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12 Ways LibreOffice Writer Tops MS Word
Open source office software is has gotten pretty good over the past decade or so; I got through grad school with OpenOffice (now known as LibreOfifice), and in my estimation was no worse off when it came to exchanging files with classmates than were friends with different versions of Word. Now, reader dgharmon writes "Writer has at least twelve major advantages over Word. Together, these advantages not only suggest a very different design philosophy from Word, but also demonstrate that, from the perspective of an expert user, Writer is the superior tool."
For at least the last three versions of Word, you can do pretty much anything you want in Word headers/footers. You can put in text boxes, graphics anywhere on the page, etc. I used to use Word headers to put in background graphics for the whole page.
I think a lot of people mistakenly think that Word headers are limited to the little box at the top of the page and don't realize that you can use them to put pretty much put anything, anywhere on the page. It will automatically take anything you do while in header/footer edit mode and put it in the background and replicate it on every page. Not sure if LibreOffice does that too or not, but I think the article makes it sound like Word's header and footer are a lot more restricted than they actually are.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
No, a real expert uses VI.
Nice try though.
When I need to make a presentation, I use Powerpoint. I should figure out how to use LaTeX instead.
Check out the Beemer class; it's handy but not exactly pretty. However, you can find some decent templates floating around the net.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3Ltr4XFiuzEJ:www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca
I got that too.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?oe=utf-8&client=mozilla&hl=en&q=cache:3Ltr4XFiuzEJ:http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html+http%3A//www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html&ct=clnk OR http://preview.tinyurl.com/7u9z3j4 for Google's cached copy.
Weird that the non-cached copy worked fine and home page's link to the first page is broken too.
Print pages worked too:
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-2.html
http://www.datamation.com/print/http://www.datamation.com/applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-3.html
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Until you find yourself writing your own document classes or other custom macro sets. Then, there are an infinite number of reasons why just about anything is better than LaTeX.
Fortunately, you rarely need to do this. Either the generic classes are fine for what you need to do, or someone else has already written a class or macro for you. For example, many journal publishers provide LaTeX style/class files, and there are many custom ones available for PhD dissertations, etc. Just google for it and you'll probably find it.
At the end of the day, I find that LaTeX documents simply look better than those created with word processors of any ilk. LaTeX's ability to control logical design (as opposed to visual design) is a great asset.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I don't mind the ribbon much one way or the other - but I still find myself getting more use out of an extensively customized Quick Access Toolbar than out of the ribbon itself.
Office 2010 sold licenses because Office XP went EoL.
Sit someone down who's been using office since the 90's with Office 2010 while still being saddled with Windows XP (extremely common in the corporate environment even today). Tell them to find Save As. Watch even the most mild mannered person get physically angry because it's not in an obvious place. The UI components when first released assumed that people would be using Vista (which obviously didn't happen for most companies).
Oddly enough I don't mind the ribbon UI on Office 2011 Mac, but that's because it still have a standard menu bar up top that gives me a choice between ribbon or traditional menu UI. Though I would be hard pressed to actually buy Office Mac on my own because LibreOffice really does 99.9999% of what I do and is free.
Because the standard MS uses is now public.
If you're referring to OOXML, then perhaps you should take a look at how Word does in the OOXML conformance test suite. Last time I checked, there were about 10,000 test failures.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Are you joking? Menu : Format / Page. Then check "orientation : landscape" in the Page tab.
(translated from the French menus, may be slightly different on your computer)
What I'm trying to say is, 200 million sold doesn't equal 200 million who prefer the new look and feel. If we generously say that half of those actually like it, then there's the other half who are using it because it was forced on them. No other company and no other product could get away with that.
But it's moved a lot of people to Open Office because they find it easier to use. And that's a good thing.
:wq
here are a few reasons to dislike the ribbon. If you're on a small screen, it uses a lot more real estate than the menus. They don't have the shortcut keys next to all of the options, which means that you don't learn the shortcuts for commonly used things as easily as you do with the menu. Finally, unlike the old toolbars, the ribbon does not allow you to put commonly used but unrelated things on the screen at the same time.
The AC mentioned these points but I want to reiterate them so more can see, since you're modded +4 insightful yet you're completely uniformed:
1) I've done the calculation: From the top of the screen to the top of the page, the default ribbon layout in Word uses THE SAME vertical space than the default menu+toolbars in open office writer. Further, you can minimize the ribbon by double clicking on it. Can't do that with toolbars. Further still, the ribbon scales better to the screen size; whereas the ribbon adjusts the size of buttons, keeping them visible on the screen, the menu system will hide them in a drop down list.
2) There are keyboard shortcuts to every feature in the ribbon. Press Alt and follow the letters. This is more discoverable and provides more functionality.
3) You can put any shortcuts you want in the quick access toolbar at the top of the screen, or you're free to customize the tabs in any way you wish including adding your own tabs.
There is no File menu
Thanks for commenting on a product you haven't used. You have not used Office 2010, because if you had, you would see the big colored tab with the word "File" in it.
Our school district stopped buying Office at 2003 because of the ribbon interface. Since you can't buy licenses for Office 2003 anymore, we use the "downgrade license" in 2007 and 2010 to install 2003.
We have a few staff members that have laptops that came with 2007/2010 pre-installed, and after trying to use it for a month or so, they all come crawling back asking for 2003 to be installed.
We also use OpenOffice.org on our Linux stations, and make OO.o available to our Windows users.
So my anecdotal evidence includes just under 3500 co-workers, and just under 14,000 students.
My personal beef with the ribbon is that there's no organisation to it. It's just a mishmash of large icons, small icons, text, jumbled together.
A toolbar has every icon the same size, and organised according to a grid.
A menu has every entry the same size, and organised according to a grid.
And, the biggest thing, is that if you turn off the annoying "personalised menus" feature, everything is in the same place, everytime. Nothing moves, nothing jumps around.
The ribbon may have it's uses. But I've yet to find one.
Apparently you've never tried to round trip an ODF file from LibreOffice to MS Office and back to LibreOffice have you. Microsoft CLAIMS to support ODF, but the hard reality is.. MS Office does not support Open Office files... it appears to, but they've intentionally broke it so that it looks like ODf files are crap... when the reality is MS is playing dirty games.
Try this... create a Calc spreadsheet with a formula... something simple like =LEN(B1) and type a short text string in B1, open it in MS Office and take a look at your formula field. Nice eh? MS Office strips off the formulas. Surprise, now your spreadsheet is useless.
Open a docx file in LibreOffice and chances are something will fall off... because Microsoft's "documented" Office Open XML format is NOT actually what they use for docx. Surprise... again.
The list goes on. The file formats are not portable.. they give the appearance of working and being portable, but they are not. If the document is simple, it will mostly work, but if it has any mid-level content, it'll fail... either way (LIbreOffice to MSO, or MSO to LibreOffice).
How do I know? I actively participated in the development of OpenOffice from 1.5 through to 3.3, and then LibreOffice from 3.3 to now.