Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I am not an MS Office user, but I have seen the effect of format lock-in with Google Sheets. A few months back I began a project to de-Google my life, which went pretty smoothly until I tried to download my spouse's accounting spreadsheet from Google Sheets to Excel format. Both LibreOffice and Excel could open it, but nothing worked correctly. So for several months, I kept that one Google Sheet live until I could come up with an alternative. When I created the original file in Sheets, I was blindly using all sorts of features and capabilities (including Google Forms) that simply have no direct analog in other products.

A couple of days ago I bit the bullet and dug into the Excel file and figured out how to redesign everything and get it going again. Yay me. I'll admit I don't like the UI in LibreOffice, but I didn't like it very much when I first tried using it (as Star Office) back in the 90s either. Yet I keep coming back to it.

If I'm going to be locked into a format or app, I'd rather it be something like LibreOffice.

 help



Your use case (specifically with Forms) seems aligned with Grist, which is also open source and has been adopted by the French government.

In my experience, it’s much stricter than a standard spreadsheet though. It feels a bit like moving from Python to Java.


Did you try exporting it in the OpenDocument (.ods) format?



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: