brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Brin ([personal profile] brin_bellway) wrote2020-07-10 10:41 am

(no subject)

Originally "switch from Google Sheets to something non-cloud-dependant and open-source" was much lower on the to-do list, but yesterday the ability to copy Google Sheets cells (extremely important for my playflow!) glitched out on Firefox and gave me an impetus.

First I tried LibreOffice Calc, and after all my good experiences with LibreOffice Writer was unpleasantly surprised by how terrible Calc was. Basic actions I perform all the time, like "sort the entire sheet, except the first row, by the values in this column", were somewhere between difficult and impossible.

But *Gnumeric* seems to be a much better fit! The Google Sheets exports needed a *couple* tweaks to their formatting (mostly the colour-coding) to display properly, but it mostly worked out of the box and anyway those tweaks *could be made*, and unlike LibreOffice Calc I can sort my Flight Rising inventory spreadsheets by whatever aspect I want without having to press several buttons each time nor accept that the row of labels won't be at the top anymore. And I can copy the cells, of course. And it seems to consume less RAM than Google Sheets, too.

I won't consider Gnumeric fully tested until I've used it to make an annual household-finance report, but so far I'm very happy with it. And it feels pleasantly ego-syntonic to have taken control of my own spreadsheets.

[personal profile] contrarianarchon 2020-07-10 04:02 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, good to know; I use Calc and am fine with it, but I haven't done anything intensive with it in particular, if I try and end up frustrated, I'll be very happy to know that there's an alternative.

(But I'm not switching now because that would take effort and I basically don't do enough for it to matter)

[personal profile] contrarianarchon 2025-04-12 07:30 am (UTC)(link)
Wandered back to this post and now thinking about how since this post, my use of google sheets has increased massively, because it turns out cloud share-ability is actually really important for a wide variety of sheets which I produce.

I still do all my personal-life tracking stuff in calc, though. Even if that is mostly books.