If we want people to move away from proprietary platforms, we need to offer something better, not just something that’s free.
I’m not happy with LibreOffice which seems to just playing catch-up with what Microsoft did 5 years ago. While there’s quite a few alternatives to Word for most people’s uses, the alternative to Excel has been LibreOffice Calc (or actual coding with CSV, Python or R).
So when I discovered Grist today, I was excited. A modern user interface, open source and formulas from Python instead of Excel’s formulas which always seem to do create some weird error.
I’m just sharing in the hope that others will like it as well.
It works, but the UI is dated and cumbersome (especially Calc). And you need Collabra to work with others online.
My main gripe though is what it isn’t. Remember how Firefox outcompeted Internet Explorer with a better user experience. An open source office suite should do the same. LibreOffices main focus seems to be an option for people switching to open source who wants to keep on working on their MS Office documents. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t make people switch to open source software by itself.
Yeah, that’s true, but I think browsers and office software have two fundamentally different purpouses.
You see, a browser, altough surely used in professional settings, is also a broad enough tool that many people can use a lot for a myriad of other contexts. I may browse my work email, but also watch youtube on my free time, scroll through social media, download games, etc…
Now when talking about office suites, the objective is definetly geared towards the enterprises. Sure, you can use Calc as a way to quickly get a shopping list, but that is just the most superficial aspect of the software. In this environment, compatibility should, or even, must, be foccused on. The user doesn’t choose exactly what to use, but is forced to work with what his company provides or what works with his company’s files.
As such, altough I would love to have more innovation in LibreOffice, I totally understand why they follow a more compatabiliy-focused approach.
But why would a business use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft? From a productivity point of view Microsoft is superior.
There certainly are workplaces where they really need some feature of Excel and can’t just switch without full compability with old documents, but for most innovative features or simply a better UI would be better.
For my work use, ranging from budgeting and simple statistical analysis to project planning and reports a tool like Grist seems like it could replace Excel. It might not be feature-complete, but the UI is much more appealing and seems geared to the kind of tasks I do.
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Better support, more focus on UX/UI and more features.
I prefer the dated UI to the moden ones.