this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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Today I did my first advanced spreadsheet on LibreOffice after switching to Linux, and it handled itself pretty well. I had to search for some features on the web at first, but after I got it down, I felt comfortable using it. Also, LibreOffice's default menu layout is not pretty, but I can find all of the functions with just a click, unlike MS Office's ribbon menu where I had to click around to find what I was looking for. Sorry for bad English.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

#775#298 060352 @ColdWater

[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I bring this up often because its so amusing to me.

Last year I did a lot of interviews with developers of popular Steam Deck and Linux programs. All went really well, and were quite fun to do.

One 'dev' (I use that term so loosely because I found out GPT is heavily used for their work) freaked out though when they saw my document I sent initially was an .odt file.

Knowing I am a pen-tester, they freaked out and told the public at large I was trying to hack them with a weird file type.

.odt

It still makes me laugh. Anyway, I swear by LibreOffice, I use it daily and love it so much!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago (2 children)

if a specific format isn't requested or required, and the formatted text document is not expected to be edited by the recipient--only read, possibly by computer, or printed, i would default to using a pdf.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

That's funny! If someone was trying to infect my PC via e-mail, I would expect them to be sending pdf files.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Most of these were not on-the-spot interviews. They were very informal questions and answers.

So Writer felt appropriate to me - the questions were there, they can copy to paste elsewhere, or enter their own answers in the document.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It’s very good but M$ make every attempt to avoid making it interoperable with Word

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

M$ loves locking users into their totally bulls*it ecosystem with deliberately broken "standards." LibreOffice, on the other hand, actually respects open formats like ODF and doesn't treat interoperability as a threat. Word still can't properly open documents it didn't create, unless you pay the vendor tax and pray the formatting survives....

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

I think they deliberately mess with the formatting text in exported to "word doc" format files from LibreOffice too.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

My first experience with it was that dark theme was bugged and the interface wasn’t intuitive

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

You can visually theme it so it looks differently

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Yeah; it's pretty great. It lacks the excel functions, but if you know some python that is a total non-issue.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I do wish it had a self hosted docker though. I could see Proton mail and thunder mail adopting it that way, which would be neat.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Is a self hosted docker different from this?

https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-libreoffice

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Yeah, but it'd be better if calc gridlines didn't have that unchangeable fade effect

[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I do a lot of work with CSV files and LibreCalc is so much better for them. You can actually tell it how to delimit the file and to put quotations around each field.

Some programs actually advise against using excel if you're going to work on a CSV to upload into the program, which is funny considering it's meant to be the industry standard.

P. S. For anyone that would like to use LibreOffice at work, download portableapps and get it from there. It's so portable it can get around IT administration requirements

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (7 children)

On behalf of cyber and IT, just ask IT to install the thing, please. They can't really say no to a free app and bypassing restrictions ends badly for everyone. I had a user do that with video editing software... seriously, what could go wrong? Ransomware. Literally ransomware. Lucky for antivirus it stopped it but yeah, please work with IT.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (3 children)

They can't really say no to a free app

What? At my workplace there's a bunch of stuff we aren't allowed to install that's free with the reasoning being security concerns.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They can't really say no to a free app

A co-worker was told (verbatim) by the head of IT that " we don't use open source". So yeah...

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago

offtopic but your english is great :)

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ribbon bar shit, personally I hate the MS ribbon bar. So for me the LO interface is way better. Just depends on what you like and what you learned and know well.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

and libreoffice still has a ribbon interface if you like that.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Indeed, LibreOffice Calc is a near-daily fixture in my operational workflow. The insistence on proprietary, data-harvesting alternatives like Google Docs is… unnecessary. For Debian-based systems, the installation process is straightforward: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa & sudo apt install libreoffice, referencing the official documentation at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Install/Linux

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

(Is debian considered a "debian-based" distro?)

Debian users, ignore the above. Debian explicity warns against using ubuntu ppa

The correct way to get libreoffice in debian is just to apt install libreofffice... It's already in the main debian repos

https://wiki.debian.org/LibreOffice

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Almost anytime i want to do something a bit more interesting in Excel i have to look for a solution on the web too. And i am considered one of the better Excel users in my working environment.

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