- cross-posted to:
- fuck_bigtech@europe.pub
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_bigtech@europe.pub
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At this point that’s almost like ransomware.
LibreOffice. No need for MS Office, ever
You’re thinking as an individual. Excel in the business is what keeps Office afloat. There simply is no substitute. Even if you want to go with another spreadsheet, who’s going to trust that to faithfully import Excel data?
How many individuals care about what businesses do though? Usually they provide the hardware too, so it’s whatever when it comes to what the company chooses to use.
These are more individual concerns for personal hardware. So long live LibreOffice.
Bruh. We’re talking about a certain piece of software. You’re getting a bit off track.
Not really. What software and hardware a corporation chooses to use for their workforce is something that employees will not have much control over if they aren’t in a high enough position.
Anything provided by a company is company property anyways. What matters more to me is what is used for personal use than a work computer or work phone or work etc.
So discussion wasn’t off track. You were seeing things from the company perspective assuming the person was seeing it from a corporate position. I’m seeing it from a personal usage perspective and not corporate, which most employees have little control over and it’s not their devices anyways.
I’m not sure I even trust Excel to import an Excel file without mangling it.
LOL, Excel doesn’t mangle shit. It’s best-in-class spreadsheet software for a dozen reasons. #1 being that it never changes. It’s solid, no other software like it. Business won’t risk fucking around with anything else.
SOURCE: Sysadmin for several companies, and one that mainly used Google for Business. Accounting still had to have Excel.
SOURCE: Sysadmin for several companies,
So, not actually an Excel power user then.
Well, no? It would be ridiculous to expect me to be a power user over all the software I’ve administrated. I judge what people need according to business demands and orders from on high. My judgement is that, yes, some business units require Excel.
That’s not what the claim was though, was it. Someone said Excel also mangles files and your counter seems to be that no it doesn’t because you’ve got users who use it. But the one thing does not automatically follow from the other.
you guys are able to save an excel file without it nuking everything?
Tell that to my companies president.
this has been goin on for like a year now. i have an offline profile with no onedrive on my machine, and tried the latest office. theres a slider saying autosave, but i was unable to use it. felt kinda weird that there is no autosave feature anymore. turns out autosave has been a cloud save option, and poor excel was not able to savemy private data to the onedrive datafarm. also the new excel is super slow compared to like the 2016 version, which indicates that theres more bloat under the hood.
The slider you’re mentioning is specifically for cloud sync, correct. But as far as I know Word still does the thingy where it will periodically snapshot and allow you to recover previous versions.
I’m not 100% sure because I don’t use it at home anymore but I still do at work.
No they won’t
This will make happy many companies…
This is certainly about making sure your files are safe and definitely not about stealing your data for training AI. /s
Don’t let Murdersoft steal your data. Don’t contribute to their corruption or genocide assistance.
Step 1: https://fedoraproject.org/
Step 2: https://www.libreoffice.org/I’m 99% of the way on LibreOffice. Gave it a solid go, but the main thing I use in excel is too cumbersome in Libre. I think it’s a great option for many people though.
As a clueless individual, how are they assisting genocide?
Working hand in hand with the Israeli government in mass surveillance and (likely) AI-generated targeting data.
Another user just linked some resources. Incredible the bullshit going on these days. So much going on it’s hard for me to keep up with it all but I’m glad to be enlightened.
For today, you can call me Jeeves. To learn more, a quick search for “microsoft genocide” or “microsoft gaza” will give you the answers.
- https://www.newarab.com/features/ex-microsoft-employees-expose-companys-role-gaza-genocide
- https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/21/tech/microsoft-employee-protests-israel-intl
- https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-israel-protests-2000648637
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cger582weplo
- https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-asked-fbi-for-help-tracking-palestinian-protests/
Wow thanks for the resources! I appreciate you dropping links I had no idea this was going on. Of course Google and Amazon are involved too, could have figured as much. Appears the only way do avoid the military industrial complex is to cease using anything provided from our oligarch overlords. What an age we live in.
Thanks, going to try out LibreOffice. Does it has same (or similar) functions as Word itself?
It’s designed to be very similar. If you are already familiar with Word, you should feel right at home.
I’m not exactly s power user in Microsoft office, but I found using libre office to be very similar. Never had issues using it for school back in the day and I’m sure it’s better now.
My only problem is how Libre Office handles their style system. It’s forced use for things like Footers, and very hard to manipulate and turn off unlike Word.
My own way to bypass it was to replace a new document text into an old converted word text that had the correct footer pages from Word.
I really hate page and Style guides because they always want to propagate everything through entire documents, instead of only changing things on a page by page basis. Adding things to previous pages when you change something isn’t helpful.
I’ve been using it for over a decade now and have only rarely come across broken documents due to proprietary features. If you’re making docs for yourself, I’d say it’s pretty much a 100% replacement. Things can get a bit more fucky if you’re having exchanges where you edit with Libre and someone else edits with Word. But other than that, they’re pretty darn close.
It doesn’t make it flawless (at all), but installing the microsoft fonts helps. Most distros have a package or helper tool for that.
No. That’s the point. LibreOffice does not send your data to Microsoft.
LibreOffice is what Microsoft Office WAS without the bugs. If Word and Excel worked for you before the cloud, Libre is golden.
Pretty much. It was OpenOffice years ago, but then Oracle got involved and so all the devs left and put a new name on it.
Thank you to the skilled developers who bailed on OpenOffice when the shit stain company Oracle bought Sun, and formed LibreOffice.
I can only hope there will always be digital freedom fighters on the side of good.
I’ve donated to LibreOffice, and you should too, if you use their suite.
I love LibreOffice, but I wish there was an Android app. I’ve even considered learning more app development to try and help, but it’s such a daunting task.
There’s a web port AFAIK, web dev has a lower entry level
Check out the Collabra Office android app. It probably covers your needs.
This here. Not fully featured but a decent reader and editor which we hope will improve with time. Good effort on the devs!
LibreOffice & Open Office Document Reader | ODF https://f-droid.org/packages/at.tomtasche.reader/
It can edit files now? Apparently it can. It took a while but it’s finally there. Finally. Good job.
Idiots will still not know where anything is saved. Catering to the technologically illiterate has made society way more illiterate.
I suppose this means Microsoft will not count Word doc file sizes against users’ cloud storage quotas, right? Right??
Anakinsmirk.jpg
It’ll be like Google: everything goes in, nothing comes out unless you jump through difficult hoops, price continually goes up.
Where do you think Google learned it?
? Google invented it.
If you’re in the EU, you can apply for a GDPR request to get sent a copy of all your data in their cloud, same for iCloud. Takes about 48 hours in my experience.
How is this served? Do they send a usb drive? Or a download link of some sort?
It’s a download link, on their respective dashboard you can select between the catagories you want. Like on Google you can select if you want youtube, drive, gmail, or everything at once.
With GDPR they have 7 days to comply, and it should be available to any EU citizen even when outside of EU territory. So I’m assuming you can just change your region. Either way, takeout.google.com is where I’d go.
Yeah, i ised take out before, it took 2 weeks to download my photos, i think 8 60gb downloads. It was painful, I got hopeful that youbhad discovered a workaround.
Ah, that’s unfortunate. Tbh I’ve been downloading 200GB there frequently and haven’t had any issues.
GDPR can also be called upon using a registered letter and they are required to deliver as well. I’m not sure but that might be a way to recieve a physical copy.
Getting anything out is already almost impossible. I moved sway from 3rd party cloud storage a couple years back. I had to get 500gb from onedrive and it was refusing to download at anything more than 50kb/s (my internet was significantly better than that)
Mario_Kart8_deluxe.iso.docx
🤣
No, they upload your file, delete the local file, then oopsie, you ran out of cloud storage, please pay $99/month to access your files.
Isn’t this already the default?
I have to change it on every single fuckin document already. Have done so for years now at work.
// I don’t use Word outside of work…
It’s on per default when signed in to OneDrive. Actually a really nice feature tbh. However, you will be promoted to hell and back if you aren’t signed in to OneDrive. I like the feature for work but I don’t like the idea of it being the default setting.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad idea. Too many people are still not backing up their data, and the article says “…automatically save to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination”.
As long as they really give users full freedom to choose any cloud service, I consider that a win.
“If you don’t have another cloud destination, don’t worry… we’ll automatically save it to your OneDrive account we FORCED you to get when you activated your operating system. Why no! You CAN’T turn it off! Also, we won’t let you edit your files without internet connectivity. You can never be too safe!”
Literally the ONLY thing stopping this from happening is they don’t think they can get away with it yet. I’m NOT going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad idea.
No, this is a bad idea. It’s a terrible idea.
What you said is like saying “well, I need surgery, having the monkey from the forest come at me with a knife is better than nothing.”
Microsoft has proven themselves over and over to be the last company you should trust with your data. Even recently they’ve been responsible for losing a life’s worth of data because of OneDrive
They’re already uploading people’s data off of their computers to OneDrive without consent, then deleting the local copies.
Plus their tech work culture is lacking. When they screwed something up with Office 365 and Outlook wasn’t available for over 18 hours (for basically the whole world), their response was a tweet that it’s fixed.
Whereas CloudFlare messed up something for only an hour, they released a comprehensive breakdown on their blog of what happened, what the root cause was, and what they’re going to do to prevent it from happening again.
Which company seems reliable to you?
A definite plus if one option is to backup to self-hosted platforms.
I’d rather use old ass word perfect at this point
I’d rather chisel text onto stone tablets than that bs.
Just use libreoffice
I actually installed WordPerfect 6 for DOS and MS Word for DOS recently. They’re very relaxing for writing and fast too. Then I use LibreOffice to convert the documents to more modern formats if needed.
That’s dope. I recently read that George R.R. Martin still uses WordStar. Maybe that’s why that dude can’t finish a book series.
“Fuck you, Microsoft.” -Everyone, at all times
Even if you’re not ready to come to Linux, you’re definitely ready to switch to LibreOffice. I dare you to try it.
“Fuck you, Microsoft.” -Everyone, at all times
Eh, that game where you had two gorillas standing on buildings lobbing exploding bananas at each other was pretty cool.
I’m using OnlyOffice bins on linux and find it to be a fantastic suite for my (minimal) uses. Not sure how it works on Windows though.
I’m unclear on the differences between OpenOffice (which I genuinely thought was retired, didn’t realize it was still a thing) and LibreOffice. If it ever gives you trouble, do make the switch.
OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.
Only office is designed for people who work with MS files. Libre Office is for people who work with open files.
Ah. I tried that a few times and didn’t care for it myself. Weird that my brain thought it saw OpenOffice.
It’s still being kept barely alive for whatever reason. But it hasn’t gotten any reasonable updates (I think not even including security updates as of recently, see https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice-vs-openoffice/ ).
See also https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-letter-to-apache-openoffice/
which I genuinely thought was retired, didn’t realize it was still a thing
It’s not gone. It’s still around. Libre is forked from OpenOffice. When Libre was forked, everyone moved to Libre because Open has a lot of issues, which is why Libre was forked.
Got it. Thanks.
Writer and Impress should cover Word and Powerpoint perfectly. Even if your colleagues use Windows, you can still open them just fine.
Excel though is troublesome, especially those with coded VBA or some plugins from companies. But for basic Excel? Calc can do the job ok too.
Yeah I got through school and could work just fine now with Calc. I’m sure it breaks when you get fancy but not that many people get that fancy.
