If we want people to move away from proprietary platforms, we need to offer something better, not just something that’s free.
I’m not happy with LibreOffice which seems to just playing catch-up with what Microsoft did 5 years ago. While there’s quite a few alternatives to Word for most people’s uses, the alternative to Excel has been LibreOffice Calc (or actual coding with CSV, Python or R).
So when I discovered Grist today, I was excited. A modern user interface, open source and formulas from Python instead of Excel’s formulas which always seem to do create some weird error.
I’m just sharing in the hope that others will like it as well.
What’s wrong with LibreOffice?
It works, but the UI is dated and cumbersome (especially Calc). And you need Collabra to work with others online.
My main gripe though is what it isn’t. Remember how Firefox outcompeted Internet Explorer with a better user experience. An open source office suite should do the same. LibreOffices main focus seems to be an option for people switching to open source who wants to keep on working on their MS Office documents. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t make people switch to open source software by itself.
I prefer the dated UI to the moden ones.
I was about to ask the same.
Hmm looks pretty open core to me.
Personally I use OnlyOffice. Works nicely and they recently opened nearly all of their stuff that they kept for subscribers before, so it has become really nice for self hosting (but they also have a desktop and mobile app that works without the server back end).
I misread this as OpenOffice: OnlyOffice looks pretty neat!
Excellent. This is a solution to the problem of “spreadsheets are shit”, where they didn’t just try to make a better VisiCalc/Lotus123/Excel/Gnumeric/OpenOffice/etc.
It satisfies a use-case of spreadsheets (turning data entry/processing into a ui) but way more effectively and logically and unambiguously than a spreadsheet.
JupyterLab is another thing worth checking out, if you want to replace the data-crunching notebook aspects of a spreadsheet, but better.
Well, Grist looks interesting and quite promising!
However, I doubt I’ll ever use it: Emacs’ built-in capabilities for spreadsheets using org-mode are on par with Grist for a single person. Organizations would benefit from the ability to limit what single employees can view on a master spreadsheet, though.
And for any friends using vim, sc-im might be of interest. Here’s a review by Tavis Ormandy, even!
