this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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interesting, what features of excel are you missing in libreoffice, onlyoffice or cryppad?
I'm not the one you asked, but speaking for myself, reliably working Visual Basic. It's what sets MSOffice apart for me, and honestly I just prefer it.
LibreOffice isn't bad; when I moved a heavily customized installation of Word to Writer I found it's fairly easy though time-intensive to switch, and sports a similar enough interface. But without all the VB macros that were impossible to run or recreate in Writer it pretty much fell flat. On Linux, VB can be problematic even if you're running MS Office via Wine or Play on Linux, and just fail to load at all even if the rest of Office works fine.
Also, there's LibreOfficeBasic: good, but not the same. For example, in Word and Excel there is a specific long form time and date macro I use to accurately and instantly preface entries in the body of an ongoing doc with just a single click; it saves a lot of time and errors and it's worth taking the time and trouble to recreate. But I wasn't able to. I searched and searched in LibreOfficeBasic but could not find any equivalent in LibreOffice that would allow me to do the same simple little thing.
That was a couple of years ago. It might be better now, but because so much of what I use MS Office for involves speed, precision, and dependability, that's my holdout. I'm testing distros now, and have Zorin Core loaded for another try specifically with MSOffice because Zorin makes a big deal about having Windows app support built in, but so far it's been dicey: when I load it, will it just work?
I'm going to Linux either way, I'm done with MS, but that's my holdout.