Which proprietary software do you prefer over their open-source alternatives, and why?

mayflower@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 428 points –
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Disagree. Libreoffice is pretty capable for most use cases nowadays.

Compatibility is also pretty good with Microsoft formats despite Microsoft‘s best efforts.

OpenOffice is dead.

it's pretty capable in term of most functionalities but you can't get the formatting, e. g. word docs, exactly one-to-one with its MS office version counterpart. So it would be difficult to share to multiplatforms users.

And Microsoft intentionally introduce bugs in its files design so that certain functionalities will be extremely difficult to replicate.

unfortunately "pretty good" is not "guaranteed", which is often what I need for both work and school. I tried to make myself use only libre options for like a week and just about every assignment I opened was broken in some way or another so I always ended up back in Word.

I'll still use the libreoffice options if i'm, say, already logged into my Linux install and don't want to bother going back to Windows. But since I get Office for free thru work and school, and so does everyone else, well... I just use it.

Not sure how it is nowadays, but back in 2018 Libreoffice Calc was struggling to handle even a single sheet of data entries, performance-wise, let alone multiple sheets.

I'm not expecting it to have every feature imaginable, but I do expect it to not freeze when processing even a relatively small dataset.

Yeah I don’t think that’s an issue anymore.

As someone that despises MS Office, LibreOffice is even worse. All I wanted to do was create a simple database of contact info, donation info, and reservation scheduling for a small nonprofit. Something I could do in minutes in Access. Let me tell you the database part of LibreOffice SUCKS. You can’t even import csv’s! Best you can do is copy paste cells into fields and Hope all the formatting and data types work. And connecting to other external data sources is an incredible pain. I found MS Office on sale for $35 and threw LibreOffice in the trash where it belongs.