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LibreOffice 4.1 Released
An anonymous reader writes "The latest major release of the LibreOffice office suite has just been published, including an experimental improved sidebar based on the work of Apache OpenOffice, embedded fonts, better Microsoft Office compatibility (improving their exclusive capability in the free software world of not only being able to read but also write .docx and .xlsx files) and many further Improvements."
LibreOffice & Apache OpenOffice should just merge in to one open source office suite.
How many to go?
Have they fixed the automatic update system yet? Or do I need to go and do it manually again like its the 90s?
Blatant Advert: Android Apps!
improving their exclusive capability in the free software world of not only being able to read but also write .docx and .xlsx files)
Is this really true? I mean, not an office suite, but PHPExcel can read and write Excel files.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...there is already a site more or less dedicated to announcements about Libre Office updates. It's called libreoffice.org, and I think most people around here know about it, so we so not need another one.
LibreOffice is free to take everything OpenOffice releases under the Apache license and release it under GPL/LGPL 3.0 of their release. Unfortunately, OpenOffice can't do the reverse without switching their license.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
What kind of idiot public school teacher requires my children to do their work digitally then print it out on paper? Oh. Ones like you. Fucking idiots. Every last one.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Having this done by a group of volunteers is nice & all that.
BUT!
These folks need to travel and smooze with others, both for the publicity, and to keep the ideas about how to do something fresh. Who knows, maybe one of them will put in that killer feature we've all been waiting for?
So when you are done downloading it, take the time to donate, so maybe the 5.0 release can afford a bigger cake. The one I saw in the pix was about 5% of the size of the one it would take to feed all the volunteers a celebratory piece of cake, maybe even with a scoop of ice cream on top. IMNSHO, speaking as a retired person living on SS, I dropped the card to say thanks. Surely the working folks who will make better use of this than I ever will, can better afford to pull out the card?
I would firmly suggest that others do the same if we want to see a 5.0 or higher release. Nothing kills a volunteer operation quicker than not being able to pay the bills.
Cheers, Gene
As a long-time MS Office user I find Outlook to be very useful. I've attempted to migrate from Office to OS but LO doesn't have an Outlook replacement, so LO is a non-starter and I'm back where I started with Office. I've tried Zimbra and Evolution with bad results, and I don't want an online/cloud approach. LO would be fine for me if I could find an OS Outlook alternative. What are your thoughts?
Or they could just save it to PDF and print from any modern OS/computer.
And while you may love the ribbon, not all of us do.
That said, I think it was just a troll... nobody actually likes the Ribbon do they?
The one change i really want to get them to implement is the two tone colors in the row and column headers in the spreadsheet program. As it is the top half of the column headers and the left half of the row headers is light grey, while the other half of each is dark grey. That probably seems like a pretty trivial complaint, and maybe it's just me, but something about having half the area light and the other half dark plays havoc with my brain and makes it hard to read the labels, especially for the row headers where the line dividing the colors aligns with the numbers.
As a moderate user of spreadsheets this is the only thing that Excel handles better than OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Well okay, that and copy/pasting HTML content. Excel handles that just fine, but in OO/LO it hangs for awhile when i do the paste, and then if i undo the paste the text goes away but the formatting and images stick around forever. (This generally happens when trying to transfer tabular data from a webpage. Once it's in the spreadsheet i'll copy it again and do a Paste Special->Unformatted Text.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
What a fucking teacher you are. How about telling your students to print their work to pdf. There presto, no more last minute formatting problems. A pdf renders the same on any OS and especially prints the same on any OS.
If yours is the kind of intellectual flexibility that is tought in college may GOD save us. We're all doomed.
Wow some anger issues there Dishevel?!?
There are many valid reasons to have print it out on paper.
1. Locations to mark/edit: I am not a school teacher but I will print out my own work and then I can review it on public transit, at a coffee shop, laying down in bed, or where ever.
2. For many if not most mistakes are easier to see on paper. When I am given docs to review I will sometimes print them out and look at them as a bigger picture and find things that I did not find on the screen.
3. Editing. It is easier to circle parts and use standard marking terms to indicate what is incorrect or what can be improved. For example circle a sentence or paragraph and draw an error to where it should be moved.
4. When going over the corrections and suggestions with your students it is easier to go over the print out then have to carry a computer around to each and every students desk.
But then again you can just calling them idiots ignoring their education, and experience... we have an adjective for this... oh ya, ignorant, because if it inconveniences you there can be nothing good of it...
If I'm reading the new features page correctly, they appear to be seeing some pretty sizable code reduction in the utilities where they are replacing Java with Python. To avoid misunderstanding, let me point out that I am aware that only a few parts of the project were coded in Java and the bulk is in C++.
I'm expecting Apache to pull their typical BS any way.
First they decide: the product isn't generic enough.,/p>
Then they make a new product that's more generic, but break backward compatibility. Which is also nearly unusable, by design..
It's, sadly, still easier to show students where and how they fucked up their spelling, grammar, and etc with a red pen on paper. Office suites are still a PITA to use for showing corrections.
Doofus...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
A stylus-based tablet is actually a decent compromise. You get the benefits (and drawbacks) of being electronic, but still get to scribble on it to your heart's content.
It's hard enough dealing with the differences between MS Office 2010, Office 2011, and Office 2013. God forbid if someone wanted to use Office 2008.
If, by your own admission, MS Office has trouble being compatible with itself, should LibreOffice really be blamed for running into problems here?
Yes, because every family can afford a few of those.
Ribbon/No-ribbon. Sidebar/No-sidebar. Phah! Where's LibreOneNote?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It was not the differences I was complaining about. It is the teachers demanding that something be created digitally then printed and handed in. Happens at my children's school all the time. Fucking stupid.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Annotations work great in the real world. Public school teachers come in two varieties.
New.
Useless Fucks.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
What? Only the teacher needs one.
Though I did intend to say something about many teachers will feel they're not being paid enough to buy one, though.
Still no Page Break line while in Web Layout view.
The biggest setback from having LibreOffice implemented in my company. Word 97 had this feature!
The Ribbon's not so bad; it's just a tabbed toolbar that's extra-thick so it can display more information than a normal one. I just want to be able to search the menus too, like you can in LO/Ubuntu.
I didn't say I was a teacher. You think the teachers do the grading? The TA's do the grading. The TAs all have more important stuff to do than grade papers. They want to grade them as fast as possible. The professors set the policies, like requiring it on paper. The TA's don't make that decision idiot. And we ask for paper, because how to you grade digitally? You put in electronic comments and stuff? Do you realize how much longer that takes to do? Grading digital work would add hours to our grading load, and we aren't paid enough to put up with that. Every time we do accept a late assignment, a digital copy, etc, it creates a lot more work for us, and we don't get paid any extra. Imagine if the whole class did digitally every week? It'd be a nightmare. Then, you would have to individually email them back their corrected assignments. Do you want to write 44 emails every week? On paper, you can hand it back to them in class, while you are watching them anyways.
You know, the students can choose to print to PDF to solve that problem. But you know what, in the real world, most of them do not. We are talking around 18-20 year olds usually. They aren't the most mature or smart people. I do tell them on the first day to print to PDF. THEY DON'T LISTEN!
And I know how to spell, but spelling correctly takes longer and I had places to go. I haven't even taught in a couple years. I don't have dsylexia, and college was easy.
The ribbon is organized well, and has most features on it, when using an HD screen. You don't have to hunt for options buried 3 levels deep. The ribbon makes all features obvious. You see a button, and go, I wonder what that does. You don't have to go 3 levels deep. Before the ribbon, you had to add custom menu buttons just for superscript and subscript. With the ribbon, those buttons are right there, by default.
Not only have those who criticized never have tried to being a college TA, I don't think you even were a student. I have years of TA experience.The students don't listen, they don't plan ahead, they don't manage their time well, they aren't very bright. You will get a few good students. But it's the worst students that you worry about. The poor students take up all your time, cause you the most trouble, bring down your grade average, and give you poor teaching evaluations. Some of the students are truly stupid and don't belong in college at all. I dealt mostly with freshmen. Freshmen don't even care about their grades, except the premeds and the smart ones. Most of them haven't realized they need to study hard to keep their scholarships. They are too busy partying and stuff to worry about that their first semester.
Don't talk about what you don't know about.
OneNote clone.
Although you are not a teacher (apparently) you clearly aren't new, so that'd make you...
Libre Office is available for Windows and the smart cookies would print to pdf from libre office and print the pdf for you to mark.
Meanwhile my University Professors were getting my open office documents in doc format opening them in open office and marking them. It's been a while since I was submitting papers, before oracle.
Is your faculty aware of your discrimination towards your students? Not every student has a silver spoon or working parents. Maybe it really is a question of finance especially since you suggest some of your students can not afford a printer. It seems hardly likely they have the money for Microsoft Office either. Of course they could pirate it but that hardly prepares them for life as an honest upstanding member of the community.
Are you in the business of educating or leaching a pay check from the public purse?
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
I'm not convinced that all the items are in sensible places. Then there are those full screen 'options' which obscure everything. Office 2003 was not quite logical either, perhaps it is familiarity, but I could find stuff. From what I can see, Office 2003 -> 2010 - a few minor improvements and a wtf change in UI.
I got sick of the entire mess when one minor variant of Word 97 could not read files produced by another minor variant of Word 97 (and vice versa), yet both programs came on media with identical labels. Having to reinstall the thing from the same CDROM in every desktop computer in an entire University engineering department was an annoying waste of time.
Meanwhile there's software here that is happily reading in files from the late 1960s because THEY ARE IN A PROPERLY DOCUMENTED STANDARD FILE FORMAT. MS Office was a step backwards with file compatibility and they knew better than to do it, but for sleazy weasel product lock-in reasons we were stuck with it, and due to their mismanagement of this "feature" you are punished by incompatibilities even if you do stay locked in with them.
There's two really critical (IMO) things that the LO devs keep missing:
- Loading time: Libreoffice is the only application which takes time noticable time to load - anything else just pops up instantly. There's even a progress bar. That's too 1999. Only games take that long (or more) to load. .gtkrc-2.0, and most text can barely fit the controls (since they don't seem to resize along with the text, which does respect DPI settings). All this makes me feel like I'm using something totally alien to my desktop, and I feel the need to get done with it and close it ASAP.
- OS integration: Why is the look and feel so slightly alien on my desktop. I've set it to look gtkish, but it still looks alien, the icons have are different from the ones in my
The Ribbon's not so bad; it's just a tabbed toolbar that's extra-thick so it can display more information than a normal one. I just want to be able to search the menus too, like you can in LO/Ubuntu.
...except it actually displays less useful information than the old, smaller menu/tool bar.
There's no need for OpenOffice and LibreOffice to merge. Yes it would be nice in so far as consolidating manpower and reducing confusion, but in terms of functionality and features, anything that is introduced in OpenOffice, the team at LibreOffice take and integrate into their package because they're perfectly allowed to by virtue of the license.
So sticking with LO means you get the maximum number of features with no real loss apart from a less marketable name (which I'm beyond caring about at this point - if it were that important I'd have giving up on GIMP a long time ago).
[snip] Do you know what happens when a student tries to make their lab report in LibreOffice, or on a mac or something, and then uses a school windows computer to print it 2 minutes before class? The formatting gets all messed up, and I doc them points because of it. So you make extra work for yourself. You either have to save time to re work on your document, or you have to own your own printer and save time to use it before class.
Save as pdf. Print the pdf. Where's the problem?
I'm no fan of monopoly.
-Gareth
Who are these people who love the ribbon? He's the first one I've ever heard of.
I find LO to be more garbage than MS Office. It has a terrible lack of polish. For example, adjusting the row or column position of a table using the mouse in LO Writer in Windows, causes a dotted line to remain on the page after having made the adjustment. It's not supposed to remain because you can clearly see it get wiped off if you scroll down then up the page again. Minimize+maximize resolves the issue, but the fact the developers don't give a shit about such details shows a lack of care towards the user experience (it might work fine in Linux, but given most people use Windows it might be worth giving Windows a bit more attention sometimes, LO developers).
That and the fact you can't resize a table using the mouse, you can't interactively crop an image like you can in Word, and a multitude of things which irritate me when compared to how fucking easy they are in MS Office, and I finally realized why NO ONE uses LO by choice unless you have no self-respect (or use Linux on the desktop, in which case the same applies).
Oh yeah. LO's dictionary recognizes the word movie, but not the word movies. Shit like this makes me question why I bother sometimes.
Oh they exist. You just choose to hang around with those who hate it, most likely. Not saying the ribbon's good or bad, but FFS, it was released in 2007. Can't geeks learn how to use it by now? If it was really that useless you'd think the world would have fallen apart by now given how widespread Office is.
For example, I have clients who use passwords on their Word docx file in their Mac 2011 and Windows 2010 versions. Both OO and LO can't open them still. Full compatibility is still an issue for me. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I try Apache see sidebar, but no edit of master page at all. Useless for slide. I try LibreOffice he work just fine.
I'm sure that people could say the same about certain internet ragers.
Except of course for the fact that the internet is doing fine. Education gets more money and less results. Public Teachers that give money to their evil union are criminal and destroying our youth. They do not care. They just want better insurance and less hours. Fuck Them.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?