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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?
Once again, LibreOffice demonstrates that it is a downstream version of OpenOffice.
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.
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...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
I don't want a sidebar. I want a ribbon. You get all used to the ribbon, and you don't want to go back. The ribbon is so much better. How long can you use this suite before deciding it's not worth it, and go back to MS Office 2010 or Office 2013? Usually when I try stuff like libre office, I can only go a day, maybe a week, before I run into formatting problems and critical missing features. In the real world, we share office documents. 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. Unless you can convince everyone who writes the documents, and everyone who views the document, and the publishers to accept it, and whatnot, basically everyone to use LibreOffice, it just doesn't work. And that's real world, after college stuff.
I know many of you skipped college, but you would have learned a lesson there. 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.
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?
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.)
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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..
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!
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!
OneNote clone.
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
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).
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.