An update to “Sigh”

An update to “Sigh”

When I posted
this
, I had just given up after an extremely frustrating set of attempts to replace the contents of some tables–copying a set of rows and columns in Calc, highlighting the same number of rows and columns in a Writer table, and pasting. What I concluded after too much time and effort was that the pieces of LibreOffice–or at least those two pieces–don’t play well together, or at least not well enough for my Gold OA/Diamond OA project, where preparing the new edition’s books requires copying-and-pasting from the spreadsheets to the documents several hundred times (I’m guessing more than a thousand in all, but definitely quite a few hundred).
A few days later, calmed down and all that, I’ll add a few words–but I don’t plan to try again. Or, rather, I did try one aspect that I hadn’t tried before, with discouraging results.
Calc: The issues encountered
Reasonably trivial: the syntax for Vlookup is slightly different. (The set of options is considerably different–and confusingly so–but it’s possible that Excel 2024 would be more similar.)
Less trivial but I could probably live with it: opening and saving files is somewhat slower. Selecting a large group of rows is
much
slower–so much so that “
probably
live with it” is the appropriate phrase. It would have added hours to the project.
Writer: [Some] issues encountered
Here, all I did was open last year’s Gold Open Access book as a .docx, save it in the OpenOffice format, delete and restore one paragraph, and then try exporting as PDF (I would also have tried printing as PDF through the same Nuance printer driver I use with Word). Although opening and saving were both slower, that wasn’t a huge issue.
By and large, what little I checked of the PDF looked good–until I got to the second table in the book, one where I had to change type sizes and margins to fit six columns of seven-digit numbers (plus commas) and two other columns (one of labels and one with five-digit numbers). And Writer screwed up the table. A lot. That suggested that I couldn’t trust anything without carefully rechecking. OK; I could probably live with that.
Copying from Calc into Writer: The killer
Which brings us back to what I do hundreds of times in preparing the books: select a rectangle from the spreadsheet, copy, select a rectangle with the same number of rows and columns in the document, and paste. I won’t bore you by repeating that I could never get this to work smoothly or rapidly.
Summing Up
I like LibreOffice. I really wanted this experiment to succeed. But I’m too old and tired to go through what seemed likely to be necessary.
I recommend LibreOffice if it meets your needs. I think they’ve gone a little overboard with control options, but that may be me (and, again, MS Office 2025 might be similarly complex). But…
Oh, as to economics. Yes, LibreOffice is cheaper–free–but, let’s face it, I paid $150 or less for MS Office Home in 2019 (the 2024 version is $149 at Amazon), so tha…