- cross-posted to:
- tecnologia@lemmy.pt
- cross-posted to:
- tecnologia@lemmy.pt
Nextcloud, Ionos and other partners are developing an open-source office suite under the project name „Euro-Office“ as an alternative to the market-dominant Microsoft Office.
The two partners are not starting from scratch, but have forked the components of OnlyOffice available as open-source code and want to build on them. In the summer, the software is then intended to replace the previous office component Collabora in Nextcloud and the Ionos Nextcloud Workspace. A ‘technical preview’ is already available on GitHub.
While this is a good news, I think they should move from github, you know microslop copilot…
Are there any actually good replacements for Excel? As an intermediate/advanced user, every alternative I’ve tried to date pales in comparison. I can’t see anyone in my industry switching away from MS because of this, as things currently stand.
Edit: I didn’t expect so many replies. I use Sync (I know, it sucks and is dead) and it didn’t inform me I had replies, so I’m only just seeing them, apologies. Can’t get to everyone though.
For those who think we’re using Excel as a database, not really. Can’t get into specifics regarding industry, but personally I use Excel daily for a variety of things, none of which is data entry. I build stuff to help calculate and solve issues; I’m not following a specific process in most scenarios. 🤷
Probably more credibility if you actually give real, specific examples of what you cannot do on Libre Calc that you require?
Oh boy!
Lack of proper table support.
FILTER is borked.
MAP functions and their ilk aren’t there.
The DBASE functions have serious issues.
Array formulas sort of work but often results in issues.
Calculation speed is super slow. I’ve tried converting a pension forecast tool and it just ran so incredibly slowly.
As someone self hosting my own Nextcloud with Collabora, I can tell you that living with LibreOffice is easy - but living with Libra Calc is impossible. It is not a workable, serious solution.
I appreciate you attempting expansion, I will say it is still difficult when you’re asked for specific detail and your response consistently States generalities like:
“lack of support” - meaning what, feature isn’t there at all? Doesn’t display existing tables from uploaded excel docs?
“has serious issues” - meaning… what are they?
“results in issues” - …
“…is borked” - c’mon
and "incredibly slow " - relative to what? Double time of expected from excel? Triple? Extra two seconds per attempt?
You’re using subjective terms that mean people can’t A) determine if you’re problem will impact them as well and B) you’re not describing your perceived issues well enough to allow experts reading along here, now or in the future, to offer you actual solutions or alternatives.
That considered, it makes you come off as a person who doesn’t want their perceived problem solved.
Alternatively, it comes off as a person who has tried this in earnest numerous times and is exhausted by people who assume that they haven’t given things a genuine shot.
And there are few things more grating than a tech person assuming the other person doesn’t know what they are doing in earnest just because they were short with you from having already explained it elsewhere, numerous times over time, to the same result of what is, effectively, tone policing. “You didn’t phrase this in a technical manner thus I assume you know jack shit.” Not far off from sea-lioning really.
You’re bringing a lot of personal momentum to your responses obviously. My point was clear, state specific issues to allow the potential for specific answers. If you’re moving in good faith, that’s the approach.
The perspective here is one of someone resistant to change, blaming FOSS as an easier scapegoat. Always simplest to blame the tool over the operator… And often, that “dumbshit, broken printer that won’t print!!!” Just wasnt plugged in.
Your rebuttal is borked.
I hear this argument a lot but no one ever gives details as to what common features excel has vs say libreoffice. I’m really curious, because i’d like to contribute free time in this direction.
What I always find missing in all these Excel vs. other spreadsheet software debates is the rationale for using a spreadsheet in the first place. I work a lot with large corporations, and it’s often the case that they can’t move away from Excel because, in the past, they relied on it to solve a process in a way that—at least today—could and should be handled better. Perhaps we should question the process more often and the Excel alternatives less.
Why don’t they contribute to LibreOffice Online?
Because the Only Office source is more modern while Libre Offices’s source code now is around 35 years old. At least that was the reasoning in one of the articles I read.
You got that backwards. Its open office that hasnt been updated in years.
So old code is now suddenly bad? Weird and somewhat also not the case, as LibreOffice is constantly updated.
I guess it is a preference. I for myself tend to rather use a FreeBSD than Fedora for production environments.
That was my thought and Nextcloud already supports Collabora Office which is a fork of LibreOffice Online I believe.
Tried nextcloud, 3 updates per day, fuck off.
I moved my data there a couple of months ago and couldn’t be happier. Maybe try a different provider?
I love Nextcloud, but I have everything running in containers, and I have them auto updating on system boot.
Its a super powerful software. Its on my top list of self hosting software. But it breaks so often with auto updates. And there is the potential of having to reinstall it because of a broken install, and your personal service being down for weeks.
Borg backups work, but they are not intuitive to setup when using containers.
Auto setting up trusted domains is not intuitive.
My solution going forward, is to have secondary containers which I don’t update as frequently, that point to the same user files folder on the primary containers. Kind of like having my services load balanced. I plan on doing this for some of my other containers that are frequently down.
In my experience, services that require more than 1 container are the ones that crash the most. Especially when they connect to a database container.
Honestly this stinks of potential enshitification downstream. Libreoffice and Openoffice are just fine. Nextcloud’s posture in the market and “Brand name feel” sets of my alarm that it is like 5 minutes away from charging people subscriptions for self-hosting if they don’t already. Synology runner up?
Nextcloud’s business model is service contracts. Which is going great. The origin story of Nextcloud is that ownCloud was too commercial (open core) instead of fully open source, so they forked it. I haven’t seen any moves by Nextcloud that has moved their focus from open source to hint at enshitification. Your claims are rather bold and without proof. Nextcloud doesn’t even use LibreOffice, but the online derivative Collabora. Also OpenOffice has been dead for more than a decade so I don’t know why you even reference that. Are you confusing this with the totally different OnlyOffice (‘only’ not ‘open’) which this news is actually about?
Their fork of OnlyOffice is actually because it is open core and they want it fully open source: https://github.com/Euro-Office/#euro-office-liberates-the-onlyoffice-code-base
I haven’t made any claims. My comment is about the “vibes” of NextCloud as a “product” and “company”, if you want objectivity in what i’m saying.
Im not a nextcloud user and it’s good that you personally don’t feel that they’ve made any moves towards enshitification but we’ve seen countless companies start with great and pure intentions that unfortunately throw that all out the window when: an opportunity to be a market leader, opportunity of profits becomes too great, or the userbase becomes significant enough. “Open Source” seems to unfortunately be part of the tech company corporate playbook.
We live in a world where organizations and companies get to change terms after sale now. While it is not zero sum, if you’re not exercising skepticism towards those trying to offer you something, you’re probably doing yourself a disservice. Nothing is truly free.
Also, OpenOffice is definitely not dead lol https://www.openoffice.org/
Nextcloud uses GNU AGPLv3 and explicitly doesn’t use a CLA: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/blob/master/contribute/HowToApplyALicense.md. They do this to prevent themselves from relicensing it. So they can’t suddenly take the code and make it closed source.
Regarding OpenOffice. I used to be a big fan of OpenOffice more than a decade ago, but LibreOffice has become my open source office suite since then.
Apache OpenOffice (AOO) might still work, but there is no significant development (see commits of the last year https://github.com/apache/openoffice/graphs/contributors?from=2025-05-01&to=2026-04-02&type=c). Only one person is committing on a daily/weekly basis, but this person is in their own words not a developer (https://github.com/apache/openoffice/pull/202#issuecomment-2561915795). Most of the commits are ‘cleanup’ commits where whitespace or comments are changed https://github.com/apache/openoffice/commits/trunk/.
LibreOffice on the other hand is actively developed. Others who are actually involved explained this better than I can:
Good podcast episode interviewing Frank Kolichek were the folk is mentioned : https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-02-nextcloud-frank-karlitschek/
Sounds good to me! I hope they support the open document formats better than onlyoffice currently does. Also euro-office isn’t a particularly good name, although it has the advantage of being explicit about where it’s based.











