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

[sosume]

From the perspective of an expert user, Emacs is the superior tool.

Re:LaTeX

[Oddweb]

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

While I personally prefer LaTeX, it can be a lot more awkward to get into for most people than either of the offices.

Re:LaTeX

[agrif]

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

Re:LaTeX

[crazyjj]

You kids with your fancy punch cards. Hand-wiring is the only way to program!

Re:LaTeX

[h4rr4r]

No, a real expert uses VI.

Nice try though.

Re:LaTeX

[Rhodri Mawr]

...and in the darkness bind them?

Re:LaTeX

[OzPeter]

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

No no no.
 
 

From the perspective of a normal user, the expert is the superior tool.

Re:LaTeX

[TheRaven64]

From the perspective of a vi user, an emacs user is a 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

[virgnarus]

Bah. Talk about a Mickey Mouse way of doing it. Rather, you should be able to command the elements to rise from the earth and form into the necessary parts. Then, with a single word spoken from your omnipotent mouth, the beasts should gather and use the parts to construct a PC and program an editor of infinite perfection, using the blessed intelligence you've bestowed on their worthless feeble minds. Finally, with your wonderful gaze, the PC will gain sentience and operate the editor by itself, performing the work you've predestined upon it.

As it uses the editor to expound the details of your immaculate glory, the beasts will simultaneously bow, exclaiming your great and powerful name. Forever and ever, amen.

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

[nschubach]

I suppose there's an xkcd comic for the obligatory posting of xkcd comics...

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.

In defense of Word headers/footers

[crazyjj]

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.

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.

Re:Number One!

[Rude Turnip]

Where to start, where to start...
I've been using Office since Office 95 (and Slashdot since 1998) and the ribbon is the greatest improvement to the suite. The ribbon can be hidden by pressing control-F1 if you're worried about screen space. It completely exposes the functionality of Office, where as menus hid it. In other words, the ribbon makes the Office interface more inviting and makes it easier to explore new functionality. This also means co-workers no longer ask you how to do things with Office because it's easy to figure it out themselves. Shortcut keys only have material value when commands are hidden in a menu system. You can right-click any button in Office and add it to a quick access toolbar. You can also customize the ribbon if you like.
There is one computer in our office using Office 2003, the last version before the ribbon. It's now considered a pain to use because it's stuck with the menu instead of the ribbon.

Re:Number One!

[Missing.Matter]

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.

Re:Number One!

[Missing.Matter]

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.

Re:Number One!

[JonathanCombe]

I think there is an awful lot to dislike about the ribbon interface. For example in Excel in 2003 if I wanted to insert a row, I'd go "Insert -> Row". In the ribbon I have an insert tab which allows me to insert lots of things but none of them are a row. No if I want to insert a row I have to press the Insert button on the Home tab and select the option from the drop down on there. How is it any easier when I have two Insert options and there is no way to know which one I need to use to insert something without clicking through both of them of and hunting for the option.

There are similar problems with Word. For example if I want to insert an object, I use the Insert tab then select object on the drop down. But if I make the window a little narrower it becomes just an icon and it's not exactly obvious until I click on it what that might do. If I make the window narrower still, to the width of the document, it puts the object button under another drop down labelled Text. So I have to click a box marked "Text" to insert something that is NOT text? This is better how?

Then there other features like the fact the "File" menu now takes over the entire window of the program.

Now with the old system I had drop down menus which makes it much quicker to go through and find all the options then go through the ribbon, click each button and navigate through all the various drop downs off those buttons. The pull down menus also made it very easy for me to find the keyboard shortcuts for an option, so I can quickly learn to use the program more efficiently. All this is now hidden in the help system - it is not obvious what the keyboard shortcuts are and I suspect users new to the system will keep reaching between the mouse and keyboard for even simple things because the keyboard shortcuts are hidden away.

However for me the worst of all is the inconsistency. In years gone buy these things were defined in a style guide so if I used one program I could quickly get familiar with others as many of the options would be called the same and in the same menus (e.g. Edit for the clipboard functions, file to save, open, close, print and so on). Once I'd learnt one program it made it much easier to find my way around other programs. Yes the menus may be illogical in places (e.g. Find, a read only option, on and Edit menu) but at least once the user has learnt these oddities they can easily navigate around other programs. The toolbar was a useful addition to this, making common options a single click away, and the user could customise them to their hearts content. Now we're stuck with a horrible interface (in my opinion) that has very few possible customisations. Worse as Microsoft has patented it, it stops other application writes from using the same interface - thereby making Microsoft programs have different interfaces from other vendors and increasing the learning curve of non-Microsoft applications.

Sorry but I'm just NOT going to be convinced the ribbon is a good idea.

Re:Number One!

[RubberMallet]

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.

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'.

Am I the only one in the world that likes Ribbon?

[sandytaru]

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.

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.)

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you like Microsoft Bob as well? How long have you been a member of the communist party?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Forbidden features!

[metrometro]

You don't have permission to access /applications/how-libreoffice-writer-tops-ms-word-12-features-1.html on this server.

Google Cache

[codemachine]

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

Print page and Google's cached copy!

[antdude]

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

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.

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

[crazyjj]

I can top it. It miss Clippy. I thought the Ewoks and Jar Jar were cute. And I liked disco.

Re:They have one huge disadvantage: Landscape mode

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Org-mode!

[gwolf]

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).
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. /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.

01001110 01101111 00100001

[uncqual]

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