Which replacement for MS Excel?

Tony0945 · Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 3:56 am Post subject: Which replacement for MS Excel?

XP seems to have fatally crashed. R.I.P. I was able to save my documents and replace the blanks in filenames with underscores.
I've always used gnumeric natively, but I see on import that it doesn't recognize Arial font, even though I have it installed and I can reset the font to Arial (on each and every sheet), but tables and graphs look different from Ms Excel. Dates are also not recognized and display as numbers (seconds since epoch?) , and graphs are square instead of rectangular with lots of whitespace on the sides.
I installed Libreoffice-bin and it took a very long time to emerge because, although it's a binary package, it depends on 49 packages that I didn't have installed. I read that Libreoffice from source takes most of a day to build. Still, Libreoffice looked much more like Excel and recognized the Arial font and dates. However, neither displays wide graphs and Libreoffice took a better part of a minute to load. Apparently the whole suite loads before you can select "Calc", which is the Libreoffice equivalent of gnumeric. So I'm asking what do other Gentoo users prefer.
I invite comments, but even if you don't feel like commenting, please vote in poll, but only if you actually use a spreadsheet program under Gentoo.

EDIT: I didn't include Apache Openoffice because of license and also generally negative comments from DuckDuckGo

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 4:21 am Post subject:

I use both Excel 2007 under WINE and LibreOffice Calc but, as your poll only allows one choice, I've selected Excel under WINE. For my work I tend to stick to Excel under WINE to ensure compatibility with work colleagues. Funnily enough, Excel 97 and Excel 2000 files from work many years ago -- which I still need to refer to sometimes -- can only be opened by LibreOffice Calc these days. On my 10-years-old laptop running Gentoo Testing, installation of libreoffice-bin is not viable due to dependencies so I only installed Excel under WINE on that laptop. My newer laptop running Gentoo Stable has both LibreOffice Calc and Excel under WINE.
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20479

I stopped using libreoffice because it seemed to get slower with every update. I hope it doesn't become the only option. I think I tried gnumeric a long time ago... maybe it didn't support Excel files, or didn't support them well?

Due to the performance issue, I switched to Apache OpenOffice and haven't had any issues.

I wouldn't have bothered posting since you brought up the license, but then I saw the part about "negative comments" so I thought I'd add input for others that may come along.

I haven't had any problems, so I wonder how many of those comments may have been motivated by the license rather than experience.

My primary use is a spreadsheet that originated under Excel, then migrated to libreoffice. Excel -> libre required "minor" changes. I believe font, font size and column width, possibly row height. I don't recall any issues when I opened it with openoffice.

As with any migration, the more complex the Excel spreadsheet, the more likely there will be a need for manual migrations.
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9259

I'm not aware of performance regressions with LibreOffice, quite the contrary. As for build time, it didn't take my notebook that long even 10 and 15 years ago, it is at around 15 minutes these days.

Calligra is unfortunately on life support these days, quite similar to AOO who from time to time even forget how to actually cut a release.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20479

Compiling was most likely a factor too. Unfortunately I don't have any timing information, and my primary issue was CPU throttling, although 15 minutes sounds better than I recall, but maybe I'm thinking of dependencies as well. i5-7200U 2.50GHz, but I no longer compile it on the laptop.

If I try to reinstall libreoffice, it wants to install 98 dependencies (36 perl related, not virtuals). That was definitely related due to annoyances with perl updates. libreoffice-bin wants a newer version of gcc, so depending on how often that happens, it may also have been a factor.

My issues with user experience slowness go back to before they adopted the name libreoffice. My recollection is that when they changed the name, there was a pretty big setback with a major release "close" to the name change. Since then, I've never perceived any performance improvements, although I'm not a heavy user of the suite, in part due to what I perceive to be sluggishness. It looks like I switched to openoffice-bin in May 2019. After I upgrade gcc, I'll give libreoffice another look.
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fedeliallalinea · Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 6:16 am Post subject:

At work I use libreoffice but usually only for see content from excel file. created by colleagues.
Until now it's never given me any trouble.
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Banana · Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 6:51 am Post subject:

I'm not the excel guy and if I have too, I use it windows. For reading and some basic tasks I use libreoffice.
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C5ace · Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 9:39 am Post subject:

I use Libreoffice. Calc with some fancy spreadsheets and Writer. Had some problems 12 years ago when moving from Windoze to Linux and at the same time to Openoffice. Cause where the Visual Basic Macros which where not portable at the time.

Average compile time on my laptop is 2:15h.
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figueroa · Posted: Fri Jul 03, 2020 9:05 pm Post subject:

I use LibreOffice-bin and before that OpenOffice-bin going back to StarOffice circa 2000. Across multiple machines, I have no performance issues. On deeply linked spreadsheets, especially sheets linked to external files, LibreOffice-bin calc is much faster that OpenOffice calc.

In LibreOffice calc, I develop very complex spreadsheets some of which link across multiple tabs, and others that link to as many as 100 different external files. The native ods files usually load without any problems in Excel.

ADDED: I have heard from other users that FreeOffice improves on compatibility with Microsoft Office components, but I have experimented with it a little bit in MX-Linux and have not had stunning results. FreeOffice, is also not open source software. YMMV.
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Naib · Posted: Fri Jul 03, 2020 11:26 pm Post subject:

jupyterlab with panda
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20479

Naib · Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2020 3:50 pm Post subject:

figueroa · Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2020 4:12 pm Post subject:

If you love Excel, you should be willing to die for LO calc.
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Naib · Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2020 4:30 pm Post subject:

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20479

Naib · Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2020 5:27 pm Post subject:

Well ... jupyter is in portage and all the needed dep's but jupyterlab isn't.. I deal with a local pip. However.. due to other conflicts i force my python to be py37 and then pip only pulls what it needs and uses the host system packages.

ideally jupyterlab goes into the tree but i doubt it
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20479

Hmm. Thanks. I think my initial impressions were that it wasn't something I needed. Web based, cloud and jquery seem to reaffirm that for me.
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Tony0945 · Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2020 4:28 am Post subject:

Many thanks to all. I found my MsOffice install disk and set it up in VirtualBox XP. When I update this computer with the 3900X, I'll do the same here.
I might as well delete gnumeric as well as libreOffice-bin. Abiword is OK, because I only use it for simple letters.

Leaving this open for more comments and the poll.

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

Well, clearly you need to discover the magic of Lotus 1-2-3!

Okay, okay fine! Jokes aside I'd use libreoffice since the compatibility is very good and it usually isn't the end of the world to skip a few updates to save time. I'd be very wary of using wine or a virtual machine for anything important. I've experienced too many update breakages to consider them reliable. One time my Windows 7 decided to unauthenticated itself and invalidate my key and what works with wine seems to be somewhat fluid. 5.9 is basically unusable and half my games where not usable while 5.10 is butter smooth and is the first version to run Empire Earth[1] in any playable form I know of. My point here is that I just wouldn't trust either option to be reliable in the event of something important. For games, sure. For actual work not so much. I really sucks to lose a day or more of productivity because an update had unexpected results.

[1]I cannot confirm or deny spending 10-15 years waiting for this to work with wine...
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Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

None too impressed with Calc's feature set myself. I find myself reaching for gnuplot often because Calc's charts make a lot of things hard or impossible.

Tony0945 · Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2020 1:24 pm Post subject:

I just didn't want to go through ll those charts changing the x-axis to time from "generic". Excel let me plot with year-month lablels. Even after changing the chart Calc only allowed year only and various combinations of month/day/year. Since all figures were end of month, day was redundant and cluttered the chart. Plus only using thalf the screen with with a square chart instead of rectangular. Maybe that could be fixed, but it wasn't readily apparent.

Once before I went from Excel to gnumeric and back. All the chart captions were lost.
I'm sure calc is good if you don't want charts vs time. I did like that there was less rounding than excel, especially when curve fitting. Something's wrong when you make big data changes and the exponent is exactly 0.1. Perhaps gnuplot is better for that.

lars_the_bear · Guru Joined: 05 Jun 2024 Posts: 512

For the record, I just built LibreOffice from source on a 2012 laptop, and it took about three hours. Built this way, it starts in about a second. It's actually more usable under Gentoo on this ancient hardware, than it is under Fedora/Gnome on the modern stuff I have.

But I'm not much of a spreadsheet user. My needs are very modest.

BR, Lars.

figueroa · Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2024 4:22 pm Post subject:

OnlyOffice and Sofmaker Office claim superior Microsoft Office compatibility.

OnlyOffice is in the repos. Or you can get in other formats including AppImage here: https://www.onlyoffice.com/en/download-desktop.aspx

Softmaker's FreeOffice is found here: You can get it as a TGZ file.

I run both from a flash drive without anything on my hard drives.

I'm going to paste in my personal README notes regarding my office portable flash drive. Feel free to ask questions as a follow up.

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9259

John R. Graham · Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2024 4:24 pm Post subject:

My own subjective opinion is that, although Excel is the best overall spreadsheet, LibreOffice is good enough such that I'm not really tempted to run Excel under Wine or a VM to get that modest benefit. Also, I'd do almost anything to avoid programming spreadsheet macros in Visual Basic, which has always been a hot mess. I've developed several small macros in Python (just one of the "supported" languages) for spreadsheet automation and extension. My one caveat is that there's not really any good, complete documentation to help you learn the gestalt of macro programming: the learning curve is steep.

- John
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