microsoft will eat dirty ass.
Libre office doesn’t offer you sharing and interactivity with role and user based access, pii and phi scanning, on top on the idp they offer you that can be used in just about any compliance situation.
Nobody is paying for just the notepad editor. They just don’t have to deal with any security whatsoever.
Libre office does offer sharing, and RBAC can be handled at the storage level.
https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/scalc/01/shared_spreadsheet.html
There are other tools for PII and PHI scanning and this is part of foundry, not Office. You pay more for that.
Oh, so it’s more expensive for less features. MS is so cooked.
Want to move an image but you don’t know how text wrapping works? Want a .DOCX editor to edit a file format from Adobe? Don’t know to R-Click? This memes for YOU!
My favourite feature is the insanely counter-intuitive indenting and bullet points.
I expected Lemmy to be less repost-obsessed than Reddit yet here we are.
