Which proprietary software do you prefer over their open-source alternatives, and why?

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Microsoft Excel
- Hah, with no attempt to explain because it's very self explanatory.
  
  Ha yeah but to explain, without my excel vba scripts the place I work at would fall apart. Too many systems with varying formats from our clients and excel is the middleman, for better or worse. Nothing else does the job, only excel.
  
  Libre calc is a great replacement imo. It has support for excel vba macros, but you can also make macros in Python, JavaScript, and their own macro language. For the most part it's cross compatible with excel, but doesn't support their xlsm file type as far as I know.
  
  I mean, I tried.
  Problem is, I have only limited power in an enterprise led decision. I argued to have Notepad++ enabled on my login for my purposes and they accepted it - but excel is so engrained in everyone's offices I simply cannot change.
  Excel just works..there's no fuss or stress or drama with admins. It just fucking works. I'm getting too old for hassle, so office it is.
  
  It's fine if you never leave Calc. If you're trying to use Calc at home and Excel at work, it's absolutely awful. Key bindings aren't the same. Basic things like auto completing formulas is different. It's terrible to flip between the two.
- That’s what I came here to post. People always think that other software are actual options. If you are using drools rules then other software can’t even follow the xlsx standard properly enough to even allow drools to compile correctly. It sucks because I’d rather not have to get licenses for my whole team to use excel when there’s plenty of free options and we don’t even use it that much, but it’s just so far into another league it isn’t even close.
  
  Weren't the MSFT X standards intentionally poorly defined with the goal of smothering OpenDocument in the crib?
  
  I mean, maybe, but that doesn't really change anything. Excel is better for a lot of use cases and whether that's due to terrible antitrust violations or not doesn't really change the fact of the matter. I honestly would love to use Libre or Open office, and it's literally the first thing I tried, it just doesn't work for most of the things I would need it for.
  
  What are drools rules? All the pages I'm reading are very high level "bueiness rules" what does that even mean?
  
  oh sorry, forgot I wasn't on a programming community. It's a software for writing rules for business operation. Not relevant to the majority of people on the planet.
- Why excel? For most things I wouldnt say Libreoffice is worse. Impress though is something to learn.
  But now I can use Impress and Writer, Calc too but the graphs are shit. Thats fair to say, graphs in Calc are horrible. The rest should be pretty much the same... I guess, havent used Excel in years

655 comments