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."

Comments

LaTeX

[Anonymous Coward]

And there are an infinite number of reasons why LaTeX is better than both.

Re:LaTeX

[agrif]

From the perspective of an expert user, {thing the user is expert with} is the superior tool.

Re:LaTeX

[Missing.Matter]

but now that journals outside of physics have moved away from LaTeX it's pretty much dead for us.

As the parent said, most computer science related journals and conferences still use LaTeX, especially IEEE conferences.

The biggest benefit of LaTeX I've found is that if your paper gets rejected, you can turn around and download the style from another conference or journal and with very few modifications have a new submission ready. Otherwise, the development time in my experience is very similar, and I'd consider myself highly proficient in both LaTeX and Word. That said, I usually write in LaTeX because version control is more straightforward.

Re:LaTeX

[rmcd]

"More work fighting with the document preparation than the actual writing"

My experience is exactly the opposite: With LaTeX you write your document and let LaTeX handle the formatting. Word is much more oriented towards ad hoc formatting. It's true that beginning LaTeX users usually don't understand this, but it's because they're trying to use LaTeX the same way they used Word.

Re:LaTeX

[Iron Condor]

When amateur photographers gather, they talk about cameras. They all have their favorite tools, they all have the "best" gizmos with all the buttons and functions and they know exactly what they all do.

When professional photographers come together, they talk about light. Composition. Art. The tool is uninteresting - a mere means to an end. And any one of a large number of them will do.

Re:LaTeX

[reub2000]

Professional photographers talk about equipment all the damn time. They have preferences for one brand or another. After all if their equipment is inadequate for the job or fails, then that's money they lost.

The only real difference is that a professional is less focused on how new their equipment is. If that body had good weather seals when it was new and an exterior made of a tough alloy, then it's probably going to stand up to tomorrows job even if it isn't the latest model. If the lens is sharp and has big aperture, then it's still good.

Re:LaTeX

[hairyfeet]

Exactly. I had a customer who knew Xres like the back of his hand and it took him ages to switch over to Photoshop simply because he knew where everything was and had custom plugins for Xres and trying to switch his workflow over damned near put him at square one.

And who cares about writer? writer for the most part has NEVER been the problem with OO.o and now LO, because Writer always got the lion's share of attention. it'll still turn heavily formatted Word docs into Word salad which is why i give it to home users and not businesses, but it does that less and less and HAS come a long way.

What sucks is the rest of the suite. hand any Excel jockey a copy of Calc and he'll laugh you right out of the room, there are too many things the Excel Jockeys use that just isn't there, likewise with Access and love it or hate it Access is used a LOT in SMBs.

So quit focusing on the only thing that works and instead focus on the things that don't. To use a /. car analogy it'd be like trying to sell a car with half the side caved in with "But it has a REALLY great set of tires"...what good is that if the rest of it is crunched? maybe instead you should just give up completely on businesses since compatibility will always be a problem, and instead focus on making more user friendly designs for the home users? after all both Apple and MSFT are focusing on home users, why not LO? Makes sense, they have less worry about backwards compatibility or compatibility with MS Office for that matter.

Anyway we should probably give the LO guys another year and a half before we say anything anyway, having to clean up a codebase that goes back to the mid 90s can't be easy and I'm sure once they have made it more modular and easy to maintain the improvements will come fast, so lets just let them do their job and see what comes out the other side.

Re:LaTeX

[BlackPignouf]

Not exactly :
Amateur photographers talk about gear.
Pro photographers talk about money.
Masters talk about light.

Number One!

[Kagato]

It doesn't have that stupid Ribbon UI interface!

Re:Number One!

[Anonymous Coward]

No because someone else in the org upgraded and will now hand out only 2010 files... It spreads like a virus.

Or companies have an agreement with MS to buy the latest version so they can get a discount on something else.

2 inches of wasted space for functions I only use once and awhile. It is a toolbar within a toolbar, with the menu burred so you can not get at all the cool things it does...

Re:Number One!

[TheRaven64]

There 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.

There are several reasons to like the ribbon. It does better on Fitts' Law metrics than a traditional menu, due to significantly larger targets. This is especially true on large screens. The larger display for each menu also means that you don't need as many submenus or even pop-up panels.

The real problem with it is that it has a different set of advantages and disadvantages to the old menu plus toolbar. For any given workflow and screen size, it may be better or worse, but you can't toggle back to the old UI if it's worse.

Re:Number One!

[geekoid]

That's a bad comparison.
I like the ribbon, but those numbers ar ebusiness that just buy whatever the version is, and computers that come with it; regardless if anyone uses it.

If I buy a new computer for my home, it's likely to come with a version of word. A home version, or a trail version. Those get counted as sales even though I will never use it in the home. I prefer google docs.

If MS didn't have the ribbon, they would have 'sold' just as many.

Re:Number One!

[DiegoBravo]

I'm sure Microsoft can point to millions of users in lots of statistics and hundreds of focus groups about people liking clippy.

Journalist telling me how product he uses

[postmortem]

is better than one he does not use.

Not defending Word here, but MS PR can also write article '12 ways word tops writer'.

It's free.

[cpu6502]

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.)

Formatting features are not the killer app anymore

[DeadDecoy]

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.

Re:Am I the only one in the world that likes Ribbo

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Re:Am I the only one in the world that likes Ribbo

[Missing.Matter]

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.