this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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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.

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[–] tombruzzo@lemm.ee 63 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] joshcodes@programming.dev 32 points 2 months ago (7 children)

On behalf of cyber and IT, just ask IT to install the thing, please. They can't really say no to a free app and bypassing restrictions ends badly for everyone. I had a user do that with video editing software... seriously, what could go wrong? Ransomware. Literally ransomware. Lucky for antivirus it stopped it but yeah, please work with IT.

[–] Joelk111@lemmy.world 22 points 2 months ago (3 children)

They can't really say no to a free app

What? At my workplace there's a bunch of stuff we aren't allowed to install that's free with the reasoning being security concerns.

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[–] cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They can't really say no to a free app

A co-worker was told (verbatim) by the head of IT that " we don't use open source". So yeah...

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[–] theblips@lemm.ee 4 points 2 months ago

They can and most of the time they do complain about free apps

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[–] whysofurious@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 33 points 2 months ago

offtopic but your english is great :)

[–] PerfectDark@lemmy.world 31 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] PerfectDark@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[–] f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz 5 points 2 months ago

That's funny! If someone was trying to infect my PC via e-mail, I would expect them to be sending pdf files.

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] steeznson@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It’s very good but M$ make every attempt to avoid making it interoperable with Word

[–] furycd001@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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....

[–] steeznson@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

I think they deliberately mess with the formatting text in exported to "word doc" format files from LibreOffice too.

[–] Termight@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 8 points 2 months ago

You can visually theme it so it looks differently

[–] Saleh@feddit.org 8 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] MajesticElevator@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 months ago

My first experience with it was that dark theme was bugged and the interface wasn’t intuitive

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes. Its the obvious choice for desktop.

But if you want web, have you tried CryptoPad.

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[–] plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] domi@lemmy.secnd.me 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This works out of the box on KDE (should work on GNOME too), what desktop environment do you use?

[–] plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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