Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks agoLibreOffice only really became better after Microsoft started pushing Office365 which made standard MS Office a lot worse. They were on par with each other until then.
The others 100% were always better.
Dave@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
You sound like you know your LibreOffice.
My experience is they are quite different but I’ve been able to do the same things for the most part.
But how the hell do I make a pivot table that looks and functions as nice as the plain old default one in Excel?
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Excel is the one thing LibreOffice still falls behind on. It’s really hard to compete with Excel, specifically.
CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Excel is probably the one sore spot for LibreOffice, but also Google’s suite and really everyone else. Excel is tough to beat, especially when you consider the additional power of things like Power Query and Excel on web having JavaScript functions.
That said: I truly despite pivot tables and I no longer use them. Like pie charts, they are usually useless.
Dave@lemmy.nz 1 week ago
Whaaaaaaaat? Pivot tables are a 2 second job to summarise large amounts of transaction data or similar by month or year. Lookups or countifs would take so much longer!
JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 1 week ago
Ugh I hate excel. It can’t do the most basic search and replace things reliably in all cases. I have moved literally all data analysis besides the absolute basic “count” and “sum” operations to python in spyder. 200x faster, repeatable, and has never once failed a basic operation like a search and replace. Not to mention the localization issues and the fact that it will fuck things up completely if you install a new printer because Microsoft decided the printer has priority of your document and spreadsheet layouts over choosing a default.
I had some evaluation board software that whenever the value dipped below -1, would place the comma completely randomly in the floating point number.
Excel almost had a heart attack when I asked it to search and replace ”-1” with “-1,” and it found all of the cases just fine, but decides to ignore the replace and not place a comma at all. If I tried to convert them to a number, it freaked out and placed the decimal place also randomly, different than the input. And of course trying to do in-place operations on a column for export is just painful.
Hell, in notepad++ I could just regex the digit range that was preceded by a ”-1” and get everything replaced using a few brackets.
Not to mention how terrible the graphs work in comparison and how bad they look with the default options 😅. But hey, you can automatically put in a drop shadow or frame it in a useless way.
There are some people who can work very efficiently and do some crazy things in excel (like the excel doom) but unless you have literally been using it daily for many years and actively looking for ways to speed up, then it is just as easy or easier to do things in an actual data processing program like matlab, octave, python, or R (And I am not a coder) and you can literally copy paste a file name for the next full dataset.