XKCD: It's more than a comic

Not quite. There are functionalities, especially in Excel and Powerpoint, that are not present in their Libre Office counterparts, or not as easy to use.

Anecdotally I do find Microsoft easier to use, though that may be because my IT lessons were mostly Microsoft Office for some reason (coding? What's that?)

Also, too real, I feel personally attacked

Edited by HalfFaust on Feb 12th 2019 at 1:02:59 AM

I've been using Libre Office (and before that, Open Office) along with Google Docs/Sheets for a while now. Libre Office just feels "off" to me - it's just not a smooth experience. It feels jittery and harsh. Google Docs is actually much nicer even though it's not as feature-rich. It works for 95% of my use cases.

The difference between a professionally-made product and open source. People get paid to put the polish on it, it's gonna look and feel a lot better.

I've created powerpoint presentations in Libre Office (and Open Office before that). Didnt seem that hard to me, although I dont use the fancy graphics that others might. What I dont like about Word is the "over-engineered" feeling- it does too much by default, and I have to spend more time than I like undoing the autoformatting.

That's one of the reasons why Word is incompatible with other office suites, by the way, a lot of it is the default paragraph and other formating they impose without the user's knowledge. I'm certain that's by design.

If those alternative products don't allow full automation via a scripting language like VBA, then I don't consider them full-featured. Just sayin'.

(Stipulated that you don't really need automation in PowerPoint or Visio.)

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 12th 2019 at 1:15:14 PM

Error Bars.

Opportunity Rover

Yeah, it was a great idea to make Opportunity's camera feed available to the public, and it sparked so much interest in Mars and space. You will be missed, Opportunity.

Opportunity, you did a fantastic job.

"If those alternative products don't allow full automation via a scripting language like VBA, then I don't consider them full-featured. Just sayin'."

Unfortunately, since I dont even know what that means, I am unable to answer that question.

VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is a programming language that allows users to automate common tasks. There are others; VBA is what's used by Microsoft Office and comes bundled in the software.

I use it regularly at work to reformat workbooks in Excel or create files that can be imported/uploaded by our mainframe and other systems. Other things VBA programs (macros) can do: create and send emails, extract information from files, and import or copy files from various sources. I once wrote a macro that opened a browser, loaded a website, read information on the site, and then based on that information determined whether or not to update data in a workbook.

If you've got a job where you do the same process over and over again, VBA's a lifesaver. But most people don't know it exists, let alone how to use it.

Fun fact: Microsoft hates VBA and is trying to move people over to its macro language, which is more secure. I've tried it and... eh. The ability to write raw code will never stop being a draw for me. Assembling programs by dragging and dropping commands into a macro UI is not nearly as satisfying.

I don't code, but I imagine it's like editing a wiki with a "what you see is what you get" editor. Everything is fine until something goes wrong, and then you have no idea how to fix it because it only shows you the end result instead of the raw formatting.

In fairness, macro assembly tools tend to be more robust against syntax errors because the interface simply won't allow you to make those kinds of mistakes.

I don't have a lot of experience debugging them, but the interface that Microsoft provides for macro tracing and debugging is fucking awful.

I thought macros were considered insecure? I remember older versions of Word warning me against opening downloaded documents with macros enabled.

Ugh, now we're getting into some serious detail. Yes, macros are a security risk, but it depends what form they take. Excel, for example, uses VBA as its macro language, which is highly insecure. Old, old versions stored macros on a hidden worksheet and they were in some kind of other language; I never really worked with those.

Access has a macro language that is treated as secure because it can only perform a limited set of actions, but has the ability to control program flow and do all sorts of other things. It also has VBA in the backend in which it is possible to write nearly anything, and that's just as insecure as Excel or Word macros.

There's one thing I've done with spreadsheets that works in Apple Numbers and probably Excel, but not in Google Sheets or Libreoffice. When I filter a sheet to only show lines where the cell in a column meets a criterion, I can copy and paste across multiple lines in Numbers like the lines that were filtered out aren't there. I copy what's visible and paste it in another, unfiltered sheet, and it doesn't copy the lines that were hidden. I paste lines into a filtered sheet, and I don't get cells pasted into the hidden lines. This is immensely useful for the most automation-intensive work I've done with spreadsheets, and it's annoying that I have a workflow that has one step that's dependent on using a specific software that isn't the one that's the most accessible to me.

Also when I'm pasting hundreds to thousands of lines, Sheets will often forget on random lines that I've set all the cells in a column to DO NOT TRY TO FORMAT THESE NUMBERS, so I get a column of film timecodes that have random entries that it oh so helpfully tries to turn into 12-hour time of day.

Later versions of Excel let you specify exactly how to paste copied cells, including pasting by formula, by value, or by value + number format. The latter is great because you can set your font and color and other properties, and they stick, but numbers paste as numbers, dates paste as dates, etc.

"Paste formula results" or how ever it's phrased is very handy. I use a simple "=sum((cell above) +1) counter to number my rows, but there's two kinds of data interleaved, so there ends up being rows where the cell above is empty and I have to copy the results and paste them as simple numbers before I turn in my finished product.

Macros are unsafe if they come from an untrusted source. If you wrote it yourself, of your collegue did it, then of course you can shoot yourself in the foot (as you can with any kind of automation), but it's unlikely that the code will be actively malicious.

Edited by petersohn on Feb 15th 2019 at 9:49:31 PM

The really stupid part is that you have to "unlock" the document (and thus, its macros) before you can look at the macros' source code (though in the case of docx/xlsx/etc. files, you can peer directly into their entrails since they're just ZIP archives).

Night Shift. I like this one. :)

Oh if only.

The alt-text got a chuckle out of me as well.

Physics Suppression

That's a good one. :)