[HN Gopher] Univer: Open-Source Alternative for Google Sheets, S...
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Univer: Open-Source Alternative for Google Sheets, Slides, Docs
Author : MitPitt
Score : 142 points
Date : 2024-04-26 16:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Another option: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE
|
| And a similar project for Photos, also end-to-end encrypted:
| https://github.com/ente-io/ente
| zipping1549 wrote:
| > (Pro feature) Sheet collaboration
|
| yeah..
| m4thfr34k wrote:
| Lost me at Sheets Import/Export (Pro Feature)
|
| Open source .... but who would actually use it without the 'pro
| features'?
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Forking seems to be a sufficient value of open source.
|
| Perhaps hou just mean, how do they expect traction if the
| open components dont entice marginal users
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| Only a pro needs to export Sheets.
| williamstein wrote:
| Another pro feature is realtime collaboration: " Enterprise
| Edition -- Provides a commercial version for enterprises with
| specific needs, including but not limited to multi-person
| collaborative editing and browsing, data connectors, and Live
| Share for collaborative browsing."
| kkfx wrote:
| Ehm... Do not take me wrong but "break application silos and
| connect business data to a single platform" mean "escape many
| jails, just come in our unified jail".
|
| To be free we need usable data, so for instance instead of
| strange zipped file formats a spreadsheet (witch should not
| exists, but that's another story) should save data as *sv/SQLite
| DB by default, a visual doc should be LaTeX or something similar
| and so on. The suite should be only a viewer.
| djbusby wrote:
| Now you've picked two jails?
|
| I with you on sqlite but lost me on LaTeX.
|
| Maybe, many open formats, with many open tools?
|
| And I'm over wishing, hoping for better print support on HTML -
| I think is the holy Grail.
| kkfx wrote:
| We have various tools and options, some was a bit lost on the
| road, some are still active and give very impressive results,
| some are crap, popular or not.
|
| First crap is the WYSIWYG model, it produce not so nice
| results and demand very complex UIs. To produce high quality
| documents LaTeX so far is the best tool, PostScript itself is
| not known essentially anymore, {La,}TeX is often wrapper for
| instance in R RMD/Quarto docs to produce nice printouts, it's
| the de facto standard of scientific typeset and have so far
| no better competitors, so it's a wise choice.
|
| Second crap is the spreadsheet concept, yes sometimes we need
| tables, and compute something on them. Org-mode show a simple
| example of table computing without being a spreadsheet, R is
| another, most modern NotebookUIs from Mathematica to Jupyter
| do the same as well. Spreadsheets was an idea to offer
| limited data manipulation to computer illiterate, and failed.
| The long tail of disasters suggest it's time to abandon such
| model. So we need something to store data. _sv works well for
| non-giant dataset, they are simple than some_ ML dialects,
| for more SQLite is a popular powerful tool offering a self-
| contained easy to move storage. I do not like it, but for
| various things is good, for the rest it's deadly simple to
| export the DB in some other formats.
|
| We should re-create the Smalltalk desktop model, the end-user
| programming concept that happen anyway today but hyper
| limited and in user-unfriendly ways. Take a look at Pharo,
| than image not just the bare bone environment but something
| developed like Emacs today. You imaging this:
| http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf or http://w
| ww.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ... for
| the modern world.
|
| Back than it fails because of high costs and general
| ignorance, people simply do not understand the power of this
| model so feel no need of it. Such legacy burden plague much
| the present IT as well, with people still imaging files as
| sheets and folders as suspended folders full of paper sheets
| in a drawer. Mentally most people have issue going past the
| paper tool even today. But today we have hw costs small
| enough and computers themselves spread enough to push again
| such model.
|
| This model is the nightmare of all big of IT, from old IBM to
| modern GAFAM, because they know they can't compete with a
| FLOSS networked desktops model. That's why they do what they
| can to keep people on the old mainframe model, now the cloud,
| and many ignoring this keep mimicking the big e powerful not
| understanding that they try to replicate an archaic model
| born out of some Xerox spoils once they see how to change
| them in anti-users ways.
|
| The "FLOSS alternative to" is the networked, end-user
| programmable desktop model, not some sightly different clone
| of some GAFAM platform.
| ohmyiv wrote:
| > Sheets Print (Pro Feature) Experience the HD printing
| capabilities of Univer Sheets
|
| Is there a reason for "HD" printing vs "regular"?
|
| Sorry, my spreadsheet usage is limited to numbers and letters so
| "HD" printing sounds superfluous.
| rajamaka wrote:
| People add charts, graphics and images etc to.spreadsheets.
| ohmyiv wrote:
| Oh, I'm a dunce. I did think of that before. For some reason,
| when I thought about it, my mind went to slide shows and
| discarded any thought of using images in spreadsheets.
| Thanks, much appreciated!
| michelsedgh wrote:
| Looks great! Apparently the self host docker has collaboration
| features also. Does anyone know if you can integrate it with
| nextcloud or owncloud or similar?
| Stephen304 wrote:
| I hope they add that ability, I'm pretty fed up with onlyoffice
| and nextcloud office (collabora) frequently breaking and having
| terribly buggy/laggy UIs.
| StarlaAtNight wrote:
| I tried the Sheets Big Data example, and it crashed on the first
| run
|
| Reprex-ish: 1. Open this on iPhone Firefox:
| https://www.univer.ai/examples/sheets-big-data/ 2. Select a cell
| and drag down 3. It crashes once it hits row 1M-ish
|
| I get that it might be some kind of memory limitation, but if so
| there should be guardrails to prevent the user from doing it
| sambazi wrote:
| good catch. seems worthy of an gh issue
| Dalewyn wrote:
| At least personally, my chief concern if I was considering "open
| source alternatives" for office software would be to ensure
| interoperability. I use office software for both personal and
| business purposes, and I _need_ my documents to get across in
| perfect shape to their destination for the latter purpose.
|
| For better or worse, that is ensured not by whether source code
| is open or closed but rather by simply sticking to industry
| standards, also known as using what everyone else is using. That
| means Microsoft Office by far and Google Docs to a lesser extent,
| whether anyone likes it or not.
|
| I suppose I should put it out there I also like paying for and
| using Microsoft Office anyway. I get back much more than what I
| pay.
| trueismywork wrote:
| You would then need to make sure to contact your regulators to
| make sure that open source companies are allowed to use
| "industrial standards". All open source alternatives I know do
| support industrial standards (ODF). It's just Microsoft office
| which doesn't use them.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Microsoft Office supports ODF.
|
| Every single business communique I've ever seen and conducted
| that's not PDF comes and goes in .docx/.xlsx/.pptx, though.
| trueismywork wrote:
| Microsoft supports ODF pretty badly. That's why people use
| other stuff.
| zeeed wrote:
| when pronounced backwards it sounds a whole lot like ,,revenue"
| js4ever wrote:
| Seems buggy, if your try the first example
| (https://www.univer.ai/examples/sheets/) then go to data
| validation, try to type chars in the date field, this is crashing
| the whole page ... wow and this is paid stuff?
| pmontra wrote:
| I remember that I self hosted an EtherPad instance
| https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite
|
| There was something like that for spreadsheets too but I can't
| remember what.
|
| The only collaborative projects I had to work on were with
| customers so we always used Google Docs, nothing self hosted.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| ethercalc
| rspoerri wrote:
| I think this is more interesting: https://cryptpad.fr/
| righthand wrote:
| I run a Cryptpad instance and it is okay. Cryptpad fails a
| little bit because you must live within Cryptpad (you have
| import/export documents with no automation about it). What I
| ended up realizing I needed had the following features:
|
| - Encrypted syncing between machines
|
| - I want to write using Sublime Text or LibreOffice Writer, I
| don't want to load up a browser as I often need to focus
|
| - Collaboration features
|
| The first one is made possible by setting up Syncthing on my
| machines. The next two are already provided by LibreOffice. The
| missing piece is if I want to share the document with someone.
| Well this is covered by email OR I have been building a small
| service to sit infront of my remote syncthing to allow me to
| set specific documents/directories as viewable. This is
| basically an Nginx proxy with some fancy configs.
|
| If Cryptpad was more interoperable with retrieving documents I
| would use it more as a remote interface. However it's too
| concerned with it's own idea to ever grow in that direction. I
| really like the Forms you can build with it however. I often
| use that feature for creating invites to parties I'm hosting.
| In the future though my sharing program may have a form build
| feature and Cryptpad will be non-useful to me.
|
| In any case YMMV.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| > I don't want to load up a browser
|
| I didn't know anyone ever closed their browser anymore.
| Honestly trying to imagine a workflow that doesn't include
| regularly using a browser seems very alien at this point.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I'm still waiting for a document editor to approach styling
| sensibly. I don't want to explicitly set color, text size and
| others, I want to define style classes that I can easily change
| later.
|
| I know that the office programs _theoretically_ support this, but
| I found the flow so terrible to be impractical - no wonder casual
| users don 't use it (all the way to many programmers hating
| WYSIWYG because they hate the process of manual styling so much).
| hanniabu wrote:
| Or at least select multiple groups with a similar style at
| once. So you select the first group of text, then a dotted line
| will appear around groups of the same styling, and you just
| hold down control or shift and click each one and it'll
| highlight then entire group that you clicked.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| You and I think like this, because we worked on/for the
| Internet. Unfortunately, other people who use these tools don't
| think like that.
| liotier wrote:
| Styling predates the Internet - Microsoft Word 1.0 for MS-DOS
| had style sheets. WordPerfect 5.0 introduced styles on that
| side. Hierarchically structured text documents with headers,
| paragraphs etc. are even older: IBM Generalized Markup
| Language began development in 1969.
|
| Lack of tooling for hierarchical structure manipulation is
| the mark of aiming for the lowest common denominator -
| casuals who edit short documents one-off.
|
| Microsoft Word Outline Mode is life. My pet feature request:
| outline mode - with a ticket opened to Libreoffice since
| 2011, preceded by an Openoffice feature request from 2002.
| Probably won't ever happen.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Why is this so difficult? We had styles in Wordstar on CP/M
| over forty years ago. I don't remember it being difficult.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| I know that Apple's Pages lets you define styles per document,
| apply them to spans, and then change the style, affecting all
| spans to which it's applied.
| neilv wrote:
| FrameMaker and Interleaf did this pretty well. And SGML-based
| tools, and TeX/LaTeX, of course.
|
| The Microsoft Word way has always seemed to support styles more
| like they were grafted on as an afterthought, without wanting
| to disturb the least-knowledgeable users, to the point that
| knowledgeable users have to tiptoe around all the UI that
| breaks styles.
| hanszarkov wrote:
| Framemaker was great, was the tool used by most US military
| contractors in 90s. Many well known aircraft were designed
| using this document tool. I still try to configure MS Word to
| work like it.
| neilv wrote:
| Exactly. Interleaf was structured-oriented like that, only
| a bit moreso. (I designed "styles" heavily in all 3 tools,
| plus some others.)
|
| Regarding mil/aero, I heard (possibly incorrect) that
| Boeing did some documentation in Interleaf, and part of
| routine preservation of those engineering artifacts was to
| archive... an entire Apollo Domain workstation network.
| Even though later/other versions of Interleaf were
| available on later platforms. I guess they weren't going to
| take any chances.
| rkeene2 wrote:
| I use LyX for this
| igtztorrero wrote:
| Is there any collaboration tool for Markdown documents ?
| bramhaag wrote:
| https://hedgedoc.org/
| sitkack wrote:
| hackmd.io
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Why not just use LibreOffice?
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