2w ago

Why not use LibreOffice Calc instead?

66 comments

Should be COBOL
- Anyone who works FinTech knows that's it's these Mainframes and HPNS systems running on code written in Latin maintained by guys working past retirement that are the frayed rope holding the debit and credit transaction system together.

You can't swap Excel with anything else. Are you going to trust that millions of man-hours of work will translate perfectly? Going to take that risk with your company?
Even if you started your business with another spreadsheet, you still have to use Excel sheets from others.

Because you don't even dare breathe on load-bearing legacy systems. You want to change the whole app, you insolent heretic?!
- The more important a system is, the more the engineers involved need to be used to changing the system.
  Of course, no engineering is really involved in excel-based legacy systems, which is a large part of why they are as dangerous as they are.

three reasons:
power query
keyboard shortcuts
pioneer for new functions (e.g., xlookup, dot-colon, let, etc)
oh, and excel doesn't crash like a boeing at annoyingly frequent random intervals.
- oh, and excel doesn’t crash like a boeing at annoyingly frequent random intervals.
  then you aren't running anything past Excel 2016
  
  Of course not, we're talking about Enterprise here. Newer versions of Excel won't run on Windows XP.
- Libre office is significantly more stable for me than office365 on a win11 machine running on hardware from 2023. It just always works and quickly.

Just gonna drop this here: http://visidata.org/
Blows excel out of the water, at least for tabular data (which, frankly, is what all financial data should be... Cell-based formulas are a mistake).

As someone who works in a Fortune 100 company, the number of spreadsheets we have for the vast majority of our tasks...
The biggest issue I've seen is how do you get a bunch of data to look and behave between a bunch of users who have different skillsets and varying knowledge about how the data connects to other data?
You could build a web page with a database backend. But this takes hours when plopping the data into a spreadsheet is minutes.
- Accountants are learning python to parse spreadsheets now
  
  Meanwhile Banks are using... Bank Python.
  
  I work in the accounting department of an insurance company doing python development, killing excel spreadsheet processes one by one. I hate when the sources came in excel because polars lazyframes dosen't work as nice that with other formats like csv or parquet. My outputs are always parquets is they are going to be used by other processes or excel if they for humans.

Libreoffice calc sucks sorry. Onlyoffice might be a good substitute.
- Sadly, Excel is still the gold standard. There are plenty of competing options for creating basic spreadsheets but once you start trying to do any sort of complex data analysis, the capabilities gap starts to widen very quickly.
  
  You know, excel still kind of sucks. It kept freezing or crashing on me when I had to process 10k+ rows. Switched to awk instead.
- I kinda curious since I've been using it for my meager spreadsheet use for over ten years.
  What sucks about it to you?
  
  It feels like a less useful Office 97 variant.
  With modern UI/UX, it’s just clunky and old. Like, Google spreadsheets is works… better. Some things that I do in excel can’t really transfer over that easily (don’t have any examples off the top of my head sorry)
  The PowerPoint variant is the WORST offense though.
  It’s like having to maintain two different skillsets that are 85% similar.

How's LibreOffice at pivot tables nowadays?
Follow-up question, how's LibreOffice at telling my tech illiterate boss she has to go to IT to get admin rights to install LO so she can open the file I just sent her because I don't morally want to support Microsoft?
- MS Office can open LO documents.

I 100% believe if some scripting language like Python was taught in schools instead of excel we would be in a MUCH better place. I have to deal with user created excel contraptions everyday at my work and they make me want to cry
- A few years back, someone at corporate made an Excel based "program" for planning our trade shows. It was the most rage inducing rickety ass bullshit contraption I have ever had to deal with. It was basically a data entry wizard GUI for a spreadsheet. But it would crash every 2-3 entries, and lose all the data that had been added since the last save. The only way to save the data involved closing it and restarting it. So I had to close/reopen after every entry just to keep from having to risk redoing it all multiple times.

It's the keyboard shortcuts. Might as well try to get people to learn Uzbek

My only complaint is the blinding white cells. There's a reason why like every other major program uses dark mode.
- Excel doesn't have dark mode? That's literally incredible.
  
  Not by default, and if you use it all the formatting (cell colors, borders, etc) doesn't work well anymore. Done up sheets with good formatting are unreadable, unless you're already very familiar with them.
  I used to change the blinding white to a light grey, but it doesn't jive with the border colors and on large sheets it adds to the file size quite substantially.
  
  but then how do you print?

XKCD #2347
- For those who can't bother to look it up https://www.xkcd.com/2347/

i do all my finances in a physical ledger labeled 'never show to the IRS'

Watch Microsoft ruin another good thing!

A lot of good answers, but my bet is the third party plug-ins. Does librecalc have SAP Analysis, or the other plug-ins to connect excel to the accounting systems?
- SAP is some kind of communicable brain cancer. My company (has factories in over a dozen countries) has been trying to implement it for almost 10 years now. A 5 min job now takes 30min because of all the paperwork that has to go along with it.
  
  SAP stands for Slow Arduous Process.

Huh. I don't know about the financial system but I'm guessing a good chunk of it is ran by some old mainframes.
It's like the retail industry, still massively relying on IBM i/iSeries/AS400. I worked for a consulting company that was doing a little bit of admin and support work for companies still using this system and the list is still very long. At least it still receives updates, and it's kind of fun/odd to work with if you like CLI, but it's super expensive and absolutely proprietary.

You want us to use access? No one wants to use access I'll just make a hyperlink to another book on the last cell

Two things: VBA and the autosum formula keyboard shortcut.

Why not use database, actually. I am yet to see anything related to money that is not a rabbit hole of wildly different things interacting by wildly unexpected logic. Ffs, is writing esoteric formulae in a spreadsheet really easier than learning some SQL dialect with a few pretty advanced and specific features?
- Queue a 6 month approval process to access data for s'curity
  
  Nice catch, I am annoyed as fuck with access approval even as a dev. But, since I am advocating for moving financial analysis to using databases instead of spreadsheets, it becomes my problem, so: me makes a separate db for this very purpose, and the access is given to any and all accountants. Security guys are welcome to join the dev process of preparing the db and data flows that write from other sources into it, so that financial guys have up-to-date state of data: want restrictions - go ahead and tell them they don't need this and that
- counter question: Do you want the people that butcher Excel spreadsheets into abominations to be let loose on your database?
  The key advantage of a database ti have everything in one place is also its greatest danger.
  
  You make forms that talk to the dBASE, you don't give them actual dBASE access
  
  No, I will give them a separate one, and when they make a mess out of it, I'll make it known, then fix it without any hurry, then they make another kind of mess, I make it known, fix it with no hurry, then... at some point either they learn (because they make efforts or because get told to by superior management), or I reach the conclusion that working here isn't worth it and move on

sc

Anybody who knows what LibreOffice is already knows what those ugly hack Excel spreadsheets should have been in the first place.

66 comments