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LibreOffice 3.5.1 Released With Fixes
Thinkcloud writes "The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 3.5.1. Some of the core fixes include: don't crash for empty input data in charts, UI fix on PDF export dialog, don't copy page styles into temporary clipboard doc, and use the correct db range for the copy. 'Another milestone for the LibreOffice project was hit this past month as well. "The number of TDF hackers has overtaken the threshold of 400 code developers, with a large majority of independent volunteers and several companies paying full time hackers." Although some are paid developers, no company employs more than 7% of developers, keeping the project independent and self-governing.'"
It's more like MS Office than current versions of MS Office... ribbonless, the way I likes it. Now get off my lawn!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm a Libre Office fan, it's one of the only good office solutions on the market as it's free and cross platform, something Microsoft Office can't say for itself;. My only lasting big peeve is that Libre can't seem to open a docx document with out having formatting / rendering issues. It also can't copy charts from a doc / docx and keep the chart in tact. Other then that's it's a bullet proof office suite, does any one have this issue or have a fix for this issue?
The Document Foundation is eating Open Office's lunch. When will Open Office merge with the Document Foundation?
Did they, finally, remove that nonsensical Java dependency?
It made strategical sense as long as it was Sun's baby. But, technically, it really is just a huge "WTF?"
The ribbon is a nice UI that really isn't very different than the old UI. It takes vertical drop-down menus and makes them horizontal. Then it ads pictures.
Big deal.
Some people claim that it takes up more space, but that is debatable. If you're truly hard-up for space you can always minimize the ribbon. Apparently in the next version of Office it will be minimized by default.
Dunno why people bitch about the ribbon so much. I think it's a combination of "I don't care why they changed it, it's different and I HATE different" and "Look! Microsoft is doing something! LET'S HATE ON IT!"
The one thing that I find very unfortunate about the timing of the 'ribbon' is that it managed to coincide with the massive shift in the most common and cheapest PC displays(especially in laptops) from 4:3 to a brief period of 16:10 followed by a rush to 16:9. Having the menu bar expanding even as vertical resolution was being nibbled away at made the always-slightly-awkward editing of 8.5x11 or A4 documents on computer screens even more irritating.
I mostly blame the fuckers who killed 16:10, since that can't be fixed in software; but it wasn't a helpful coincidence.
Yes, people are adverse to change. That doesn't mean change is bad, but neither does it mean it is good. Rather, it puts the onus on the person suggesting the change to show why the disruption and re-learning that will need to take place is worthwhile.
If, as you say, it is a "nice UI that really isn't very different than the old UI" then why is it necessary to force people to spend any time re-learning the interface? Why take up more real estate to do so and then tell users "well if you want it back, just minimize our annoying new UI?" This isn't somebody's pet project; it's an enterprise-class software suite used by literally millions and millions of people around the world. Change for the sake of change is not helpful; it is actively counter-productive in the most literal sense of the term.
I honestly can't decide if communication is Microsoft's great failure or if they really don't have a coherent reason for the things they do. It's happening again with Windows 8. Is the UI change just the stupidest possible idea in the world, or is it the greatest thing since sliced bread and they have just been utterly failing at actually communicating why? Don't get me wrong, I see how it's beneficial to THEM to essentially be able to focus on one UI across devices, but I don't see why I should want a touch-driven UI for my computer with mouse support tacked on top instead of an operating system built for that usage--and more importantly, one I have been largely familiar with for what, 15 years?
So yeah, I'm not adverse to change but somebody needs to show me why the learning curve and lost productivity is ultimately worthwhile. I don't care if that learning curve is five seconds or five years. If they can't do that, they deserve the derision. It's not like they don't have the budget for it, so I have to assume it's because they don't have the rationale.
I'm pretty sure that Access' mission in life is making it comparatively easy for people to develop database frontends(and often get in over their heads and produce some real nightmares...) not to be a database per se. Although I think that MS has been moving toward killing JET, in favor of SQL Server 3-legged-puppy edition, to make upselling to SQL server proper easier, the point is making it easy to dump some forms and buttons in place without having to be a real programmer.
Which I love they do. IT helps me push Libre office.
Not only does it have Lower TCO, but it also has ZERO training for the users.
Allowed us to avoid the MSFT Office tax cince 2005.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Microsoft has to change Office every so often. Its necessay otherwise how do they sell the same product over and over again ? It sure isn't getting new functions is it ? Oh maybe in 2 decades we will make the emacs joke about Office. But until then, to get the suckers (consumers, enterprises, etc...) to lay down $$$ every 3 years for whats basically a glorifed typewriter they have to change, even if its superficial change. Office attaigned maturity with the 95 version. Since then its been about superficial changes and format changes of course.
WTF, WTF'er?
Word 2007.
ALT-F. A. Save-As dialog pops up
ALT-F. P. Print dialog pops up.
For crepe's sake, it even DISPLAYS the letters for you for keyboard navigation of the ribbon. It's almost like EMACs, except you can see where the heck you're diving down into.
THIS! We have an Oracle corporate wide license and recently a new manager hired several people for her group. Unknown to IT these people were brought in to create a complete DB in Access. We found out when she approached me and asked me to install Access on everyone's PC. She became irate when I said no that she should be using our Oracle DB. Ironically they were pulling data from one of the Oracle databases to populate their Access DB. Her argument was that it was "easier" to get stuff done in Access and she had never had any problems at her previous employer. Unfortunately she was also friends with the new president of the company and got what she wanted. The guy who created the DB moved on and the DB "broke" and IT doesn't support Access so they had to hire him back to maintain his code. If it was so "easy" why couldn't they get somebody else in their group to maintain it?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I just installed the new version because I needed to work on an old Visio diagram & I had read that Draw supports Visio imports. It didn't actually support the ancient version I was dealing with, but I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to just duplicate the old diagram in Draw, connectors & all. Big thumbs up!
I love the ribbon now and I cringe going back to menus.
It has its benefits and if you hit the alt key, it will even number the shortcuts. You can preview changes by just having the mouse cursor over all the settings. I love it and the ribbon bashing is so 2007.
It reminds me of those whinning about guis and how CLI terminals and DOS were soo awesome.
It took a week to learn but unlike METRO solid R&D was behind it in usability. Word is certainly more tolerable.
http://saveie6.com/
Would you rather have a 1 million line excel spreedsheet where there are 5 different versions all emailed around and not synchronized instead? Yes, this happens because people do not have time to wait for I.T. and some BS policy on databases. This causes a lot more headaches.
I will take access thank you.
If it is such a pain do not buy an Oracle License. Use Mysql or postgresql and use ODBC as an external datasource. A fresh college grad making websites in college should be able to set it up in about a day or two.
If people are emailing databases back and forth they are doing it wrong. It defeats the purpose. Seriously in 2012, this should be universal as databases were taking ground in the 1980s. It seems we are going backwards.
http://saveie6.com/
> Good luck having another supplier, vendor, or another business view your documents
Who has to conform to whom depends on who is the dominating partner in a communication. If the dominating partner mandates that all communication with him from now has to be LO-compatible, as a supplier you have to become LO-compatible, or you wont get his business.
The key to establish LO in the office space is to make a few influential players start using it, everybody who depends on them in some way will have to follow.
> and have them all looking funny?
If they depend on getting money from you, it suddenly is their documents looking funny, not yours. It is just a matter of perspective.
Because it is not a server database.
It is a personal one. If you need real databases then use an external source like SQL Server or even Mysql through ODBC.
Access has a great gui that a non IT professional can create a solution quickly without having the hell of 5 versions of a 1 million line excel spreadsheet emailed and unsynchronized floating on the network were 1 - 2 hours a day are spent finding errors. Yes corporate America is doing this more commonly thanks to restrictive I.T. and the high demand for more results with less employees.
Think of it as a gui builder to store data for small to medium sized business. Not that is can't datawarehouse and run on 32 cpu systems with a thousand users at once, etc. That is not what it is for. An average Joe will not setup an Oracle Enterprise Data server to store client records in his small local business store. Access fits perfectly.
http://saveie6.com/
Problems with the Ribbon:
- the change was done with no regard for longtime users who lose ALL of their knowledge of where to find what feature, with no option to revert to the old ways.
- Worse, Microsoft threw out conventions like the menu order (File, Edit) that have been the same in all Windows programs since W3.1. Again, loss of knowledge.
- it takes much longer to go through all the Ribbons to find a feature than to drag through the menus. You could drag through all of the menus with a single click-and-drag action. You have to click on each of the Ribbon tabs.
- minimizing the UI has its own cost in annoyance when the Ribbon deploys when you don't want it.
- The Ribbon relies on icons more than text. I find that it takes me longer to find the correct icon than it took me to find the correct menu. Not everyone thinks visually.
All of this for the sake of being more newbie-friendly and ooh-shiny.
Dunno why people bitch about the ribbon so much.
I'll list my particular grievances:
1. It undoes 15 years of expertise I had in using Excel and Word. I've been using the ribbon now for over a year and still find myself hunting occasionally - my productivity has still not caught up to the "old" interface.
2. It changes depending on window size/screen size. On my laptop with a small screen, the ribbons are subtly rearranged compared to those on my desktop. On my desktop, I don't run Word full screen, since my monitor is large. Depending on how large I make the windows, the buttons on the ribbon rearrange themselves. This breaks a fundamental human interface rule that MS loves to break - things should not move around.
3. Adding custom buttons is now murderous, and the built-in selection of buttons is very limited. They've had a icon editor built in to MS Office since, what, 1996? And they take it out because... they want to force you into this cumbersome XML editing workflow for user-defined icons. Ugh.
4. You are absolutely correct - it isn't very different from the old UI. It takes vertical drop-down menus and makes them horizontal, then adds pictures. Humans are worse at scanning lists horizontally than they are scanning vertically. This change makes no sense. It now takes me longer to scan through the ribbon than it did to scan through the drop-down menu.
In short, I am angry that Microsoft didn't spend more time fixing obvious flaws in Office and instead screwed up the GUI.
Take VBA... it is the killer feature of Excel, and really the only reason to use it over other spreadsheets. Unfortunately, they haven't really updated it in 10 years and it is stale. Big macros have to be split into multiple procedures. The performance is awful. User-defined functions fail silently. Mostly, though, the IDE and language have not seen any modernization in 15 years and even simple things like a Perl "associative array" or a Python "dictionary" are painful to implement (via Collections is usually how I do it...). Meanwhile, Open/Libre Office has steadily improved their macro support and it is almost usable. I can see a day where I start writing to that package instead - especially if I can abandon VBA and use something more modern.
Take graphing... Quattro Pro had better graphing tools in 1997 and it still does today :) No, I haven't compared them recently :) But Excel's graphing options are pretty much stuck in 1996. Heck, the formula bar still shows graphs as Excel 4 macros! Goodness... Meanwhile, Open/Libre Office has steadily improved their graphing capabilities and it is pretty much a credible alternative.
Now to be fair, the ribbon in 2010 makes more sense than the ribbon in 2007, so there is hope.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Oh, not so different, eh?
How about those who use keyboard shortcuts? Alt+F, P. Hmmm, no printing? WTF? Alt+F, A. No save as?
Yes, totally identical.
What about those keyboard shortcuts? A quick test in Excel 2010:
Alt+F,P -> Print
Alt+F,A -> Save As
Personally, I have found the buttons to be meaningless and totally non-descriptive. Words do a much better (and more consistent!) job of explaining what a task is supposed to do rather than a picture. For example, how does one distinguish between single spacing, 1.5 spacing and double spacing using an image? The icons are about 30 pixels square, and the image is basically just a series of vaguely shaded lines. On the other hand, it makes a lot more sense to me to click on the Format menu, then Paragraph, then find the Spacing portion of the dialog box. There are some things you just can't express using images (much less images which are less than a centimeter in size) that you can using words for directing workflow in a complex program like a document typesetter. I also take issue with the way things are organized, but I can't really give a concrete example - it's been years since I've used Office anyways.
I think the appeal of the ribbon is not cause it's better but because it caters to people who don't spend any effort thinking about how they can do what they want to. Usability, organization and workflow suffer as a result. This is why a disproportionately large fraction of /.ers hate it while pretty much everyone else likes it.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Calc doesn't do VBA. Different Macro semantics. If you want help in the conversion, you can contact me at fred (dot) weigel (at) zylog (dot) ca.
Assuming you want to go it alone:
ActiveWorkBook is replaced with ThisComponent
ActiveSheet is replaced with ThisComponent.CurrentController.ActiveSheet
ActiveCell is replaced with ThisComponent.getCurrentSelection
etc.
try http://www.openoffice.org/api/docs/common/ref/index-files/index-1.html
Basically, OOo BASIC macros are really not that useful for beginners -- there is a lot of crufty stuff.
msgbox WorksheetFunctions.Average(Range("A1:A5"))
is replaced by something like
Dim oSheet, FuncService
FuncService = createunoservice("com.sun.star.sheet.FunctionAccess")
oSheet = ThisComponent.CurrentController.ActiveSheet
msgbox FuncService.callFunction("AVERAGE", _
array(oSheet.getCellRangeByName("A1:A5")))
As you can see, the VBA can be replaced, but it's not easy.
What version of OpenOffice/LibreOffice are you using? Did you (or someone) use Tools/Customize to delete Tools/Macros? (possible, and I might do it for a delivery platform). In which case, use Tools/Customize, and select Menus. Select "Tools" from the Menu pull-down and add the Macro Editor again. Or, reinstall.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061