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Univer: Open-Source Alternative for Google Sheets, Slides, Docs

by MitPitt on 4/26/24, 4:23 PM with 53 comments

• by solarkraft on 4/27/24, 12:15 PM

  I'm still waiting for a document editor to approach styling sensibly. I don't want to explicitly set color, text size and others, I want to define style classes that I can easily change later.

  I know that the office programs theoretically support this, but I found the flow so terrible to be impractical - no wonder casual users don't use it (all the way to many programmers hating WYSIWYG because they hate the process of manual styling so much).

• by kkfx on 4/26/24, 11:48 PM

  Ehm... Do not take me wrong but "break application silos and connect business data to a single platform" mean "escape many jails, just come in our unified jail".

  To be free we need usable data, so for instance instead of strange zipped file formats a spreadsheet (witch should not exists, but that's another story) should save data as *sv/SQLite DB by default, a visual doc should be LaTeX or something similar and so on. The suite should be only a viewer.

• by rspoerri on 4/27/24, 7:08 AM

  I think this is more interesting: https://cryptpad.fr/

• by ranger_danger on 4/26/24, 11:13 PM

  Another option: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE

  And a similar project for Photos, also end-to-end encrypted: https://github.com/ente-io/ente

• by ohmyiv on 4/26/24, 11:56 PM

  > Sheets Print (Pro Feature) Experience the HD printing capabilities of Univer Sheets

  Is there a reason for "HD" printing vs "regular"?

  Sorry, my spreadsheet usage is limited to numbers and letters so "HD" printing sounds superfluous.

• by zeeed on 4/27/24, 6:10 AM

  when pronounced backwards it sounds a whole lot like „revenue“

• by pmontra on 4/27/24, 6:33 AM

  I remember that I self hosted an EtherPad instance https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite

  There was something like that for spreadsheets too but I can't remember what.

  The only collaborative projects I had to work on were with customers so we always used Google Docs, nothing self hosted.

• by StarlaAtNight on 4/27/24, 2:07 AM

  I tried the Sheets Big Data example, and it crashed on the first run

  Reprex-ish: 1. Open this on iPhone Firefox: https://www.univer.ai/examples/sheets-big-data/ 2. Select a cell and drag down 3. It crashes once it hits row 1M-ish

  I get that it might be some kind of memory limitation, but if so there should be guardrails to prevent the user from doing it

• by michelsedgh on 4/27/24, 1:38 AM

  Looks great! Apparently the self host docker has collaboration features also. Does anyone know if you can integrate it with nextcloud or owncloud or similar?

• by js4ever on 4/27/24, 6:18 AM

  Seems buggy, if your try the first example (https://www.univer.ai/examples/sheets/) then go to data validation, try to type chars in the date field, this is crashing the whole page ... wow and this is paid stuff?

• by zipping1549 on 4/26/24, 11:16 PM

  > (Pro feature) Sheet collaboration

  yeah..

• by igtztorrero on 4/27/24, 1:55 PM

  Is there any collaboration tool for Markdown documents ?

• by cynicalsecurity on 4/27/24, 7:13 PM

  Why not just use LibreOffice?

• by Dalewyn on 4/27/24, 4:51 AM

  At least personally, my chief concern if I was considering "open source alternatives" for office software would be to ensure interoperability. I use office software for both personal and business purposes, and I need my documents to get across in perfect shape to their destination for the latter purpose.

  For better or worse, that is ensured not by whether source code is open or closed but rather by simply sticking to industry standards, also known as using what everyone else is using. That means Microsoft Office by far and Google Docs to a lesser extent, whether anyone likes it or not.

  I suppose I should put it out there I also like paying for and using Microsoft Office anyway. I get back much more than what I pay.