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Which spreadsheet program do you run? |
Gnumeric |
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2% |
[ 1 ] |
Libreoffice Calc |
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82% |
[ 33 ] |
Calligra |
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0% |
[ 0 ] |
Excel under wine |
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5% |
[ 2 ] |
Excel on a Windows VM |
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7% |
[ 3 ] |
Other (please post) |
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2% |
[ 1 ] |
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Total Votes : 40 |
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Author |
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Tony0945 Watchman
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Joined: 25 Jul 2006 Posts: 5127 Location: Illinois, USA
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Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 3:56 am Post subject: Which replacement for MS Excel? |
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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 |
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Fitzcarraldo Advocate
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Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 4:21 am Post subject: |
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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. _________________ Clevo W230SS: amd64, VIDEO_CARDS="intel modesetting nvidia".
Compal NBLB2: ~amd64, xf86-video-ati. Dual boot Win 7 Pro 64-bit.
OpenRC systemd-utils[udev] elogind KDE on both.
My blog |
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pjp Administrator
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Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 5:06 am Post subject: |
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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. _________________ Quis separabit? Quo animo? |
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asturm Developer
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Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9088
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Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 5:15 am Post subject: |
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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.
Tony0945 wrote: | Apparently the whole suite loads before you can select "Calc" |
No. It is a single binary, but every component can be started directly without the need for starting the 'greeter'. Load time depends very much on the complexity of your files; built from source is much faster than the -bin in that regard. |
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pjp Administrator
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Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 5:54 am Post subject: |
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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. _________________ Quis separabit? Quo animo? |
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fedeliallalinea Administrator
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Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 6:16 am Post subject: |
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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. _________________ Questions are guaranteed in life; Answers aren't. |
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Banana Moderator
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C5ace Guru
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Posted: Mon Jun 29, 2020 9:39 am Post subject: |
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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. _________________ Observation after 30 years working with computers:
All software has known and unknown bugs and vulnerabilities. Especially software written in complex, unstable and object oriented languages such as perl, python, C++, C#, Rust and the likes. |
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figueroa Advocate
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Posted: Fri Jul 03, 2020 9:05 pm Post subject: |
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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. _________________ Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
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Naib Watchman
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Posted: Fri Jul 03, 2020 11:26 pm Post subject: |
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jupyterlab with panda _________________
Quote: | Removed by Chiitoo |
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pjp Administrator
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Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2020 3:09 am Post subject: |
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Naib wrote: | jupyterlab with panda | Is that an actual alternative, or is it primarily writing python code? From reading the jupyter page, it seems like they prefer using pip, "conda" and npm rather than package management utilities. _________________ Quis separabit? Quo animo? |
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Naib Watchman
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Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2020 3:50 pm Post subject: |
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pjp wrote: | Naib wrote: | jupyterlab with panda | Is that an actual alternative, or is it primarily writing python code? From reading the jupyter page, it seems like they prefer using pip, "conda" and npm rather than package management utilities. | depends on what you are wanting. Pandas is really REALLY good. sure you need python and such but damn ... its a lot nicer to do stuff in then excel (and I am someone that loves excel... I have a full controller in excel just because ) _________________
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figueroa Advocate
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Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2020 4:12 pm Post subject: |
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If you love Excel, you should be willing to die for LO calc. _________________ Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
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Naib Watchman
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Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2020 4:30 pm Post subject: |
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figueroa wrote: | If you love Excel, you should be willing to die for LO calc. | except... Excel >> LO calc. the UX is a lot more fluid and thought out _________________
Quote: | Removed by Chiitoo |
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pjp Administrator
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Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2020 5:16 pm Post subject: |
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Naib wrote: | depends on what you are wanting. Pandas is really REALLY good. sure you need python and such but damn ... its a lot nicer to do stuff in then excel (and I am someone that loves excel... I have a full controller in excel just because :) ) | I seem to have an allergic reaction to python, but I'll see if I can make heads or tails out of how to install it. What is in the gentoo repository doesn't seem to match up directly with the website. _________________ Quis separabit? Quo animo? |
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Naib Watchman
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Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2020 5:27 pm Post subject: |
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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
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Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2020 5:44 pm Post subject: |
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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. _________________ Quis separabit? Quo animo? |
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Tony0945 Watchman
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2020 4:28 am Post subject: |
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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. |
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The Doctor Moderator
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2020 5:14 am Post subject: |
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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... _________________ First things first, but not necessarily in that order.
Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box. |
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Ant P. Watchman
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2020 6:50 am Post subject: |
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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. |
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Tony0945 Watchman
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Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2020 1:24 pm Post subject: |
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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. |
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lars_the_bear Guru
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Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2024 3:26 pm Post subject: |
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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. |
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figueroa Advocate
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Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2024 4:22 pm Post subject: |
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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.
Code: | OpenOffice:
http://openoffice.org
from: https://apprepo.de/ at: https://apprepo.de/appimage/openoffice
OnlyOffice:
https://www.onlyoffice.com/en/download-desktop.aspx
LibreOffice (Fresh Basic Portable):
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/appimage/
FreeOffice (2018 and 2021):
https://www.freeoffice.com/en/
https://www.freeoffice.com/en/service/tips-and-tricks/portable-installation
https://www.freeoffice.com/en/service/tips-and-tricks/textmaker
Note: softmaker-freeoffice-2021-1064-amd64.tgz contains an installation script and an LZMA compressed archive. 125 MB
FreeOffice for Linux can also be installed on a USB flash drive. Here's how it works:
Note: FreeOffice2018 and FreeOffice2021 can coexist on the same flash drive. Just adopt a unique naming convention for each of them.
Install FreeOffice on the built-in hard drive of your Linux PC. This lets you work with FreeOffice as usual, even without a USB flash drive. I used MX-Linux-18.3 for FreeOffice2018 and MX-Linux-21 for FreeOffice2021. Both run without apparent error under Gentoo, so the application programs appears to be self-contained. Both were installed from the MX-Package-Installer.
Create a folder on the USB flash drive and copy the entire contents of the FreeOffice application folder (usually /usr/share/freeoffice2018 or freeoffice2021) to this folder:
mkdir /media/disk/freeoffice (Replace /media/disk with the path of your USB flash drive. "freeoffice" can be "freeoffice2018" or "freeoffice2021" or most any other name.)
cd /usr/share/freeoffice2018
cp -Rv * /media/disk/freeoffice (replace /media/disk with the path of your USB flash drive)
In the new freeoffice folder on the USB flash drive, create a file with the name portable.txt. Its content is irrelevant:
cd /media/disk/freeoffice (replace /media/disk with the path of your USB flash drive)
touch portable.txt
The portable.txt file is just a "marker file" that informs FreeOffice that it should run in portable mode and not leave any configuration files on the host operating system.
Launch TextMaker:
textmaker
TextMaker then creates the folder /media/disk/freeoffice/SoftMaker for your documents, templates and settings. Next, TextMaker copies its default document templates and configuration files into this folder. Once the installation is complete, TextMaker starts.
If you want, you can now copy additional documents and templates to the flash drive. Put documents in /media/disk/freeoffice/SoftMaker and templates in /media/disk/freeoffice/SoftMaker/Templates 2018.
To launch one of the programs, open the FreeOffice folder on the USB flash drive and double-click (or click, depending on your file mananger settings) on the program you want to launch.
Run from PlanMaker (TextMaker or PresentationMaker) shell script as follows:
#!/bin/sh
cd freeoffice
exec ./planmaker
or for TextMaker2021
#!/bin/sh
cd freeoffice2021
exec ./textmaker |
_________________ Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
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asturm Developer
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Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2024 4:24 pm Post subject: |
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figueroa wrote: | OnlyOffice and Sofmaker Office claim superior Microsoft Office compatibility. |
Of course they would claim that. But talk is cheap. |
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John R. Graham Administrator
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Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2024 4:24 pm Post subject: |
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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 _________________ I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters. |
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