Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tpoacher 126 days ago
Don't mean to trivialise this problem, but, libreoffice provides full keyboard shortcut customization, which I find very easy and intuitive to work with, including, if you really wanted to, a "bring up menu then functionality from that menu" multi-key sequence shortcut as you describe here. So isn't this something that could be solved relatively easily by reassigning keyboard shortcuts once in your machine?
1 comments
pcchristie 125 days ago
Nah I appreciate that. And you're probably right. Only reason I hadn't looked into it was:

a) I didn't know if it could simulate the "Alt Codes" i.e. Alt + 3 separate keys in quick succession.

b) There's 50-100 I'd need to replicate (and arguably all of them as I pick up a new one every short while and it would be nice to be able to universalise them and be able to go back to Excel any time).

c) Even if a and b were no issue, I haven't "mained" Libre Office ever so I'd want to be sure the juice was worth the squeeze and I didn't find that it was missing some key/edge capability (I believe some of the newer functions released for 365 might be proprietary... at least they aren't on Sheets).

link
tpoacher 125 days ago
Fair enough. My personal anecdote (and obviously your mileage may vary) is that, I've switched to Libreoffice a long time ago, and now my frustrations mirror yours except in reverse; i.e., I'm very happy and comfortable with the Libreoffice suite, and whenever I am 'forced' to work on MS Office, I find it super-unintuitive, buggy, and frustrating. So perhaps some of this is 'habit / comfort-zone' disguised as preference of functionality. Sometimes it's just simple stuff, like, being unable to resize the comment column, but even small stuff like that adds up in the end.

Having said that, I'm not a heavy Excel user, yet I'm already aware of some differences between it and Calc which are probably not a simple matter of reassigning a keyboard shortcut. Switching from AB mode to RC mode is one example; in Calc you need to go to Tools::Options::Calc::Formula::Syntax to switch. But so far I've had no problems working in Calc in general. I was able to follow Joel Spolsky's infamous "You suck at Excel" video [0] with no problems, for example.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg

link