8:06pm

A few months ago, I went on a week-long excursion into the question of leaving both the Microsoft and Apple ecosystems behind. I concluded that the Apple ecosystem was too useful and integrated into my life to walk away from and still use a MacBook as my primary computer. 

As those of you who have followed me for while (or know me personally) are aware, I am a former Network and Windows Systems Admin. At one point in my life, I ate, breathed, and slept the Microsoft ecosystem, and even though I migrated away from Windows as my primary operating system, I still kept Microsoft Office.

I stumbled across an article, though, that has me re-evaluating my affection for Microsoft Office. To the point that I have removed it from my MacBook to explore going back to a life without it.

Here’s the article from XDA Developers.

As part of this, I realized I really need to update my monitors. My main monitor is crisp and clear and excellent graphical detail. My left (and second) monitor… is not. Even with that being the case, Microsoft Excel with my Writing Log open still looked acceptable, whereas LibreOffice Calc (the spreadsheet within LibreOffice) with my Writing Log open doesn’t look as good. I realized it was at least 50% the monitor’s fault when I moved the window to my main monitor to focus on some necessary changes that I will explain below.

Most people in the computer world are familiar with OpenOffice. It first came on the scene at least fifteen years ago, maybe longer, and it was primarily maintained by developers at Sun Microsystems (the people behind Java, as well). When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, they acquired ‘ownership’ of OpenOffice almost as a fiat accompli. A group of developers didn’t like the direction the new lords and masters were taking OpenOffice, so they forked the code and started LibreOffice.

Like its forebear, LibreOffice is free open-source software. Like OpenOffice, it’s a tad more clunky than the latest iterations of Microsoft Office.

But having played around with a few settings to fix a problem that became apparent almost immediately, I’m not sure but what LibreOffice is the superior product. Let me grab a screenshot of my Writing Log to have an reference example going forward.

So, if you look at the Daily Word Count and Total Time columns, you’ll see different fill and text colors. Those are conditional formatting that I set up in Microsoft Excel, and even in the current version, the dialog box to do it looks like something out of Office 97.

While you’re editing the range of cells conditional formatting applies to (in Excel), you can’t use the arrow keys to move around the text field, because Excel interprets that as you trying to change the cell range, so it starts moving the selection around on the worksheet underneath.

In LibreOffice Calc, the conditional formatting mechanism uses the styles mechanism to handle all the formatting and treated all the different conditional formatting rules as different styles. My styles list in my Writing Log had something 245 conditional styles.

While the distibuted configuration makes it a tad more clunky to set up conditional formatting, the LibreOffice system makes it way, way easier to modify. If I manage to keep LibreOffice (especially after I upgrade to 4k monitors), I think I’ll create my 2026 Writing Log from scratch inside LibreOffice, instead of copying the master file I created in Excel.

The main point of the article above is that Microsoft makes their XML file format very cludgey in what is probably an attempt to lock people into their software ecosystem, and seeing 245 conditional styles in the styles list of LibreOffice Calc, I don’t have too much difficulty believing it.

The one thing I don’t like about LibreOffice Calc versus Microsoft Excel is that I have to bring the worksheet zoom down to 74% to get everything on the screen that was on the screen in Excel with the zoom at 100%. That’s a UI scaling problem, I know, and there’s probably even a way to fix it that doesn’t involve dropping the zoom to 74%. But that’s a problem for after I upgrade my monitors.

Right, then… quasi-rant over.

As you’ll probably also notice in the screenshot, my writing has tapered off again. Trust me, I’m at least as unhappy about that as you are. The thing is, I have no idea why it always tapers off. Never do.

I managed a week of daily writing this time.

Doing the math, I’m no longer certain I can finish Torvalin by the end of the month. Even at a consistent pace of 4,000 words per day, I’d still be about 10k words or so under where I want the story to be.

I’m going to focus on Shepherd Security Services until I get Sol finished. I have active pre-orders for those. From here on out, though, I will not create pre-orders for titles that are not at the editing stage… at the very least. I should’ve known better, but I created the pre-orders for Lynxeen, Vorcalix, and Sol in the midst of the Hell Funk, so I probably was not thinking as clearly as I could’ve been.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I should probably write up my Ten Commandments for Writing & Publishing and post them somewhere very visible… in case I hit another Hell Funk or something.

But that’s a thought for another time.

If you’re reading this, thanks for sticking with me.

I hope the days treat you and yours well. Stay safe out there.