[wmccullough]

This is wonderful to see, big fan of LibreOffice.

I am left questioning a few things based upon the feedback in this thread. I'll preface this that I'm trying to be cordial and tactful here.

Why is it so bad that Microsoft charges for their product? I use Office in my professional life and Libre+Office in my personal life. I think if you make a decent product, it's perfectly okay to charge for it. Am I missing something ideological?

I constantly read that Office is clunky and unstable, and I haven't experienced that in years at this point, probably since Office 2007 after they famously had to rip out CustomXML in a hurry. For me, both Office and LibreOffice perform well, and I often only use one over the other when I find support for one or the other is lacking because of some crazy scenario.

P.S. To those barking about "scary" warning for ODF files. It does the same thing for Office 2003-2007 documents too...

[nothis]

It's more the fact that they hold a quasi-monopoly AND have severe interface flaws that are now "standard". If it was just one of the two, I think people would be more forgiving (see Adobe Photoshop/InDesign, which, while flawed, understand user interface).

I have seen people waste hours doing things in MS Office that should take 5 minutes because of how broken its UX is. They got a tiny little bit better but then you try setting the print area for an Excel table again and spend a good 15 minutes and you know they still have the same problems at their core.

The problem with LibreOffice & Co is that they basically just copy Microsoft's mistakes, making UX an afterthought with wobbly, unaligned buttons and illogical grouping and hierarchies of different elements. We'll likely won't escape that office software hell any time soon but projects like LibreOffice at least have the freedom to chisel at its foundation.

[yellow_postit]

This really underestimates the amount of work that goes into UX for such a massively used product. Look no further than the ribbon to see the type of backlash that comes from any interface update. For any sufficiently large and complex project nearly every new UI tweak willl help some and hurt others. Measuring and walking that line is not to be underestimated.

[awoeirl]

So, I have a relative who worked Microsoft UI, and know a lot about it from that. I understand all the design and user testing that was involved.

This is what I see:

With the ribbon, MS came up with something that was nice and innovative. But it was also incomplete. Unlike the menu, which was consistent across all the functions you might want to apply, the ribbon exists for some things, and then you break into this totally different UI for other things.

Is this ok? My concern is that with Microsoft's monopoly (still) we could argue until we were blue in the face about whether or not the ribbon as implemented was worth it or not, and will never know because there were not really any other options other than "ribbon or not." We can't tell if people just habituated to the ribbon's flaws, or decided that the pros of upgrading outweighed the cons, or were forced to upgrade, directly or indirectly, by the legions of corporate decision makers who were afraid to be lagging behind, or what.

Office has improved a lot since LibreOffice's predecessor, OO, emerged. In some ways I think MS Office is superior. But I still have this nagging feeling that we never know what we could have had if there were more competition, in terms of pricing, options, formats, etc. I also resent being forced to use MS Office for things that absolutely do not require it at all (e.g., by certain publishers, etc.). Because then I have to choose an OS that MS Office is on, and then certain hardware, etc. It's not the cost of MS Cloud or whatever anymore, it's that cost, plus the hardware infrastructure that's required to run it.

At the moment LO, for me, is competitive with MS Office, and meets my needs, and to me that's important.

I don't think there's anything wrong with MS charging for a product. What I do think is wrong is everyone requiring it, explicitly or implicitly, and there being lack of choice. At the moment I'm not even sure that's MS's fault--most of the time I encounter it I attribute it to laziness or inconsiderateness.

[JBlue42]

Users get used to the flaws, shortcuts, or workarounds. That's with any software I've found. I typically argue that the difference between being 'experienced' with a bit of software vs basic/intermediate knowledge is having a greater depth of understanding of all the flaws and how to get around them.

[taoistextremist]

Makes me think how I've just given up on doing any kind of complicated formatting with word processing software. They give you the tools for it, it seems, but you start adding tables and graphics and equations, the minute you hit enter and go to a new line it somehow displaces itself or some other odd behavior. And it's not exclusive to Microsoft.

If I ever need to do something like that I just pull out a text editor and start writing stuff up in TeX now, which while it doesn't really cause me any distress because I've learned TeX, is kind of ridiculous for the many people who've had no reason to learn TeX because they expected word processors to work as advertised.

[lakechfoma]

I love the Office UI/UX. My only complaint is with cloud integrations it defaults the save dialog to onedrive or whatever, which I never use. But otherwise what problems do you have with it? The breadth of tools/options is incredible. The ease of use of many of them is on point. The only reason I prefer MS Office over Libre is because of the UI honestly. I would rather use Libre but I can never find what I'm trying to do.

[sireat]

LibreOffice should shine in customizability but it is not the case for intermediate users.

Anecdotally I was trying to set up a simple keyboard shortcut to change color of a row of the selected cell in a spreadsheet.

Neither Excel nor Calc offer this functionality out-of-box except for user defined macros.

On LibreCalc 5.3 custom keyboard shortcuts are awkwardly defined but once I figured shortcuts out I got stuck on recording a macro. There was a choice of Python,Java and I think VBA lookalike. Very nice, except it was not immediately obvious on how to proceed. I'd love to use Python to script Calc but I did not have time to hunt for the API.

On Excel 2013, within 5 minutes I was able to record a macro then edit the VBA not having used VBA in 5 years. Plus I was able to add a few extra bonus macro commands within 15minutes.

I am sure you can do really nifty stuff when you become a power user in LibreOffice. The problem is that a large proportion of users are casual users like me.

By comparison, I can create and edit nice macros in Photoshop/Illustrator only being a very casual user(maybe once every few months).

[Spooky23]

Microsoft is moving towards and exclusively rent to own model. This is already causing problems for businesses who built adhoc applications in old versions of Access — they lose downgrade rights when moving to O365 and are often pirating Access 2003 or whatever.

That exacerbates the key issue with proprietary general purpose document formats — as users, citizens or companies we lose sovereignty over our data.

When Microsoft decides to cut out some feature in 2030, data produced with it can be forever lost. This is a big deal when Office is the universal language of modern government and business.

This is not an exclusively Microsoft problem either. Google Docs is far worse, but relatively speaking nobody uses it.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

> Google Docs is far worse, but relatively speaking nobody uses it.

How do you mean "nobody"?

In any case, at least for now, it's relatively easy to make automatic backups of your entire Google Docs collection, and all these documents can be exported to different formats, including ODT.

[Spooky23]

Note the word relatively. Microsoft has over a billion paid office users. There’s probably another billion pirated users. Google is a few hundred million, and has low penetration into institutions. 3-4 US state governments use Google in a paid capacity. 50 states use Microsoft.

Also, generally speaking, it is preferable to preserve original documents for archival purposes. Export to other formats is problematic in those cases, especially as time marches on and you end up making exported copies of copies.

[yellow_postit]

If those companies have no way of updating their software what’s their approach to security?

[madmulita]

We simply complete the forms saying that we applied all the patches and upgrades that were necesary... and pray for the best. /s

[candiodari]

You could also point out that it mostly consists of not giving untrusted users access to internal stuff, like webapps would.

[ufo]

The problem isn't that they charge for it. It is that the MS Office suites ais proprietary software and uses proprietary file formats that are incompatible with anything else. Microsoft has used this to muscle out the competition and monopolize office software.

[wiz21c]

and nothing proves that this strtegy was necessary to their success. What would have happened if they had used open file formats ?

[ufo]

Microsoft's Embrace, Extend & Extinguish strategy was instrumental in killing off their competition and achieving a monopoly position.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extin...

[icebraining]

Where in this thread has anyone said that it's bad that Microsoft charges for their product?

[loudmax]

Agreed, I don't see any posts in this thread arguing that MS charging for office is a bad thing. And I don't see any problem with charging money for productivity software either. But since the issue has been raised, I'll bite. I can articulate an ideological opposition to Microsoft Office's proprietary file formats which are a de-facto standard.

The original Office file formats were entirely proprietary and MS explicitly used this to lock out competition. The OOXML formats in use since 2007 are technically an open spec, but one that is difficult to implement reliably. The only software product that is reliably compatible with MS Office is MS Office.

For much of the HN crowd, Office documents isn't a big part of our job, but we're in the minority here. Most people are far more likely to open Word than any code editor. In my experience outside of the tech industry, document collaboration is primarily done through SharePoint, if not emailing Word and Excel docs. Scheduling is managed via Outlook/Exchange with their proprietary protocols.

This isn't a problem as long as people are being productive on their own using MS Office. The problem is that files are widely distributed with the expectation that anyone can view and edit them. For example, my kids' school teachers regularly post homework assignments .doc or .docx format. I've also seen MS Office files from doctors' office and municipal governments.

So there's free stuff like LibreOffice and Google Docs, which are mostly compatible with MS Office, and mostly sufficient for home or personal use. Usually .doc or .docx files open fine. Sometimes they come out looking like garbage.

A typical business will want to be able to exchange documents with their customers and suppliers, to say nothing of years of legacy documents that they already have. Compatibility is important, and it is worth paying for. The notion that they're paying for software to make their employees more productive isn't a problem. The fact that they have no alternatives where to spend their money if they want to be compatible with their legacy docs and the rest of the world, that's a problem.

[thibaultamartin]

> Why is it so bad that Microsoft charges for their product? I use Office in my professional life and Libre+Office in my personal life. I think if you make a decent product, it's perfectly okay to charge for it. Am I missing something ideological?

Well, it's not bad at all. The fees can be quite prohibitive for some companies, but that is just business.

I might trigger some flamewar here, but as a casual LibreOffice user, as an individual, I "bill" myself the price MS Office would cost me (70€ a year here in western Europe).

I find I'd rather pay for something that produces code which I consider to be "public interest", but I agree use cases can make one chose MS Office instead of LibreOffice.

[dorfsmay]

You bill yourself? Where do you send the money?

[robin_reala]

I think they mean they sent the equivalent cost of an Office licence to the Document Foundation.

[BenjiWiebe]

I was at a conference today and watched Office's presentation thingie lock up. :)

[akkat]

For one, they don't make it for Linux. If they did then I would buy it.