Is LibreOffice something for me? First try opening an Excel file hangs immediately

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#1

I am having a look at the feasibility of replacing Microsoft Office (Version 16, macOS) with LibreOffice. I test opened a Word file with track changes, comments, which looked OK. Then I tried to open my most important but also complex Excel spreadsheet (my administration), and I got nowhere: LibreOffice went to 100% CPU on a single core and hung while trying to load that document. I had to kil LibreOffice after a few minutes as it wasn’t responding. I did not see error or warning messages.

As a first experience that isn’t hopeful. I have to be able to do my administration at least. I’m not a heavy office user, Word if I have to collaborate with other who are using it, Excel spreadsheets, I have only two, but they are pretty complex.

So, I wonder if this is going to be a very short experiment or that I am just stumbling across something simple. Can anyone give me tips to find out if LibreOffice is something for me yes or no?

#2

Quite difficult, as we don’t have much informations, why this problem arises.
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My first question would be, if you can open other MS-files on your Mac with LibreOffice? If you can open no file from MS-office, I would assume some “modern” security system restricts access, but I don’t know details of MacOS…
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If you can open other Excel files in LibreOffice there may be a compatibility issue with LibreOffice. I would try the same file on other computers/other OS to rule out a problem with your install and you can try safe-mode on your computer.
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When it is not possible to load this file it would be a nice case for a bug-report, but perhaps you are not willing to share a file incuding your administration.
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It may be possible to recreate the file in LibreOffice (only you have any information on this), but that’s up to you to decide…

#3

Understandable. I can open the other main Excel spreadsheet (also somewhat large, but not complex). It is not an access issue, LO just hangs while reading the file. And indeed, sharing this administration file is not an option. So, the only thing seems to be if there is a way to get debug output while it is opening. Is there?

Recreating that file for a system that seems so shaky is too risky, all effort could easily be for naught. For one because I don’t know if this combination of logic and data in the file then would not trigger it likewise. I must say I had not expected this to happen, having heard good things about LO. Whatever you put in, you should never get a hang or crash, you should get information (or at least that is how we looked at software engineering in the past). Systems should be robust above anything else.

Anyway, I’m willing to try things (especially get debug info), but unless that happens I will have to remain a Microsoft user for the foreseeable future.

#4

@gctwnl, what is the file format? (xls, xlsx, xlsm, etc.).

#5

It is an .xlsm file, it contains one small macro that converts numbers that use comma as the fraction separator into ones that do point (I sometimes have to import data which comes in that comma-format which is Dutch standard, but the whole spreadsheet is in dot-format.

Furthermore it contains two pivot tables sourced from sheets, the content of which are used again in another sheet, so in Excel after updating some sheets, I need to update all pivot tables and then recalculate again to get the remaining sheets in order. Because it is so complex, automatic recalculation is turned off, because otherwise a lot of the time I would be waiting 15-20 seconds for some automatic recalculation to finish . It also contains quite a lot of lookups across sheets. And it contains two graphics based on data in other sheets. The dependencies between various sheets can be convoluted.

#6

Maybe the macro has to be rewritten in Calc.

The pivot tables might need to be rebuilt in Calc to work. Note that Power Pivot does not exist for Calc. Other differences might be found in Feature Comparison: LibreOffice - Microsoft Office - The Document Foundation Wiki

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