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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."
And there are an infinite number of reasons why LaTeX is better than both.
It doesn't have that stupid Ribbon UI interface!
is better than one he does not use.
Not defending Word here, but MS PR can also write article '12 ways word tops writer'.
I made a big mistake when I bought MS Office. I spent ~$150 and used it to update my resume. Have done very little else with it.
For us casual users the free version of Open/Libre Office can save a lot of money. PLUS writer doesn't come with the stupid ribbon interface. (Where's the find menu option? Where's spellcheck? I don't want to play Where's Waldo? with my software.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
If I wanted superior formatting control, I'd use LaTeX. The primary reason I'm stuck with MS Word, and sometimes google docs, is due to superior collaboration tools: change tracking, multiple views for revision and final draft; identifiers for whose made changes where (provided the userid has been setup properly); notes/comments in the margins.
For the record, I haven't taken the recent version LibreOffice for a spin. But from what I remember of OpenOffice, these features were not that functional. I thought OpenOffice was a decent piece of software, but it's still based on prior definitions of what a documenting software has been, rather than what it could be.
The problem with ribbon I have is that it assumes what I need and don't need. It works fine until I have to do something that isn't easily found. Then it is hidden two or three menus deep that I have to use MS help or the Internet to find. I could customize the ribbon but that requires precognition that what I want is not obvious.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
. . . "Guys, we have a styles system! And it's better than Word's!"
From the title of the article, I was expecting 12 distinct and separate features, not 6 features and a treatise on how awesome Styles are in LibreOffice.
I am counting hyphens as another point in styles, because the hyphens point is essentially "You can specify this with styles too!"
Sigh :(
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Isn't that the problem with any interface? Due to limited screen space, they can't make every option available in a menu system or the ribbon system (which is really still a hierarchical menu, just a different layout). So they have to make obvious the most common features, and hide some of the more esoteric ones. The benefit of the ribbon is that 90% of the functionality of Word is available in 3 clicks or less. With the old system, many more options were hidden in multiple layers deep. So much so, that people started requesting functionality to be added that has been there the whole time, because they couldn't find those features in the menu layout.
At any rate, if you really need to, you can customize the ribbon layout in Office 2010 in pretty much any way you choose.
It's a very quick and easy way to lock down a complex background layout that replicates on every page and isn't easily changed or screwed-up by a clueless user.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Revision control is only a collaboration tool to those who haven't used real collaboration tools.
Unfortunately, about 99.997% of documents written today are not academic papers or theses written to comply with the house style of a few hundred journals and a few hundred major institutions.
Even if they were, LaTeX's typesetting power now looks like the first car with an internal combustion engine: a revolutionary advance in technology at the time, that is now so antiquated and incompatible with modern standards that it has little value outside of its niche except as a historical curiosity.
Your argument about LaTeX controlling the logical design is well-taken, but unfortunately it never really did that, because in practice it conflated content and presentation to such an extent that you couldn't really separate them in anything beyond trivial cases.
The TeX family remains the preeminent tool for exactly one task today: typesetting maths. And that's only because no-one else has yet created another set of tools and fonts for doing so that doesn't suck.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Except for the bazillion times the user wants to remove my name from the header and put theirs and suddenly there isn't a background.
But boy you hit the nail on the head on this technique, by all means it's hackish at best, and goes to show some of the quirkiness that one has to learn to use the Microsoft Office suite like a pro. I'd dare say that combine the quirks one must learn and the constant tossing of every feature in every single spot drowning you out, MS Office is the PHP of productivity software.