Posts by Daelos

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Re: All you need

If there's one application there is literally no substitute for, it's Excel. I practically live in it. Power query, power pivot, dynamic functions, better charts, Power Bi. It's streets ahead. The rest of the office suite only just beats the competition due to online collaboration features.

Also, 90% of my work clients are on Microsoft 365. The 10% on Google Workspace still have old copies of Office installed just for Excel. I have Google Workspace too just so I can easily collaborate with my Googley clients.

Libre Office is good for some jobs though and have a copy sitting around for unruly CSVs, some other large datasets and ironically to open some older Excel sheets that Excel can't (even the odd corrupt Excel sheet). It's python support is often better than Excel's but that's job dependent.

Metaverses are flopping – hard – says Gartner

Re: Surprise - Second Life reboot fails...

The thing is, Second Life did a better job of the Metaverse than Meta and with far inferior tech.

For metaverses to work, they can't be top down with a handful of megacorps hiving off parts of it for their own use. There needs to be a VR version of http, some common API where anyone can create content or host areas with whatever resources are to hand.

Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail

""who uses as a local email client in 2023. Doesn't everybody use webmail these days?"

Well to be honest, yes, most of us do,"

What parallel universe do you live in? I know very, very few people that use webmail as their primary access to mail. Everyone at work uses Outlook and those at home not on PCs use Mac Mail.

I've got several email accounts and whilst I have set up Edge and Chrome profiles for each account, I still use Thunderbird for my personal email accounts and Outlook for my work ones. I even use Windows Mail for my burner email accounts.

Gmail is okay for reading and writing the odd email but it's totally pants at mailbox management. Heck, you can't even sort by subject or sender email address and deleting multiple emails at once is immensely tedious compared to a real email application.

EU companies claim Google still abusing its Shopping power

Google are guilty of a lot of shady stuff but their shopping site is way down the list of offenders.

Surely they should be going for Amazon, Ebay, Ali Express etc than for Google.

Apple have pretty much cleaned up for music purchases.

Even ASOS has more presence in my searches for stuff to buy than Google.

I don't think I've knowingly bought anything via a Google search other than actual Google stuff.

User locked out of Microsoft account by MFA bug, complains of customer-hostile support

Had a vaguely similar problem with a client who lost access to a Google Workspace account.

Getting in touch with them is practically impossible. In fact I would say actually impossible for a normal soul.

If it weren't for the fact that I had access to an unrelated reseller account where I could actually contact a human being, I doubt I would have been able to get the issue fixed.

There's many things Google do better than Microsoft but support isn't one of them.