this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
457 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
85080 readers
4366 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't think it was ever bad, the compatibility with Microsoft office is not completely their yet making it not usable to Excel experts of for some teachers due to docx support being a bit lackluster
It is worth pointing out that the only reason docx support is lackluster is because of active efforts from MS to undermine third party support. It is a interesting story actually, but I don't recall exactly, but it goes like this, there was some regulatory push to open formats and MS undermined this by creating and making the docx (and all other *x family) open but make it so convoluted and unnecessarily difficult. If I am not mistaken they even keep unnecessarily updating and changing it so third party is always lagging behind in support and the cherry on top that MS don't correctly implement its own format on purpose so the files are effectively broken for anyone that follows the spec to a T.
I remember reading about how LibreOffice was better at recovering broken Excel files than Excel itself. It was a long time ago, but I wouldn't be surprised if that still were the case at all.
I think Excel has more functionality than any of the FOSS alternatives, unfortunately. It's some pretty powerful software.
But I've also run into cases where LibreOffice could do things Excel couldn't at the time.
Like enter strings that are longer than 255 characters into a cell.
Yeah a lot more, 90% won't miss any of though.