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

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Excel. There's just basic stuff with LibreOffice and OnlyOffice that work like crap. Like why in LibreOffice when I type =sum then hit tab does it think I'm done with the formula instead of adding the ( and letting me put in the first input. It's awful.
- Honestly anything I can't do easily in Google docs probably means I should just do it in Python anyway.
  
  I need spreadsheets for work in commercial loan underwriting. We don't have a commercial underwriting system yet so all our templates are excel based. I waited to move to Linux solely because of Excel when working from home. During COVID though my work finally gave everyone laptops so I didn't need to do work on my personal rig anymore.
  
  Have you tried quadratic? It's web based but it's an infinite spreadsheet that lets you use JS, Python, and SQL on your spreadsheets and is open source.
  https://github.com/quadratichq/quadratic
  Never used it but they've sponsored No Boiler Plate who is one of my favorite programming YouTubers a few times and he seems to sing their praises.
- I am a big fan of LibreOffice in general and there is not much I need that I cannot do. That said, I agree that Calc has lots of little usability paper cuts like the one you describe that make using Excel a lot more pleasant.
- Libre office's filtering is far better though- being able to apply actual regex instead of Excel's weird proprietary pattern matching is just so much better that I opt for it most of the time.
  
  I'm not usually doing any filtering of information. I'm doing calculation based analysis on tax returns for commercial loan underwriting.
  
  Ah gotcha - well it always comes down to use case, imo.

655 comments