this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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    Many such cases (lemmy.ca)
    submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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    [–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    Can you explain why MS office alternatives like libreoffice suck?

    [–] ScreaminOctopus 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    I think it comes down to 2 main reasons, and some members of the libreoffice suite definitely do a better job than others.

    1. Comparability with MS Office, it's really difficult to use these programs when you can't reliably collaborate with people using the de-facto standard office software. Impress is exceptionally bad at this.

    2. User interface clunkines, the ribbon ui Microsoft uses in modern office versions is really nice, and makes finding the actions you need really easy. This is coming from someone who used office 03 and 07, it's not just a learning thing, it's a better design.

    These issues are definitely a bigger deal on some parts of the suite than others. I've found Calc to be a solid replacement for Excel, but when I'm making spreadsheets I'm not fiddling with complex formatting at all. Impress is on the opposite end of the spectrum. It has horrible comparability with PowerPoint, and I need to get things looking just right when I make a presentation. It's difficult to find even basic formatting options. I could probably solve the usability issues by reading a few tutorials, but the comparability issues hold me back from putting the time in, since I have no idea how a presentation will look when someone loads it in PowerPoint anyway.

    [–] [email protected] -2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

    you mean this

    look better than this??

    I dont know but i like libreoffice better in terms of ui.

    But now I think I understood the formatting issue in calc tho. i dont know how excel handles this

    playing around with Impress i can get pretty good slides without any issues(yet). I think your problem is only with portability. I guess that will remain unsolved for a long time.

    edit :

    So yeah now I dont see the formatting problem, can you elaborate on that?(what other formatting issue you faced?)

    [–] ScreaminOctopus 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    Yes the PowerPoint ui is much better. It takes more space but it's much easier to find features you might not use as frequently.

    I haven't done much switching between calc and excel. Formatting issues come up when making or editing a document in libreoffice and opening it in MS office. Especially with impress, the position and sizes of objects will be very different between the two programs. This makes opening a presentation from impress with PowerPoint on a different computer impractical.

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    I like Libreoffice ui better. There are different ui modes too if you want to experiment. I selected tabbed compact since I like compact UI, there are other modes which takes more space and have more features visible probably. Anyway UI might be about preferences but at least there are different UI modes. If you hate all of them, its okay.

    Almost all your problems sounds like problems when mixing MS office. Do you face other problems that is not a compatibility issue with MS?

    [–] ScreaminOctopus 1 points 4 months ago

    Nothing that isn't subjective, but the comparability issues are a complete dealbreaker, because interoperability is so necessary. This is definitely something that can be fixed since Google Slides is no where near as bad about this.