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You're completely full of shit. LibreOffice can connect to a wide variety of ODBC data sources, including MSSQL. Are you generally this stupid, or just on Thursdays?

I think saying there is, "no way" to do that in LibreOffice may be a little much. Have you ever looked at using a JDBC Connection or the MySQL Native Connector?

I think saying there is, "no way" to do that in LibreOffice may be a little much. Have you ever looked at using a JDBC Connection or the MySQL Native Connector?

That's fine and all. But it doesn't matter since LibreOffice is distributed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, not GPL. http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...

I don't know offhand if there's a conflict between the App Store and MPL.

I agree, but as far as I know, on Debian it does not depend on Java. The Libre Office requirements page says it is only necessary for certain 'Base' features: http://www.libreoffice.org/get...

(I have never seen the popups, or had Java installed on my machine for a long time, so I was curious. Libre Office also runs pretty fast imho.)

NeoOffice basically stripped it from Base, and their download page says: "Base users: if you use Base, we recommend that you use OpenOffice with the Oracle Report Builder extension. The Base features in NeoOffice 2014.6 are much more limited than OpenOffice." (http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/macappstore.php)

LibreOffice Base seems to be what you're asking about.

http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/base/

The list concentrated on money. EG sponsorship. This ignores contributions and resources directly contributing code.

http://intel-iscsi.sourceforge...
http://www.crunchbase.com/orga...
https://www.virtualbox.org/wik...
http://www.libreoffice.org/

Is coming to android pretty soon?
dev git download: http://dev-builds.libreoffice....

100% agree!

If businesses were smart they all would chip in $10 say towards LibreOffice, Inkscape, Krita, FreeNAS, GimpShop, etc.

They could be free of the tyranny of proprietary vendor-lock file formats for once and for all. But yet they would rather pay to suffer ! **shrugs**

Could you image how much development could get done if open source alternatives to X could get funding!? Not say money is a silver bullet TM but it certainly would go a long way!

You, sir, are a fucking idiot. His idea of fixing a bug is to ignore it. Feature, not bug. In his own words:

Citation.

Status: RESOLVED NOTABUG

Yupp, journal corruptions result in rotation, and when reading we try to make the best of it. they are nothing we really need to fix hence.

Moving form office to office, I've found that LibreOffice does better than MS Office at properly importing office documents from various versions of MS Office. YMMV.

Yes, I totally agree that importing is rarely a problem. However LibreOffice fails in many aspects. our publishing house made the switch to LibreOffice early this year after basic testing.

For a simple example that Writer is not fit for businesses: it cannot properly handle even basic tasks such as working with templates. Without an add-on it is not possible to change the template. Yes that's right. Only documents that are created based on templates are coupled to that template. The available add-on (templatechanger ) to change this is only available for the latest version via a user that added it to a bug report (many thanks for that btw) and only works with Writer. For Calc changing templates is simply not

Another function that is sorely lacking as an editor has been in MS Office since version XP, around ~2001 I think. If you receive a document from a freelancer it often has the wrong styles in it or only a few. To change this quickly in MS Office you load the tempalte you want. Select the style that is wrong, click select all instances followed by a double click on the style you want. This way you can quickly fix documents.

I find the default colors of LO's panel dreadful. There are better colors available though, such as http://extensions.libreoffice.... Why are these not used or given as an option?

If you save a file on a NAS and select Tools/Share Document so more people can simultaneously work in it, often the formatting of the file changes randomly between saves. Old formatting often re-appears.

Calc cannot properly handle conditional formatting. This morning I created a Calc document with a cell that could have one of three colors based on the content of three other columns. I then copied the formatting to more cells in the column. After saving the document only the first cell formatting is kept, the formatting in the other column cells is lost.

For our publishing house LO mostly suffices, but there are many ways in which it has to improve for other business to even consider it.

Quite the contrary: StartSSL is accepted by every major browser and SSL/TLS library, and has been for years.

Well-known sites, like EFF.org, LibreOffice, and others use StartSSL-issued certs and don't have any issues. Sure, they're not Google-sized sites, but they're fairly major.

I do the same, though mostly as a small business. Very occasionally I find someone for whom the document doesn't work right. In those cases I simply say something like "oh; it must be a bug in MS Office; you might try LibreOffice; its available for free from https://www.libreoffice.org/" everybody I have done this for has downloaded that and been happy.

So, using the post right above yours...

https://www.libreoffice.org/
http://www.linuxmint.com/
http://www.gimp.org/


how are any of these quality apps tracking, selling my data or any of the other nonsense you posted?

They say they are "free" and they don't beg for money every time you use them.
They do have a donate page on them, but you are free click "not now" and contniue to download it.
How hard is it to post something that is not free as "freemium" or "in app purchases" instead of free?

"As I said, levels of ignorance."

What does this even mean? people are ignorant when "free" games beg for money and this is not 'false advertising'?

Office with no ribbon?
https://www.libreoffice.org/

libre/openoffice base can both be used as a frontend to a mysql database. i'm surprised so few people know about it.

http://extensions.libreoffice....

So you didn't bother downloading the offline http://www.libreoffice.org/get... documentation?

Apparently they didn't, presumably because they use Ninite to install their standard software bundle. LibreOffice has a track record of not working well with Ninite, so this isn't a huge surprise.

In any case, would that have fixed the main problem, which was that the search feature didn't actually find something as basic as a spreadsheet function that was requested by its exact name?

I don't feel that bad for you ... obviously you're the type of person Microsoft is targeting.

I don't know whether that was meant as some sort of insult, but if you'd read my post carefully you might have realised that it was a different organisation's computer I was working with at the time, so any feeble ad hominems aimed at me are way off target.

Then again, maybe if you're the kind of person who doesn't pay attention to getting details right, you're the type of person the LibreOffice project is targeting? :-)

So you didn't bother downloading the offline http://www.libreoffice.org/get... documentation?

I don't feel that bad for you ... obviously you're the type of person Microsoft is targeting.

The OO/LO help is a separate download. Once installed it does not require online access for help to function. The link for this download is adjacent to the regular Windows download link. http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...

Have you open a bug ...

To be honest the bug title would have to be "write user documentation". What is published at https://help.libreoffice.org/ is a bad joke. Just yesterday I was looking up how to set font size of equation and arrived to this page that starts with helpful "Use this dialog to specify the âfont sizes for your formula. ". I have to admit that there is *some* useful information however it is missing the crucial details such as screenshot of the dialog, or any description how to arrive to that dialog.

So what I'm saying is that it's not a occasional glitch that needs fixing. I'm saying that this part of the product is mostly not there. That also rules out an individual scratching the itch because the whole thing would lack any consistency.

Have you open a bug ...

To be honest the bug title would have to be "write user documentation". What is published at https://help.libreoffice.org/ is a bad joke. Just yesterday I was looking up how to set font size of equation and arrived to this page that starts with helpful "Use this dialog to specify the âfont sizes for your formula. ". I have to admit that there is *some* useful information however it is missing the crucial details such as screenshot of the dialog, or any description how to arrive to that dialog.

So what I'm saying is that it's not a occasional glitch that needs fixing. I'm saying that this part of the product is mostly not there. That also rules out an individual scratching the itch because the whole thing would lack any consistency.

Try opening a Linux file system with any version of Windows.

My linux file systems are on my linux machines which I access over the network, works fine. There are also drivers for accessing ext file systems on Windows if you want to plug the drive in directly.

How about this one, write a document in MS Office, save it in an open format such as .odt.

Why? Just send it as a word doc or a pdf or upload it to gdocs.

I can read Windows file systems, write to a .doc file, even install some Windows applications on my Linux box. If you prefer Windows, good for you. On this one though, your facts are backwards.

I can read Linux file systems, write to .odt (if for some reason i wanted to, using LibreOffice) on my Windows box so my facts are perfectly valid, you are just uneducated on the subject.

Can use LibreOffice whitout Java http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/...

TDF should be pushing their scriptable LibreOffice, and point out the benefits of not having to purchase it either now or in the future, the freedom of open formats, and also the benefits from a "smart kids" point of view to giving them an open-sourced office suite they can tinker with.

If companies see value in using Microsoft's full suite and stack, more power to them both. In the mean time, from an educational, budget and general open formats point of view, LibreOffice is the way to go.

Heck, if it's about kids' programming skills, and if the kids think they can improve the scriptability of the application itself, they could even submit their own patches and features to LO. Not so with MSO.

Thank you for everyone who worked to make Libreoffice so great!

LibreOffice it's free! It's great! It's local software for local folks, with none of that being on MS's or Google's hairy teat.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

There are efforts underway in the community to support schools and teachers in doing exactly that. So if you agree with the sentiments of the parent poster, please help out! Encourage anyone you know who can read and write to help out as well!

Should schools pay for M$ or take Google's privacy invasive stuff free or is there a third choice. Should the federal provide free open source software under federal core program. Software that is free, has been audited for quality and security, software that is free of privacy invasive elements during and after school use. If all the money spent on software licence had instead been spent on developing software, the government would have produced the necessary software ten times over and been able to distribute for free instead of still paying to this day. Niether M$ nor Google is the answer, they just both keep the problem going, year after year after year, instead of permanently solving the problem with something like https://www.libreoffice.org/.

Dude, stop making sense.

Should schools pay for M$ or take Google's privacy invasive stuff free or is there a third choice. Should the federal provide free open source software under federal core program. Software that is free, has been audited for quality and security, software that is free of privacy invasive elements during and after school use. If all the money spent on software licence had instead been spent on developing software, the government would have produced the necessary software ten times over and been able to distribute for free instead of still paying to this day. Niether M$ nor Google is the answer, they just both keep the problem going, year after year after year, instead of permanently solving the problem with something like https://www.libreoffice.org/.

LibreOffice - latest version, not the old one from your distro
http://www.libreoffice.org/ (install with dpkg -i *.deb)

Dia https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia (poor mans visio)
Lyx http://www.lyx.org/ (easy latex editor) with modern-cv to keep my CV up to date
Metasploit, Nessus, ettercap, wireshark, nmap, etc. just for fun

Avidemux, ffmpeg and VLC media player for everything related to video and audio
Gimp and Blender (latest version) for photo editing and 3D-stuff

This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish.

* 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/

* CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n...

* Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n...

* IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/

Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/

* KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/

* LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/

* Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/

* SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co...

* UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg...

* VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, oen source, Linux/Mac/Windows)
http://www.videolan.org/

This list is part of a much longer list that I maintain and sometimes publish. There are few others, but some are more as needed special use cases. * 7-ZIP -- Create/Extra ZIP and many other other file compression formats, very powerful. Note can open some installer EXE and MSI files (see Microsoft Orca for more MSI options) (free, open source, Windows, there may be Linux/Mac variants). http://www.7-zip.com/ * CCleaner -- System optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. (free, closed source, Windows) http://www.ccleaner.com/ **Alternate Tool** BleachBit -- Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. (free, open source Linux/Windows) http://bleachbit.sourceforge.n... * Greenshot -- Good Screen Shot tool with simple annotation options. (free, open source, Windows) http://greenshot.sourceforge.n... * IrfanView -- Image Program View, convert, crop, optimize, sideshow, batch Processing etc (free noncommercial, closed source, Windows) http://www.irfanview.com/ Instantbird -- Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) **Alternate Tool** Pidgin - Multi Protocol Instant Messaging (IM) Client - AOL, MSM, Yahoo, etc (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://pidgin.im/ * KeePass Password Safe -- Good Quality secure password manager, stores passwords encrypted. (free, open source, Windows Linux/Mac with Mono) http://keepass.info/ * LibreOffice -- Power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production. Excellent replacement for other Office Suites, can open many different and sometimes odd file types -- (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.libreoffice.org/ * Mozilla.org FireFox -- Web browser for more security then Internet Explore (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.mozilla.com/ http://www.mozilla.org/ * SpeedCrunch -- fast, high-precision and powerful cross-platform desktop calculator (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.speedcrunch.org/ & http://speedcrunch.blogspot.co... * UltraEdit -- Probably the absolute best most powerful text editors around, edit huge files, FTP, column mode, and more (shareware, closed source, Win/Mac/Linux) http://www.ultraedit.com/ **Alternate Tool** Noteppad++ -- Good Text / Source Code Editor replacement for Microsoft Windows Notepad/Wordpad (free, open source) http://notepad-plus.sourceforg... * VLC Media Player -- One of the best media players out there. Highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats ) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. (free, open source, Linux/Mac/Windows) http://www.videolan.org/

... you still cannot perform a search and replace using manual page breaks. A simple shortcoming, but it keeps me from being able to dump MS Office.

You can use this extension, no?

https://www.libreoffice.org/do...

A new engine for Calc - massive parallel calculations of formula cells using GPU via OpenCL are now possible thanks to our new formular interpreter.

Indeed it's openCL.

> It took a moment to familiarize myself with their implementation
hhhuuummmmmm... it seems to be a standard regex though... https://help.libreoffice.org/C...

Easy enough to answer the question for yourself...

Have a look at LibreOffice, 4.2 RC4 is out, a lot of work had gone into their spreadsheet. LO 4.2 FINAL is due out Real Soon Now.

http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...
or
http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...

Have a look at LibreOffice, 4.2 RC4 is out, a lot of work had gone into their spreadsheet. LO 4.2 FINAL is due out Real Soon Now.

http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...
or
http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...

Agreed, ribbons are a mess.

Why are they eating up so much precious vertical real estate instead of using simple menus, or do like OpenOffice does, and put this complexity on the side.

OO Example: http://www.openoffice.org/prod...
LO Example: http://www.libreoffice.org/fea...

I switch back and forth between OO and LO all the time, with occasional forays into Word/Excel. I much prefer OO to Word. No ribbons.

All you need. Click here.

He already said "I've done the usual [....] use a credible Internet Security package." At that point, the major danger is going to come from "zero days" and Internet Explorer browser attacks which will entirely bypass any form of AntiVirus etc. Changing which particular "credible Internet Security package" is used is going to make a very marginal difference. In fact the main OS difference will be in turning off useless services.

To make a step change up in security you want to talk about things like OS diversity; driving backups from the admin account and offsite backups. You may also want to consider switching her to cloud services of some kinds. Wait you say, he already said "I would love to switch her to Linux, but she struggles with change and wants to stay with Vista and MS Office." ... well sure; that's true. But it's a matter of interface. You can keep the Windows as the front end for now; probably for as long as she continues to be a desktop user; but use a different OS such as Linux for storing and copying her data.

When you set this up, consider very carefully the trust between systems. Obviously you don't want your Linux system to trust the Windows system (do the management from your own Linux system as well) but the opposite is true too. Due to Linux's design which encourages applications not to need aministrator access there is less malware for linux, but there are plenty of attackers and bad passwords can compromise your system. Ideally you want to have no dependence in either direction. Just have the administrator account on your Windows system backup files automatically to the Linux system. Have the Linux system automatically archive those backups so that the Windows system can't delete them and you will have a major recoverability improvement.

If you know them well you might want to consider using something like OpenBSD which may be easier to configure securely. Don't bother if you don't know them.

Offsite/Offline backups can be done by buying three huge slow disks which get copies off the NAS swap the last updated one for the one in the NAS each time you visit. If she has fast internet, just encrypt (GPG will do fine) and upload to a cloud service. Download a copy of those to your own offline backup for when your cloud provider makes a mess.

You haven't said what you mean by "security"; so far I've assumed the normal stuff; integrity, recoverability etc. If you also want to consider privacy you will want to think very carefully about gradually moving her to more private solutions. Microsoft has very much the same advertising and spying capabilities as Google but without the level of sophisticated systems Google uses to keep partners and employees away from the data. Just because you keep Office and Windows available to her, doesn't mean she can't start to diversify:

• Install LibreOffice but only to handle Open Document formats; this will avoid data corruption issues with Excel which have been a problem for a long time
• Move her to a more modern/secure browser such as Chromium or Opera
• Encourage her to use a different email system; yahoo; gmail; anything which will later make migration easier.
• Occasionally send her useful information in other formats
• Teach her to always convert and save MS Office documents as PDF for mailing and archive - show her that different versions of Office are not actually compatible with each other so sending office formats is never a good idea.

Long term, being dependent fully on Microsoft is something you can't be sure about. They may stay as they were; however the use of Active Tiles in their new operating systems really suggests a move to a much more advertising and

Libreoffice does have extensions... http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/alternative-dialog-find-replace-for-writer

In all seriousness. The standard LO can Find and Replace my most common error that I find in papers with the search set to ^. and the replace to \t$0 That's for a change of paragrah to have an extra tab at start.

There is also the AltSearch plugin that works great and does exactly what you want it to do.

The AltSearch plugin can be had here: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/alternative-dialog-find-replace-for-writer and the RegEx expressions with the builtin can be found here: https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/List_of_Regular_Expressions

I tend to favor LO over MS Word because anchoring isn't a chore in LO versus everything you have to go through just to get images set to the exact place that you want them to be in on a document, but that's just my opinion. I still prefer LO and since our document requirements allow us to output to sites in PDF, it is bar-none the best to work with for those who really like to dig into the guts of a document.

Again, just my experience with LO, YMMV.

In all seriousness. The standard LO can Find and Replace my most common error that I find in papers with the search set to ^. and the replace to \t$0 That's for a change of paragrah to have an extra tab at start.

There is also the AltSearch plugin that works great and does exactly what you want it to do.

The AltSearch plugin can be had here: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/alternative-dialog-find-replace-for-writer and the RegEx expressions with the builtin can be found here: https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/List_of_Regular_Expressions

I tend to favor LO over MS Word because anchoring isn't a chore in LO versus everything you have to go through just to get images set to the exact place that you want them to be in on a document, but that's just my opinion. I still prefer LO and since our document requirements allow us to output to sites in PDF, it is bar-none the best to work with for those who really like to dig into the guts of a document.

Again, just my experience with LO, YMMV.

"Libre Writer .. can't even do a search and replace on a manual page feed"

Install the AltSearch extension and search for \p ...

Apache OpenOffice like Harmony before - propped up by IBM. LibreOffice has supporters from lots of companies and non-profits. They has 20000 commits per year, under 2000 commits at Apache and is innovating.

http://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/advisory-board/
http://www.documentfoundation.org/supporters/

are any of the LibreOffice bugs filed that are complained about ? those guys need to know them to fix them.

Indeed. Such as LibreOffice, which is (I read) in active development, and available in pre-alpha form for Android already.

Are you suggesting that people should choose a pre-alpha version of an office suite over the Microsoft offering, or are you suggesting that they wait to type up their documents until LibreOffice is available as a 1.0 release?

... they could get the impression that Office 365 is a poor hack and opt for something else.

Indeed. Such as LibreOffice, which is (I read) in active development, and available in pre-alpha form for Android already.

There will no doubt be a chorus in favour of so-called "cloud"-based office applications, but I don't see any likelihood of localhost programs dying out soon. There are still many (myself included) who don't trust other people's servers, or who (also including myself) who can't count on a permanent connection to the internet.

Another proprietary app to tempt people. And a completely unneccessary one at that, Libreoffice is quite complete and works well.

http://www.libreoffice.org/download

According to the LibreOffice Bugzilla, 2937, if you don't count NEW bugs.

The point is that without the Apache guys there wouldn't be a sidebar in either project. LibreOffice has done a lot of stuff but none if it is as visible as the Apache guys have done.

This is nonsense... The sidebar stuff wasn't written by anyone in Apache - it was IBM code from the symphony project/fork donated to Apache that was then merged into AOO and merged (with small improvements like resizing) into LO as well...

As for the not visible bit have a look through the new features and fixes in 4.0 and 4.1.

There's a lot of nice new content with visible useful features such as chart import and export as both ODC and images in calc, presentation mode in Impress, visio import in Draw (that was LO 3.5), huge reduction of java dependencies, refactor how calc views cells internally for much faster performance on large spreadsheets, MS Publisher import, and the list goes on ....

As for letting the code speak for itself ... yes please do and it's obvious which project is currently healthier and better overall.

The point is that without the Apache guys there wouldn't be a sidebar in either project. LibreOffice has done a lot of stuff but none if it is as visible as the Apache guys have done.

This is nonsense... The sidebar stuff wasn't written by anyone in Apache - it was IBM code from the symphony project/fork donated to Apache that was then merged into AOO and merged (with small improvements like resizing) into LO as well...

As for the not visible bit have a look through the new features and fixes in 4.0 and 4.1.

There's a lot of nice new content with visible useful features such as chart import and export as both ODC and images in calc, presentation mode in Impress, visio import in Draw (that was LO 3.5), huge reduction of java dependencies, refactor how calc views cells internally for much faster performance on large spreadsheets, MS Publisher import, and the list goes on ....

As for letting the code speak for itself ... yes please do and it's obvious which project is currently healthier and better overall.