• /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
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    16 hours ago

    I use libreoffice but man libreoffice writer is so finnicky. Formatting is all wonky. Definitely not a 1:1 replacement. It will format things differently than if you opened it in word

    • krf@szmer.info
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      9 hours ago

      I was using Microsoft Word on and off since 6.0 (shipped with Office 4.0), and no version of Microsoft Word was formatting your documents in the same way that the other versions did, and the same version liked to break things on different version of Windows, and sometimes ever on the same version of Windows on the other computer, because locale settings were different.

      That being said, Word is a toy that can be replaced with just basically any word processing software (unless you need multiplayer editing from the Sharepoint), it’s the Excel which is the true strength of MS Office, and unfortunately it’s irreplaceable by anything that isn’t purpose-built database processing software.

      Excel doesn’t do anything very well, but it can do everything that the twisted minds of the upper management can imagine, and in the hands of person experienced enough and mad enough (and you will become mad enough after couple years of VBA) the possibilities are endless.

      LibreOffice Calc on the other hand is limited to 1024 columns, which is a hard limit I hit more than once, and external database integrations are real PITA.

      • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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        7 hours ago

        LibreOffice Calc on the other hand is limited to 1024 columns, which is a hard limit I hit more than once, and external database integrations are real PITA.

        Might be time to learn an actually programming language and take a database course brother

        • krf@szmer.info
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          5 hours ago

          Nah, I’m good :) I don’t need to touch anything like that those days, days of anything resembling big data are gone for me. But I know of people who need – and who work in dark basements of „Big 4” with terabytes worth of Excel sheets passed down through the generations of data scientists. No one will ever touch those workbooks, as they make the world go round, and last person that understood how it works retired 15 years ago. These setups will survive humanity, and will be estimating resource and energy prices on the international markets long after we’re gone and only entities dealing in resources will be rats and roaches.