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LibreOffice 4.2 Busts Out GPU Mantle Support and Corporate IT Integration
Billly Gates points to this basic summary of the features of the recently released LibreOffice 2.4, writing: "In catching up with MS Office, the new LibreOffice 4.2 now has full Windows 7/8 integration including Aero peek, thumbnails, jumplists, and recent documents all from the taskbar. In addition, one weak area for LibreOffice has been enterprise network support and the lack of active directory tools: LibreOffice now has GPO and active directory support for system administrators to deploy and manage LibreOffice over corporate networks. LibreOffice also includes an expert configuration Window to assist power users and system administrators when deploying to hundreds of workstation at a time." Read on for some more details about the release, including some information about support for AMD's Mantle CPU acceleration support.
Also of particular interest is AMD/ATI is expecting to finally release Mantle in the next coming hours for games like Battlefield 4. Surprisingly LibreOffice also supports mantle as well according to the release notes. However you will need the 14.1 driver which is being compiled and uploaded at the time of this writing to utilize this feature. Mantle will accelerate lower-end CPUs by up to 300% in some tasks while having modest improvements for those with more recent powerful CPUs. Real niceties for those like myself on AMD phenom IIs with the later 7000 series cards.
The only issue (some on Slashdot may say benefit ) is the lack of a ribbon UI. However, for recent articles about governments considering OpenOffice this release addresses shortcomings with the new active directory and GPO support."
The only issue (some on Slashdot may say benefit ) is the lack of a ribbon UI. However, for recent articles about governments considering OpenOffice this release addresses shortcomings with the new active directory and GPO support."
4.2 not 2.4... are you messing with us intentionally, just to see who is awake?
Unclear if I can get a copy without all this unwanted bloat.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Can LibreOffice guarantee 100% compatibility (both read and write) with MS Office documents?
If the answer is no, then it doesn't matter how many other features are added, most businesses aren't going to use it. You can't risk the possibility that a PowerPoint slide in your quarterly board report will show up as garbage because of a compatibility issue.
To form a second-rate club of second rates!
The only issue (some on Slashdot may say benefit ) is the lack of a ribbon UI.
The majority of Office power users I know (mostly lawyers) were disgusted by the replacement of the menu-driven UI with the infamous ribbon. It's not just left-brained Slashdotters that prefer an easily navigable interface.
I submitted the story.
While ATI has listed LibreOffice for one of the few programs that use Mantle I can not find any other information on this?
This begs to differ if LibreOffice uses GPU directwrite or OpenGL and does it work on platforms than Windows. Of course this is not critical unless you do multimedia heavy presentations I am somewhat curious. I wonder if anyone who develops it can care to comment?
Also I use LibreOffice in conjunction with MS Office. I can't afford publisher and it is nice to use it to repair office documents that MS Office says are corrupt. This is a highly recommended upgrade even if you use MS Office full time.
http://saveie6.com/
Anyone who tried to move files between different versions, system with different system languages or, if you are really daring, different platforms knows this.
MicroSoft can't guarantee compatibility with a lot of formats either, including older versions of their own formats. Any major upgrade or change is going to give compatibility and training/skill issues, regardless of what vendor you had or will go to. Sure, it'd be really nice if OpenOffice and/or LibreOffice would actually be able to fully work with at least current MicroSoft formats without messing up some of the formatting some of the time, but if you're looking beyond that, you'll be fine once you've migrated.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
What about OneNote? Anything about a Libre OneNote? It's the only thing keeping me on Windows.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
... you still cannot perform a search and replace using manual page breaks. A simple shortcoming, but it keeps me from being able to dump MS Office.
Open Office/LibreOffice are both so obsessed with competing against MS that they, just like Microsoft, have no interest at all in people who actually write narratives for a living. As a desktop publishing package, LibreOffice is constantly improving. As a tool for corporate administrative assistants, it may very well be wonderful. As a useful tool for someone who actually writes stories, it is becoming increasingly more of a pain in the rump that it is worth. It is a painful truth that Word 2000 (shudder) is honestly more writer friendly than anything, commercial or open source, that has been put out since then. FYI, just in case someone mentions yWrite5 and/or Scrivener (someone always does) they are not writing programs. They are organizing programs. RoughDraft, and some others like Jarte, can be used for small stories or articles. But they are old and not being maintained. Plus they lack the necessary fonts and/or other tools for modern submission requirements. Many of us would gladly invent something for ourselves, but we are wordsmiths. We don't program. So we're screwed.
Honestly will it ever look like a modern application? Office 95 wants its UI back.
If it'd still reliably run on 64-bit systems, my suggestion would be to try and get a copy of StarOffice 5.2, the ancestor. No version of OpenOffice[.org] or LibreOffice has met my demands as well yet. Unfortunately, it doesn't. So what I'm doing today is running StarOffice 5.2 on 32-bit systems, like my netbook, and OpenOffice 3.3 on 64-bit systems, which is the latest of the StarOffice descendants still capable of saving documents in StarOffice 5 compatible format. (StarOffice 5 binary formats are still fully readable with current versions of OpenOffice and LibreOffice, for that matter.)
I use LibreOffice a lot and actually like it, not as much as FrameMaker (before Adobe layed of its creators), but it's still a good software. But if a fairy came by and offered me to realize a wish list with up to a thousand entries regarding Libre Office improvements, I would still not even come close to wishing GPU support for it...
Fcuk office, I use LaTeX.
WISYWIG is the WORST invention since they include too many fonts, too many colours and they can't even get references and formatting copy and paste right. Not to mention LibreOffice has an interface dating back to the 90's.
If you really insist on using Office and it's clones in the WISYWIG world, I suggest you AT LEAST read TYPESETTING best practices instead of using the equivalent of CRAYONS to typeset documents.
Office and it's clones should have some kind of Typeset mode to be taken seriously.
As someone using LibreOffice to write a huge manuscript that has been in development for several years, I would like some really good change control tools. I may be dense, and not quite understanding the problem, but it seems to me that integrating LibreOffice with Github to support distributed editing of huge projects, and version control, would be a natural... Am I just to ignorant to understand why this isn't being done? -Stony
Yes, LibreOffice is Word compatible. Specifically, it scores better than Word 2011 on compatibility with three of the four .doc formats. See the Microsoft article "What happens when I save a Word 2007 document in the OpenDocument Text format?"
I experienced this myself when my mother couldn't open any of her old documents on her Win7 computer with MS Word. I opened them in LibreOffice for her and converted them to the latest version the .docx format.
Because the OpenCL support is used in the spreadsheet to speedup Calc functions and you've mention FrameMaker in the same breath as LibreOffice as in your talking Writer features.
Nobody would add GPU support to their wishlist, but I'm sure your wishlist would include things like fast rendering of charts, better looking graphics, etc. I.e. some of your wishes would translate to wanting better graphics support, which could translate into using the GPU.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Mantle is a low-level API specification developed by AMD as an alternative to Direct3D and OpenGL, primarily for use on the PC platform.
Emphasis mine. I can't be the only one seeing this as a bad strategy (versus pushing this into Openxx).
Outlook. Without it you can forget any kind of migration. It's really AD that makes it indispensable, so don't bother suggesting anything without it.
It would never occur to me to do calculations demanding enough to benefit from GPU usage by using a spreadsheet application. And even if a GPU can accelerate the rendering of some 3D graphics in a document, I would rather want the application to do such rendering in the background once and retain the rendered image in a cache while I scroll around in the document - so that rendering speed would not really matter a lot.
Even Foxit has got that horrible thing now.
...because they don't know what they're doing and don't understand the playing field to begin with. They think that presenting similar windows and icons is all that's needed, when its really the "platform-ness" of the OS that matters the most. This includes a lot of qualities and business practices which Apple and Microsoft adhere to but are known only internally or not even expressed at all (along with others that are commonly talked about in MS/Apple circles but are completely ignored in most FOSS projects).
You sit at the personal computing table, you watch, you reverse-engineer the dynamics and you learn. Then you can try to figure out which elements can be adapted to FOSS or possibly even improved upon.
No? Then get out of the way, cuz users have expectations and aren't attracted when systems developers are trying to impress only their peers --as well as that works in the server world, its just a pile unrecognizable pieces to everyone else. Barging in with piles of tools, plus 6 or 8 candy-coated DEs and calling it all "Linux" hasn't worked... cannot work.
My god, man, its just a confusing mess.
What Google did with Android was very savvy: They lost the "Linux" identity, published an SDK (so app devs see a stable target) and started with a select group of hardware vendors to support it (instead of that horrible pretence of 'try different distros and see which one works on your system'). But Android is not meant for the desktop...
still way behind
I want to use local tables, odbc and native drivers all in the one base file so i can update and move stuff around quickly between sources.
i'm still stuck using access 2000 to get work done.... any alternatives welcome.
how about it guys! some of us want to cut / paste part of a cell or formula quickly
I had a few problem case .docx's that I had lying around that came from MS Office users. I am happy to report that they have rendered correctly for the first time in LO 4.2. Well done !
And finally the taskbar/aero peek stuff finally behaves properly on Windows !
Pet peeve taken care of ! I also feel a certain improvement in speed and responsiveness in general Nice nice nice.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
The only way I find out a new version of LibreOffice is available is either by visiting the website and click on download to see the version number or when someone posts something on slashdot.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
if it emulated wordperfect
The only issue (some on Slashdot may say benefit ) is the lack of a ribbon UI.
You're quite right. I still have to see the benefits of that attrocious "innovation"!