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If you've ever tried to use the CONCATENATE function in Microsoft Excel to merge the values in a range of cells, you know it doesn't work unless you add each cell to the function, one by one.
You might have noticed the following message in the support article for CONCATENATE:
Important: In Excel 2016, Excel Mobile, and Excel Online, this function has been replaced with the CONCAT function. Although the CONCATENATE function is still available for backward compatibility, you should consider using CONCAT from now on. This is because CONCATENATE may not be available in future versions of Excel.
Meet the alternatives: CONCAT and TEXTJOIN
for CONCAT and TEXTJOIN:
Note: This feature is not available in Excel 2016 unless you have an Office 365 subscription. If you are an Office 365 subscriber, make sure you have the latest version of Office.
While it is admirable that Microsoft is finally fixing some of the idiosyncrasies of its software, I fear the future will bring a level of fragmentation unseen since the office 2003 to 2007 switch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27 2018, @09:39AM
As a LO user for years (started with version 2.x or OpenOffice) I have to say that you are right in some part.
LO Calc is poor replacement for Excel if it comes to data analysis. It is just impossible to open any larger file with data (>100000 records) without clogging memory extensively and having large delays. Removing rows in such file is an awful experience, and because devs have a top-grade processors with server-like amounts of RAM this is not a problem. This is what itches me the most as I frequently deal with measurements results.
Although significant effort is made in this field, the "curse of Agnubis" as I call it, is still present in some cases. The name is from Agnubis, the experimental FOSS presentation software which had a very interesting save feature (available as a patch): It dumped a whole state of program as a file. The problem was that restoring of such state, as not all objects were configured and "registered" during load, was problematic and frequently did not return all changes. Well, that was probably the last version of Agnubis :). LO tends to "forget" cropped image positions, linked areas, sometimes even text flow properties. Because this happens in larger documents, it's not taken as a bug.
For dev who invented that putting uneditable defaults in "normal" template is a good idea I recommend to work in a more suitable field, which does not require thinking about future actions.
Although Calc, Writer and Impress are indeed usable in a simple tasks and they may replace Office in home/small company environment, the Draw and Base are not. SVG exported by Draw is worse than HTML exported by MS Word.
And the Base. It looks like an ordinary user who wants to make a small relational database of his stuff needs to pay for a server and hire a geek to do it in C++, Python or similar language. Base is a perfect example how to waste a good software by using lots of libraries for the same thing, which has impact on stability and memory usage. And Base is done without any thinking about how it will be used. This is a database, there will be macros everywhere! And in Base lots of normal things like opening system windows requires complex hacks which are more exploit-like.