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from the how-do-I-convert-my-existing-files? dept.
Google Docs vs. Microsoft Word: Which works better for business?:
Have you been thinking of reassessing which word processor your business should standardize on? The obvious choices are the two best known: Microsoft Word and Google Docs. But which is better?
Several years ago, the answer to that would have been easy: Microsoft Word for its better editing, formatting and markup tools; Google Docs for its better collaboration. But both applications have been radically updated since then. Word now has live collaboration tools, and Google has added more sophisticated formatting, editing and markup features to Docs.
TFA requires free registration, but the question is an interesting one: Have Google Docs arrived at parity with, or surpassed, Microsoft Word for business needs? How much work is required to transition existing documents, macros, and workflows?
(Score: 3, Informative) by inertnet on Tuesday June 02 2020, @07:44AM (4 children)
I normally use LibreOffice, but got a company laptop with Office 365 on it. It can't properly save CSV files because there's no option to quote text fields. So the laptop now has LibreOffice on it.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday June 02 2020, @09:55AM (3 children)
I use LibreOffice, too, but older versions of MS Office would quote fields if necessary, i.e., if they contained the delimiter character. Have they "fixed" this in newer versions?
My main quarrel with csv files in MS Office was that they weren't really csv (i.e., comma separated value) files, but ssv (i.e., semicolon separated value) files, despite the use of that name. LibreOffice has support for arbitrary separator characters, both when saving and when loading, so it is a much better choice for dealing with csv files.
However, one problem with LibreOffice is MS Office compatibility. It's good enough if you want to read a file produced by MS Office, and will probably produce good enough MS Office documents, if you don't use LibreOffice features for which there is no MS Office equivalent. However, if you need to accurately reproduce the formatting of an MS Office document, this may not always be possible.
E.g., in Greece, during the COVID-19 lockdown, you had to carry with you a special permit, if you needed to go outside. The simplest way was to send an SMS to a special number, with the permit being the automatic reply you received. An alternative was to print a form, supplied by the government, fill in your name, tick one of six check boxes describing the reason you wanted to go outside, and sign it. (Yes, there was a third option for those who couldn't do that either: just jot the stuff on a piece of paper.) The form was provided in both PDF [forma.gov.gr] and docx [forma.gov.gr] format. In the PDF version, which, presumably, had been exported from whatever version of MS Word the form had been created, the check boxes were perfectly aligned with the corresponding descriptions. When opening the docx file from an older version of MS Office, the checkboxes were slightly misaligned, even though you could easily tell which box corresponded to which description. If you opened the file from LibreOffice, the checkboxes were completely misaligned. Instant vendor and version lock-in!
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Tuesday June 02 2020, @11:22AM
This is a quote from a Microsoft site about quotes in csv files:
After that they show a complex macro with which you can program this feature, which simply used to exist in Excel in the past.
I know about the formatting differences between MS Office and LibreOffice, because it happens to my children's homework too. As students they get a free MS account (smart move from Microsoft because most will never learn about alternatives), but I refuse to buy a subscription just so I can view or print my kid's work exactly as they created it.
About comma vs semicolon, here in the Netherlands it's impossible to use csv files from Excel with comma separators, because our decimal point is a comma. Your only hope of parsing csv data correctly is not to use a comma as separator. And you can't have fields with carriage return and/or line feeds in them, if these fields have no quotes around them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @03:57PM (1 child)
> If you opened the file from LibreOffice, the checkboxes were completely misaligned. Instant vendor and version lock-in!
No this was all solved by having 2 different formats both called docx. One of them is compliant with standards and one isn't. It's not their fault that everyone didn't change the default noncompliant docx to the complaitn docx. The market has decided I guess?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2020, @12:44AM
It is actually 9 different formats. If you smooth over the various BC/FC issues and don't need certain features, you can get that down to 4. Whee. Are we having fun yet?