Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by samstave 2461 days ago
Clearly, but that is something us sysads for decades get...

You think that joe mechanic who just bought his daughter a new machine has any of this lexicon.

Whomever is responsible for all of this bullshit at MS should be hit in the face with a shovel.

Recently, and I’ve been in tech since 1997, I bought an office lic at Costco because I needed excel on a machine...

You know what a pain in the ass it is to install office on a generic factory machine with the new bs. They want to tie that install to an outlook account.

Nope. I just want excel this machine won’t even be connected to the internet. But MS says fuck-you-because-thats-why.
1 comments
imglorp 2461 days ago
If don't need 100 pct of Excel's bazillion features, Libre Office is a decent alternative. It works with Excel files, doesn't need Windows (but it can run there), and doesn't nag you to join any clouds. And it's free. There's very few home users who actually need full Office.
link
vetinari 2461 days ago
My non-favorite pain point with LibreOffice are Excel tables (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/overview-of-excel-t...). Home users won't be missing them, but Excel power users will.
link
samstave 2461 days ago
Excel is a requirement for the integration I want to do to another program: bartender

To print barcodes and labels in serial with an ODBC connection... so libre won’t work

link
imglorp 2461 days ago
Libre does support ODBC, perhaps not exactly the same way though.
link
samstave 2460 days ago
Its on the reverse.... bartender (from seagul scientific, which their software is fantastic by the way) doesn’t support it...

I have a bug filed with them where if you build a thing in google sheets and export to xlsx and attempt to connect to that data source it crashes.... (but if it is native xlsx it works fine) hence my need to install excel on that particular machine, as the bartender software can take tabular input for varying data for each sticker printed ( cannabis compliance labels, which I have now mastered)

They are a great company though, and bartender is an amazing program. I suggest everyone download their free version and learn it.

link