@Alexandre, Hi, sorry for replying more than a year late, I am only now again back checking only office. I tested again after a year Only Office desktop, last version and I would like to share some thoughts, not only about this feature, but in regard to the spreadsheet app in OnlyOffice in general, I will try to stick my examples to the subject/feature discussed in this forum post as much as possible though my thoughts are more about the general side of things, not just about this specific case so there are times where I must get a little bit sidetracked.
First, maybe some contexts are needed in order to understand my point of view. As my name implies, I work in the finance sector, more specifically, I am a financial analyst at a bank and we use Excel extensively among with other in-house and 3rd party tools for our work. My main interest for Only Office was to be a drop-in replacement for excel in my own workflow, being that I don’t like the sort of monopole Microsoft and Google have on office products, but that’s another discussion that don’t belong here. This time around, I am still looking for that drop-in replacement for Excel, not only for my work, but to use potentially broadly inside a new business in my sector, that I am currently starting.
Unfortunately, my takes on the Spreadsheet app in OnlyOffice still remains the same, it is good for maybe playing around and learning the basicf on how spreadsheets work, but it is still nowhere good enough for any professional work.
In short, it is not just about missing features, I think there is poor management and prioritisation of tasks and also some lack of transparency
About ‘missed’ features, if you have any suggestions\ideas, please share them with us. This forum is the place where we can communicate with our community and some of your ideas are really great.
The issue here is not the lack of reports from OnlyOffice’s users to be honest, most if not all of the issues/missing features I personally have found during my time playing around with the software have already been reported by other users in the forums as far as I have checked.
The real issue in my opinion is that, for example, for this specific post, today, 2 years after, I tested the program again, and this, what I think is a simple feature, but a deal breaking one is still not implemented.
Similarly, I verified the other issues I remember of as well, checked the posts that discusses them, and really most of them haven’t been solved as well despite being reported long, long times ago too.
Your team always gives some obscure internal tracking code that we, users cannot really check for progress on, as far as I know, then you say that we will be updated on the issue, but the update seemingly never come.
The issues I am discussing about here are not some very niche issues as well. Many regular and necessary operaton used in excel would lead in a broken workflow when applied to OnlyOffice, not because of behavioral differences but because OnlyOffice just lacks many basic features of a spreadsheet.
There is this one 2 hours Excel crash course video in our company that even would work on MS Office versions from 20 years ago, but if tried on OnlyOFfice instead, would give new employes in training extreme difficulties after maybe just 10-20 minutes in, which is quite bad, for a supposed complete Suite replacement for MS Office.
For example, this one in my initial post, is something you would teach any beginner in Excel, and would be a habit of any regular Excel user, but wouldn’t work at all here and this is just the basic.
And while still sticking to the subject of this post, there is quite literally no use in a spreadsheet to be used in large complex operations, if this is missing, and one have to manually copy and paste formulas across who knows how many colums each single time one insert new rows. By that point, why not then just make manual calculation if we are already on this track.
Meanwhile, as basic deal breaking features are still missing after years, I see in the forums that small niche bugs are fixed very fast, within a single month or 2, like small discrepencies in text rendering for example, should that really be the priority? How many users would really care if random letters are just so slightly spaced or scaled differently compared to MS Office?
You may say that maybe some features are more difficult to implement than others, and that may be true in some cases, but in here an some other instances, I don’t think so.
For this one specific feature for example, if I was in excel, I am fairly confident that I would be able to replicate most of the requirements for this feature solely using VBA, and in a very short time. Following the logic that VBA macros in excel, and the macro in OnlyOFfice, are just much more limited wrappers around the more powerful underlying code they call into, I objectively don’t see why this feature, would take more than 2 years to come to existence, or even a year unless OnlyOffice is written in assembly maybe?
Jokes aside, my intent is not in any way to downplay the development of this Suite, which I am still interested in following, and I quite like in other areas (Powerpoint and word equivalent) but as I said in a previous comment, it feels to me that the team behind the product, does not put priorities in the right places at all.
If professional adoption is your main goal, which seems to be the case based on your website’s marketing strategy, then you should focus on catering to the actual needs of professional users who require powerful, practical tools. If you promise an MS Office replacement, you need to deliver a product that matches MS Office in functionality, not just appearance.
There are two approaches that can work together. First, prioritize fixing or implementing bugs and features requested by your paying clients as quickly as possible, which you might already be doing.
The other approach is that you actually need to get clients in the first place, so there is a need to focus on what potential clients want. I am on that side of the fence, and it doesn’t instill confidence when basic features are missing and remain unimplemented for years and when the focus seems to be on odd niche issues. As a client, I wouldn’t want to rely on a product that will break my work due to missing basic features since at this point, it stops being a tool, it becomes a nuissance, especially when thee features seemingly are not in the priority list for the product at all. We can do without Excel’s new advanced features which a lot of time, we would use custom Macros for, but not when the basic ones are absent.
It’s also problematic that you frequently promise updates on specific issues but then go silent for months or years, leaving us with no idea of the progress made. Realistically, issues in a work environment need fast solutions or at least know some ETA on when issues would be fixed to find evaluate workarounds and cannot just wait indefinitely for an update that may never happen.
Again, I’m not a paying client yet, though I have investigated being one 3 times already as you may have noticed, but those issues really does not put a good light on how situations might unfold when I as a worker, or when my business does actually become clients.