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.
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.