Technology

Sometimes it is better to start fresh.

Especially when you want to be the owner of something.

Libre has 35 years of good, bad, and the ugly. It's has 35 years of tech debt, and design choices made. That's not easy to just "fix"

It's a completely different beast to sift through legacy code than it is to just start fresh requiring a completely separate set of skills.

Not getting rid of the old is one of the many reason Windows is such a shit show. Every program today in 2026 asks itself "Am I Barbie Riding Club(1996)? Before it runs because it needs a special compatibility mode". Why inherit among the million other issues if you don't want to?

Old isn't necessarily bad, unless years of decision-making have left it in a massively complex state (see also: Xorg)

The real reason here is that LibreOffice is written in C++, which is falling rapidly out of fashion for modern apps, leading to a smaller supply of developers.

Contrast this with Onlyoffice. Yes, the document engine is still written in C++, however the build tools use more modern items like python and onlyoffice supports having Javascript frontends and scripting, making it easier to source web devs to work on these parts.

Technical debt is a thing. Everyone says Xorg is too old to be maintained so we have to switch to Wayland for example. I don't know the state of Libre Office but it's possible it simply can't be easily migrated to newer, better tools.

Maybe liberation office, or just LibreOffice for short.

The issue is that a lot of processes need to be understood by people who have no IT background. Your basic office drones need to be able to use it, enter data, and make changes. Every applicant in an office job will be relatively proficient in Excel.
If you move your process to another solution, the majority of your employees will have to be re-trained.

As a data consultant, I would say those companies already do question the process, and have done for decades.

Yes there are countless situations where a dedicated system or database could and should replace Excel, but there are just as many scenarios where Excel is ideal, and swapping out a spreadsheet for what would be potentially tens of separate applications across the business, or one absurdly expensive behemoth, to perform tasks that could be done rapidly and clearly in Excel is neither practical nor economically viable for most companies. A spreadsheet is perfect for plenty of situations.

My job is literally to help these companies move to appropriate database solutions, often transitioning away from Excel. But there’s no getting around that a spreadsheet solves (often simple) problems that are impractical with other tools. You can move a company to a supplier’s sector-specific solution and solve huge numbers of issues, but unless that solution exactly meets every aspect of the business requirements, there’s always going to be a fallback and it’s often Excel, for better or worse.

I'm confused. Excel is a spreadsheet, that's always in the form of a table.

I can only assume anyone still asking the question “is Excel really that much better than the alternatives?” lacks exposure to Power Query and its prevalence in business.

It's one of the friendliest programming languages around. If you have written something in VBA then you'll do fine with Python, except for all the bad/outdated nonsense you'll have picked up from that language. And there's interactive interpreters you can just mess around in.

If this doesn't scare you then give it a look:

things = [4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42]
for number in things:
    print(number * 16)

64
128
240
256
368
672

it was partly made for mathematicians who did not know how to develop software, but also for education. so I guess it's a good starter language. but it allows doing way too much things that will be very confusing when overused

If you are running multiple databases you are already a "tech people"

Sharepoint is not a "database". Many people have made that mistake and it eventually comes back to bite you.

I would recommend learning SQL. It is made to be human readable, and we've been perfecting it since the 1960's.

Python let you run SQL on any file, and standard DB technology with a very small number of lines of code. Recommend reading about Pandas

None of those positions are expected to know VBA script either.

No, but for these OnlyOffice is a viable alternative. @surgarsweat was referring to way advanced features, not something secretaries or HR or accounting will need. I have use OnlyOffice for 6 years now, and have yet to find an Excel need it could not fulfill.