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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.
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?
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 like the Ribbon layout. Go figure. After an initial "what the hell?" week I got used to it, and now I don't even notice it or think about it.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
The note that one can use Libre Office as a replacement for FrameMaker is interesting though.
The one feature I've always wanted to see in Word was for the style formatting area to have each paragraph style be a pop-up menu which one can click on (or better still tab to) and change the current paragraph style w/ the keyboard.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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"
Did you like Microsoft Bob as well? How long have you been a member of the communist party?
Libreoffice writer is more annoying to use than Word, but it's not so bad. I use LaTeX/vim for the vast majority of what I write. It actually does what I tell it to do, which is better than any WYSISWG program.
What's really bad is Impress. It's a complete mess from a usability standpoint. When I need to make a presentation, I use Powerpoint. I should figure out how to use LaTeX instead.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I've used several variants of Libre/Open Office and I've found one fundamental problem with all of them. The developers insist on copying MS Word's brain dead interface.
One time, I was trying to do a vertical layout that should have been simple. After fighting with Open Office for about an hour, I gave up assuming that the Open Office developers just hated their users. So I broke down, fired up the Windows machine and started using MS Word.
What did I discover. All the brain cell killing UI design had been copied exactly from MS Word. So I will continue to use Libre Office and I will curse Microsoft every time I find a hard to use feature.
To the Libre Office developers, I say it's okay to branch from MS Word's UI, especially on the obscure features. Most of the users that can't deal with a different UI barely do more than change fonts anyway.
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.
Seems unfair to pick that direction. Why is that not Word's fault?
It is also why I always send important documents in pdf, I have seen different versions of Word render documents very differently.
I didn't get the hate for Ribbon either...till I realized that it was mainly all the people who had memorized all their shortcuts and exactly which obscure menu had the function/tools they needed to use. They were the power users of old, and suddenly they were castrated, and they were back to being on the same level as MS noobs. To make matters worse, the ribbon interface actually made the MS Office suite of software easier to use for noobs and probably made these same power users feel threatened.
I was never a power user of Excel/Word/Power Point 2003, but I always found them to be exceedingly frustrating to work with. Sure, if your work requires you to master those tools, I'm sure you'd get really good after months/years of use, but to a new user, the tons of nested menus with features hidden away made MS Office use an exercise in frustration.
Then I used Office 2007, and once I realized the orb was the file menu (that, I agree was a terrible decision), I found myself using tons of new features that I could never have known about or discovered in Office 2003. The quality of my Word documents, Powerpoint presentations and Excel files greatly improved. I actually find the interface extremely useful because everything is arranged in a logical manner and it is fairly easy to find the tools you need to use without having to spend tens of minutes trying to find the feature in some hidden menu.
Not to say that Word and Office doesn't have its fair share of issues (formatting documents consistently in Word is just a nightmare. I had to write my doctoral thesis in Word because my adviser did not know to use or care about LaTeX), but as far as the new ribbon interface goes, it certainly seems a big improvement over the old Office interface.
I'm with you on this one. Sure it took getting used to but now I find it much easier than browsing through multi-level menus. Plus it's really just a glorified quick access toolbar and you can do a lot of customization as to what commands are on it. I could live without the File menu taking over my whole window though.
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.
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.
You're not alone. I like the ribbon.
It's a helluva lot better than a thousand menu layers.
All about me
I've had to only just use it because my new employer uses office (I use libre office at home) and no, ribbon is shit.
It does seem like LibreOffice's spell- and grammar-checking-tools still need some work, though.
. . . "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!"
You're not alone. I just don't like the fact that it requires actual processing power to work, unlike a regular old Word 2003-style menu... this results in keyboard shortcuts lagging on slow machines (such as netbooks). Other than that, I actually quite like it - much easier to find stuff if you're actually new to Office or haven't used the application for a while...
You don't have permission to access /applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html on this server.
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).
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.
Putting latex files under revision control just works. Doesn't work so well with word/openoffice.
Who says it was after 20 comments? None of them appear to have RTFA. The article may never have existed!
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
That is false.
The docx Word 2010 produces does not follow the documented standard.
Even if it was true, the openoffice/libreoffice document types are actually publicly documented.
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.
I can top it. It miss Clippy. I thought the Ewoks and Jar Jar were cute. And I liked disco.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
What I don't like about the ribbon is that there are many functions I used to use regularly that were always on screen. Now they're spread out across many different ribbon tabs, and sometimes where they ended up is non-intuitive for me. What used to be a simple click turns into an Easter egg hunt.
Perhaps if I used Office daily, I'd develop the appropriate muscle memory. But, I only use it a few times a month, and it's usually different apps -- this week it's Excel, next week it's PowerPoint.
I don't care if "zoom", "increase font size", "merge and center", and "fill with color" all belong on logically different tabs based on their function. For me, they all belong on the "I use this regularly" page.
Program Intellivision!
I use LibreOffice on my computer. While I don't use it much, I haven't used MS Word in years. I generally find LibreOffice to be harder to use and less professional-looking than MS Office. How do I know? A few months ago, we were putting together some documents for work. Other people in the office were using MS Office and I was using LibreOffice. Sending documents back and forth between us mostly worked, although there were sometimes things that didn't appear in the LibreOffice version of the document (if I remember right, it was some image data in the headers and footers and sometimes signatures wouldn't show up in LibreOffice). I was sometimes surprised when I looked at a document in MS Office because I'd suddenly discover that something important wasn't showing up at all in LibreOffice and there was no indication that something was supposed to be there. Also, formatting had a tendency to get messed up. Don't get me started on getting charts to format correctly on LibreOffice. When I'd go over to my coworkers computers and look at/adjust the document in MS Office, it was generally a better experience (even though I haven't used MS Office in years). My conclusion was that MS Office was just plain a better program and LibreOffice has some usability issues and looked like it was a number of years behind MS.
I use LibreOffice because it's free - that's the only reason. If both were free, I'd use MS Office. But, for someone who wouldn't spend a lot of time using LibreOffice/MSOffice, it's just not worth my money to buy a copy of MS Office.
Revision control is only a collaboration tool to those who haven't used real collaboration tools.
Man I dislike the ribbon. But even more I dislike how word 2011 puts all your embedded figures and textboxes in these weird hierarchy of wrappers I find impossible to manipulate. I can't find anything that word 2011 does better than 2008 did.
When I want to lower my blood pressure I turn to apple Pages. man what a breath of fresh air. It too has a different interface than the old word, but it is very very self consistent so the learning curve is fast. unlike the ribbon which is required for some functions, the toolbar is not required for any function, it is just for convenience.
There is exactly one problem I've had with Pages that is a show stopper. The folks at Zotero have a stick up their ass about trying to make zotero compatible with apple. They say it is because it is an undocumented API. but it is just xml, easy to read, and easy to figure out how to add end notes into. Various people have shown how to do this with perl scripts. but no Zotero somehow has this apple-hate vibe.
Thus endnotes are crippled on Pages.
I wish apple would implement their own bibliography system in pages in a way like zotero.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What you're missing is that before the ribbon it was easier to self discover the menu option that was needed and it wasn't buried 3 menus deep. As for customization, I already told you that while I can customize the ribbon, it requires precognition that I need to customize the menu. So I will need to memorize every single tab/button arrangement to know that something I will need isn't easily found before I start working on a document. If it is something I use all the time, customizing the ribbon makes sense but otherwise, I'm spending too much time looking for things.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
This is it. Lots of people had behavioural understanding of how to use the old menu system, and it had 2 decades of inertia behind it. But that didn't make it a good way to do things. For all the new users (3rd world, and high school kids learning) the old system didn't really click with their understanding of how computers behaved. It very much represented things as layers of types of computer operations, not types of tasks you want to perform.
They've taken some time to get it improved, and there are certainly areas for improvement, but the user experience, and the learning curve for the ribbon are vastly preferable to the old system.
1. Has a vastly larger market share then LibreOffice. 2. You can get support on it though millions of forums, tech net articles. 3. Virtually no training need to introduce it in to an already existing windows echo system. 4. Its supported by coders that are paid to fix problems, not volunteers. 5. Integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft Office Products 6. Integrates seamlessly with Share Point. 7. Microsoft has been doing this for years, Libre is still "new" to the game and im sure there are others but im tired of typing and have to get back to work.
You are correct.
Only the slashdot summary makes this mistake. The actual article is written by someone who knows a lot more about the subject than the slashdot submitter and the slashdot editor who approved this story.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
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
I've yet to load any Word document into a different version of Word and have it look the same.
This does not appear to be a deal breaker for anyone.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I can top it. It miss Clippy. I thought the Ewoks and Jar Jar were cute. And I liked disco.
You like things that everyone else hates, so...... you're a hipster?
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
I'm not sure I would ascribe so much psychology to it. The interface changed significantly, and everyone who was used to the old interface found the new interface counter-intuitive and difficult to use, so they raged. It's what users do.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
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)
I was recently introduced to Emacs' org-mode. It is really GREAT. I never looked into it before, as I thought it was basically a to-do list manager â" But no. I am currently using it mostly as a word processor (well, for semi-complex documents, as it makes little sense if your documents have no structure at all) and for presentations. And I'm still only beginning to love it (and am sure I'm truly underutilizing it). /italics/, *boldface*, =code=, nested/itemized lists with hyphens, etc.), and with three keystrokes, you export to your favorite format. C-c C-e b shows the document as a (inter-linked) HTML page, C-c C-e d compiles it with LaTeX into a PDF, etc.
True to the WYSIWYM mode, you work with a regular plain text file. There is a good deal of markup, but quite easy to learn (i.e.
so...... you're a hipster?
I have a MacBook and iPad to prove it.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It takes 2 seconds if you know the exact terminology Help expects. Otherwise it can take a while then you go to Google and use your terminology (which is more common) and someone else tells you the MS terminology. Or if it was self discovery, you would have been done already.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
01010010 01100101 01100001 01101100 00100000 01101101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100111 01110010 01100001 01101101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00101110
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
The main reason for crashes in LibreOffice appears to be system memory. With sixteen gigabytes of RAM, Writer has yet to crash any document that I have opened -- something that I can't say about Word.
Does anyone else think that having to have 16 GB of ram to prevent your word processor from crashing is a bit excessive?
It didn't sell 200 million copies because it was the best program available, but because companies got bundles, have upgrade contracts and are already using older versions. Since the older versions no longer get updates, or will not get them in the near future, companies decide to upgrade. They seldom re-evaluate the competution, but just buy "the lastest version" and get unpleasant surprises like a lot of users not being able to do their regular work with the ribbon.
If they would seriously investigate what office suite would be best to purchase, before accepting the bundle or upgrading to the latest version of what they already have, I'm fairly certain that about half, maybe more of those 200M would not have been sold. Yes, I'm saying half. Word 2010 may be an annoyance, but it's still one of the better document editors around for general office use by office staff.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
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.
Wait, what? In LO, I right click the page, select "Page..." and in there you can click the landscape radio button. Click OK and done. Or am I not getting exactly what you meant?
Here's the secret to immortality:
There is nothing "standard" about what MS is doing. It's smoke and mirrors. I did a couple proofs of concept for unbelieving superiors who bought into this "standard" stuff. It's a joke of a standard.
Here's a lovely tidbit that indicates how bad things are: you open an old word file in Office 97 format, and save it as docx, all using latest office. You then inspect it, and there's a little flag that basically tells word to format it as if it were old Office 97 or whatever. Yes, it's a docx file that merely carries the behavior expected of the old doc file. There's no documentation anywhere about how to implement that flag. A whole lot of docx documents has this flag set because, guess, what, they where effectively imported from old doc into docx. There is no way to handle this without reverse engineering what Office 97 did, and documenting its behavior.
Never forget that it doesn't appear that MS wrote the opendoc standard first and then worked off of it, in a clean room fashion, in implementing their xml office file format support. Nope. They were at best documenting things as they went, and the only "standard" is the microsoft implementation of it in their office product. If you try and come up with your own implementation, you'll run into endless slightly incorrect statements, slight bits of missing information, slight smoke and mirrors; the general feel of the standard is that it was someone's second thought, never meant to be used for implementing anything, but merely used to appease the (rightful) "oh noes vendor lock-in" crowd. Smoke and mirrors, that'll be all there's to it.
Yes, the opendoc standard does IIRC correctly document the xml schema and whatnot, but that's a far cry from implementing the formatting engine. Merely knowing the data structures is only one side of the medal. Similarly, if you were to attempt reverse-engineering the old document stream format, you'd only end up with how they represent the document data in the stream (doc is an OLE compound storage file). You still need to know how all this data drives the formatter to produce the visible output. And that formatter, ladies and gentlemen, is so intertwined with the details of the underlying GUI engine in Windows, that expecting a pixel-identical output is absurd unless you'd reverse engineer and produce a formal spec of the formatter code from old Word, and do the necessary work of documenting how it interacts with the font rendering system -- because that's also anything but trivial.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You don't need to say it slower. I understand what perfectly what you're saying. I just think you're wrong.
My point is that you cannot know to customize the ribbon without precognition. This is true of menus, ribbons, whatever.
This is not the point you made originally. You're backtracking now. You asserted that the problem with the ribbon is that it assumes what you need and don't need and hides the rest. Now you say this is a problem with any menu system. So we are in agreeance now.
It is not a solution to the problem at all.
I'm not so sure this problem needs to be solved at all. How often do you need to find uncommon functions. By definition... not often. If you find you do need one often, just make a shortcut. You seem to want an interface that can read your mind and always activate the function you have in mind. This is unrealistic.
You make this assertion that "The ribbon makes it harder to do by MS purposefully obscuring what it considers less used feautures 2 or 3 menus deep. With the old way, it was there and more easily discoverered." But you have yet to substantiate this. I have provided several examples and reasons why the ribbon makes functions more easily discoverable. Let me enumerate and expand them for you and add a couple more.
1) The ribbon layout decreases search time. Finding a function in the old menu takes time O(m*n*p) where m is the number of menus, n is the number of items in the menus, and p is the number of flyouts. Finding a function in the ribbon takes time O(m*n) where m is the number of tabs and n is the number of items in the tabs.
2) The layout of the ribbon allows for more items to be displayed at once. Thus the number of items 2 clicks away are much higher than in the old menu. Thus the need to drill down into sub menus is decreased compared to the old menu.
3)The ribbon uses icons and words to represent functions, which makes them not only easier to remember but easier to scan quickly. In a menu system you have to read each of the words, one after another to find the one you want. And sometimes, a picture is a better representation for a function, like a style or a shape or a chart. For instance, the ribbon allows plenty of space to visualize all of the text styles. Rather than reading "heading 1" "heading 2" "text body" etc... as in Open Office Writer, you see them visually in Word due to the Ribbon.
4) The ribbon has more logical groupings for functions due to more space. Like the example I gave, Bibliography functions are under reference. In the old menu system, several related functions might be spread across different menus.
5) Context specific ribbons bring together common tools. For example with graphs, all graph functions are available in context tabs. In the old menu system, they try to replicate this with context toolbars, but the toolbar changes depending on the part of the graph you have selected. So rather than having everything in front of you, you have to click on the different chart pieces to try and find the function you want. Not very discoverable.
Now, how exactly does the old menu system beat these features of the ribbon in terms of discoverability?
Advantage: Hierarchical Paragraph Styles.. "since every style is based on Normal"
Let's examine that. The first four properties of a style in Word 2010, sitting open next to me.
-Name
-Style type
-Style based on
-Style for following paragraph
So a Style can be based on any other style, or (no style) should you want to start from blank. Does that sound like a hierarchy? It does to me, and I use it as one. Set up what you want. Knock yourself out. It works, and allows you to create a hierarchy.
His piece on list styles/bullets seems slightly ill informed too, as is the tirade on headers and footers, tables of contents... Word can do what is described.
Custom properties, linked to fields, are extensively used by many organisations and what he's describing sounds more like Word than Writer to me. That one has me really confused as metadata management is really quite good in word.
In short, I know Word quite well and I think the 'advantages' that are being proposed as Writer advantages are simply down to the author's lack of knowledge.
I fully expect flamebait moderation for this, but it would be nice if someone could point out where I'm wrong!
I have tried to use open alternatives to Word, but they just don't cut it when trying to collaborate with others. Cross compatibility with Word is poor, particularly for long manuscripts that are edited extensively with track changes. It just isn't worth the headache, and trying to convince academics to convert to something else is nearly impossible.
And LaTeX is not an option, most people I collaborate use Word for manuscript prep. And I will preemptively state that many journals we submit to openly state they prefer manuscripts written in Word, but will accept LaTeX...