Opening LibreCalc just once was enough to prove to me that it's not a viable alternative to Office. Both usability and performance were bad, performance egregiously so.
I have the complete opposite experience. I use CSV files a lot, LibreCalc has a sane import dialog and handles these files near perfect by default. When working with Excel-users I always get a reply along the lines of „the file is weird, can you send me xls?“
And yes, I know that Excel opens CSV just fine. But it is not straightforward enough to explain it to a semi computer-literate office drone…
Excel used to give you the option of using the import wizard for CSVs when you opened them. Now they've intentionally hidden that in a submenu, for some bizarre reason.
Libre Office is good enough for basic use, but Excel has a lot of great features for intermediate users. Some of the newer functions they've added in the last few years are great, I use LET with my own lambdas and the quite often. I also kinda like the Power Query/M language, but the implementation in Excel is absolutely horrible.
this sound really spoiled. I think if your first experience with this kind of software is librecalc you'd be perfectly fine with it.
Especially because you mention usability. Expectations are very important for perceived usability, but librecalc is a different program so at some level you will have to use it differently. If any of those differences touch on your workflow, you will be biased towards calling it unusable instead of attributing this to just not being used to the software.
Fact of the matter is that LibreOffice allows a user to do office tasks for free. You might have to do it differently, but if you get used to it, it will be perfectly usable.
Spoiled in that I can afford to pay for office when I need it for a moneymaking business, sure I guess. But it is not being spoiled to judge an alternative by the same metrics as the incumbent, if it doesn't meet my requirements it doesn't matter whether it's paid or free.
> Expectations are very important for perceived usability,
I grant you that the UI is laid out differently and things are done in a different matter, which isn't intrinsically worse. But in this case I argue that it is.
For example, I have a set of x-y coordinates that I want to plot. I accidentally do not select all of them when creating the chart. Where do I now go in order to extend the selection?? Where do I go if I forgot to add the column headings to the selection? New users can certainly learn these things with enough head bashings, but it can certainly be more accessible.
Why does the UI seeming keep disabling my trackpad scrolling as I focus on chart elements versus the sheet as a whole? Why does it come to a glacial crawl when working with more than a few dozen points? Where is the option to disable snap-to-column/row when panning?
> perfectly usable
High praise. Though I agree with you. If you have different requirements, especially less of them, then I'm sure that you can do manage just fine without excel.
I don't know, I don't use spreadsheets a ton, but for my fairly casual usage Calc is good.
I use Writer a lot, and it's great. When my largest complaint is "it doesn't have a font I like pre-installed", that says something about its quality.
And yes, I know that Excel opens CSV just fine. But it is not straightforward enough to explain it to a semi computer-literate office drone…