Just a couple of days ago I discovered ONLYOFFICE. I was very impressed with it and I decided to switch over from LibreOffice to ONLYOFFICE for the desktop (Windows 11 professional). But after some experimentation I am discovering some problems.
Problems with the Windows desktop app of OnlyOffice.
Windows 11 Pro, 25H2
ONLYOFFICE, Community version 9.4.0.129 (x64 exe)
——
I live in the Netherlands but all my software uses English (US) as the UI language. Thus also Windows 11 and Android, but also all apps that I have installed or developed myself.
Problems with the ONLYOFFICE DOC writer :
I start a new document and see bellow “English – United States ” with tool-tip “Set text language” and next to it I see a world icon with tool-tip “Set document language”.
If at “set text language” I choose “Nederlands (Dutch) “ and I start typing, the “Set text language” changes automatically and immediately back to “English – United States ”. Why?
When I choose in “set document language” the Dutch language and if I type dutch words with errors, I do not get any indication of the errors (red underscores under the wrong words). If I press the “ABC” icon with tool-tip Check spelling, it does nothing, no errors identified.
If I type words with errors in a document set for English in “set document language”, it underscores the wrong words with the red lines like it should.
My problems are:
-
Spellchecking in Dutch is not working while in English it is working.
-
I do not understand the difference between “Set text language” and “Set document language”. For me both concepts sound like the same.
Problems with the ONLYOFFICE Spreadsheet:
I Open a .ods file that I had originally created with LibreOffice. I notice that the formulas have changed from ENGLISH (the original) to DUTCH. For example this is a formula I had written originally in LibreOffice;
=IF(LOWER(D7)=“x”;0;IF(F7=1;$C7;0))
… This formula was changed in OnlyOffice to…
=ALS(KLEINE.LETTERS(D7)=“x”;0;ALS(F7=1;$C7;0)
I think it is wrong to change automatically the function names in the formulas like this ! If I want to extend the spreadsheet, I do not want to be using function names in Dutch ! I want to use function names in English like I always did. This is currently a problem for me, if I want to extend spreadsheets with more functionality: I will - unfortunately - have to go back to LibreOffice for that!
Lots of expats live and work in the Netherlands and they do not know the Dutch language. If they want to use ONLYOFFICE and are confronted with this un-requested change in the formulas, they will drop ONLYOFFICE as a tool for them.
There could be cases of Dutch users that are accustomed to write formulas in Dutch and when they open a spreadsheet with formulas in English it could be convenient for them to have the formulas converted to dutch like ONLYOFFICE is automatically doing here. For those cases, you could introduce a settings option to do that. Thus when a spreadsheet is opened and it contains formulas with English function names, do not translate to the local language (in this case Dutch) but offer a setting to allow for that to happen if the user wishes, for example the following option: “Translate function names in formulas to ” where could be ‘Dutch’.