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by Steko 4645 days ago
The VB stuff matters of course but as a regular excel user what kills me when I use LibreOffice is:

(1) The responsiveness which I guess is from hardware acceleration. It's like comparing a $60 cheapo tablet and an ipad or Al Bundy's old Dodge to a 2014 Camry.

(2) The need to flout basic Excel conventions as if that's somehow lauditory. LibreOffice has made some strides here (hey you can use commas in formulas again) but it still feels like someone from Samsung should be put in charge of the whole thing.
3 comments
Decade 4645 days ago
1) I think the responsiveness of Microsoft Office is largely from using appropriate APIs. LibreOffice is ultimately based on StarOffice, and StarOffice was the worst office program I've ever tried. It dragged its own OS platform on top of whatever OS it was installed on, and it was slow and buggy. LibreOffice is heaps better now, and it's improving fast, but it still suffers from the legacy.

2) I don't see the need to slavishly follow Excel conventions, but I don't know of any evidence that Samsung would be a good lead developer of any software. Be that as it may, Samsung is free as anybody else to contribute to the LibreOffice project.

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pessimizer 4644 days ago
>2) I don't see the need to slavishly follow Excel conventions, but I don't know of any evidence that Samsung would be a good lead developer of any software. Be that as it may, Samsung is free as anybody else to contribute to the LibreOffice project.

I think 2) was a joke about Samsung copying Apple.

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davidgerard 4637 days ago
Someone with the goal "make Calc a better Excel than Excel" needs to take a serious interest involving lots of developers.

Basically, LO needs to be able to import the sort of monster power user spreadsheet that takes 16 hours to run in Excel, and run it fidelitously in 12. These guys sign the cheques.

What would that take?

1. Get a pile of example spreadsheets. (Code to real-world examples, like Wine does, rather than abstract specs that are often inaccurate.) This will be the hard part.

2. Every OOXML tag in the documents needs to be correctly imported and understood.

3. The VBA in the documents needs to run perfectly.

4. Optimise the hell out of it.

That gets LO good enough to seriously compete. Then you make the IDE as good for those users as Excel's is.

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gruseom 4644 days ago
What basic Excel conventions do you have in mind? I'd like to avoid making the mistake of flouting them.
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