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Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What?
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word, and that's in large part thanks to the success of the OpenOffice family of word processors. "Family," because the OpenOffice name has been attached to several branches of a codebase that's gone through some serious evolution over the years, starting from its roots in closed-source StarOffice, acquired and open-sourced by Sun to become OpenOffice.org. The same software has led (via some hamfisted moves by Oracle after its acquisition of Sun) to the also-excellent LibreOffice. OpenOffice.org's direct descendant is Apache OpenOffice, and an anonymous reader writes with this excellent news from that project: "The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache OpenOffice has been downloaded 100 million times. Over 100 million downloads, over 750 extensions, over 2,800 templates. But what does the community at Apache need to do to get the next 100 million?" If you want to play along, you can get the latest version of OpenOffice from SourceForge (Slashdot's corporate cousin). I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
Libre Office is much better, IMO.
it [poopd
NO
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MS and its Office needs to die.
I thought LibreOffice was the true descendant of OpenOffice.org?
...would be done to the U.S. economy by having the U.S. Federal Government migrate away from Microsoft to an open-source solution.
(And please, not a Microsoft shill or apologist here - I use OpenOffice at home and enjoy it and wish I could implement it at work. I don't like the economy of the United States hinging on continued government spending, either. But OTOH, you can't tell me that ditching Microsoft wouldn't have some pretty serious economic consequences and we're in the mess we're in.)
I thought everyone had moved to LibreOffice already.
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word
My first thought upon reading this was, "Right, because Microsoft has all of those various free Office viewers".
I don't respond to AC's.
With so many people experiencing issues with Microsoft Office 2013 activation and random requests to re-activate which result in error codes, or issues where "A problem has occurred" with no log entries or error codes when you try to install the software, it's quite possible Microsoft has strongly encouraged people to seek alternatives.
Since experiencing so many reliability issues with Microsoft Office 2013, issues that did not exist with Microsoft Office 2010, I've become a vocal advocate for making the switch from Microsoft to either OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
I often encourage OpenOffice for older folks that are looking for a more reliable experience while I suggest LibreOffice to those who want a feature rich experience and don't mind the occasional glitch or updating the software as regularly as they release updates. I feel both are great projects.
Microsoft claims 1 billion MS Office users. No doubt some/many are pirated, but that gives a sense for the scale of the potential user base for OpenOffice. And from what I've seen, Apache OpenOffice gets around 1 million downloads per week, a steady rate that can certainly continue for quite a while. So even if Apache did nothing, we would get to another 100 million downloads in another two years.
The question is whether we want to glide or really take off?
To really advance among mainstream end-users, people like your mother, this will only happen as average people, not just the techies, learn about open source and are comfortable with it. This means better documentation, especially geared toward newbies.
To advance among corporate users OpenOffice needs better interop with Microsoft Office. Yes, I hate to say that as much as you probably hate to hear it, but it is the reality we (some of us at least) live with.
Finally, we should find a way to extend the OpenOffice brand to the web and tablet editing experience, since traditional desktop PC use is a diminishing proposition.
none of them matter if the document standard is closed.
programs: irrelevant. standard: relevant.
But how many actually use it on a daily basis?
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word
Sadly that isn't really true. My company has standardized on LibreOffice and we use it for most things. However I get Word and Excel files all the time that cannot be accurately read by OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Particularly .DOCX and .XLSX files. Many are just fine but the more complicated ones tend to have moderate to severe formatting corruption. Sometimes to the point of unreadability. Google Docs and other doc viewers frequently don't do any better of a job of it. I have to keep a seat of Microsoft office available for those documents that I can't read any other way even to this day.
I've tried over the yrs to download the latest ver of OpenOffice and to give it a try and I always end up moving back to MSFT Word within a few days/weeks.
It's not missing features per se, it's layout/UI awkwardness and smoothness.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
n/t
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Nice but when they redo the UI and do typesetting you can pry LaTeX from my cold dead hands.
get the damn thing to work properly. I seem to have the magic touch to get every obscure and unexpected behavior to happen.
Mostly random stuff.
Why is no one able to come up with an Outlook alternative?
Then maybe there really would be a migration...
At the Office 2003/2007 interface, I had better luck with Open Office displaying some documents between Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 than with either Excel. Microsoft internal document standards are a farce.
I use Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Then again, that's my reaction to a lot of things, so....
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
I remember working on a document in Word 2003 with several large tables. Periodically, Word 2003 (which I had to use by corporate edict) would crash while working on one particularly large table, and would be unable to reload the document. I found out that loading the document in OpenOffice and saving it back immediately fixed whatever problem Word was having and I could work in Word for a while longer. I ended up having to do that every few days until I was done with the document.
I use Libreoffice in large part because it isn't streamlined. Office is OK if you never have to do anything that MS doesn't want you to do, but if you need to do something that's off the beaten path, it can take a lot of looking to find. The interface is just not intuitive at all. I had Word XP and disabled the customized menus because it had a habit of hiding things that I needed and not offering an adequate clue where it is. So, with the next release, they put in that ribbon crap and it's been shit ever since.
MS has a habit of making shit interfaces then refusing to acknowledge it.
I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
That's because Microsoft Office has long ceased being the proprietary alternative to OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Nowadays, any typical organization use Microsoft Office + Active Directory + SharePoint + Exchange et. al. complete with compliance with bullsh*t like HIPAA and FIPS 140-2, and OpenOffice/LibreOffice cannot simply become a drop-in replacement anymore.
Don't treat your users like idiots or children. If you can't explain why they should switch, you don't know how to explain things or there's no good reason for them to do so.
...
Step 4. Profit !
They make web servers right? Sun Microsystems makes Java and Open Office. Maybe I'm behind the times.
IMHO, Microsoft's motivation for adopting an open document format was possibly more about killing Adobe Acrobat, than maintaining compatibility with a competitive (zero-cost) product.. by adopting an open format, MS was able to throw cold water on one of Adobe Acrobat's major value propositions.... just like HTML5 has done / will do to Flash. Agree or Disagree?
What's next? Getting people to use it after they download it. I suppose I'm counted in that 100 million, but I've never actually had a reason to use the product. Absolutely everyone I know in business and personal life uses MS Office, and I get the whole MS Office suite free through work or included in any new PC purchase.
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I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
Microsoft positions MS Office as part of an integrated solution for clerical work that scales to an enterprise of any size.
Microsoft Office 365 for Health Organizations
Microsoft has entered into a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with Texas, a pact that carries much more weight these days after the HIPAA omnibus rule was released in January.
Implementing Office 365 for such a large network should serve as a sign that the state is comfortable enough with cloud computing that 100,000 employees, including the state Health and Human Services System, will be using the services.
What will Texas Office 365 deal mean for healthcare security? [Feb 2013]
In the 80's and 90's there was linkage between apps and OS .. and the Juju was strong. Monopoly resulted. Now in the new era, platform is irrelevant. Same data and capability needs to be made available on all platforms where practical. The Juju pops back up though in places like HealthVault (championed by an outfit that is losing its monopoly) where a subset of functionality is available to non windows users. (yeah.. I was irritated!) Have we reached a point where we should be free of linkage between applications and platform? Lets hope that the app developers (free and closed) can provide value with software quality, rather than platform linkage.
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
...collaborate and listen. LibreOffice has ~10 times the number of developers involved ( https://www.ohloh.net/p/libreo... , https://www.ohloh.net/p/openof... ), and it's a better project in every possible way. The only thing you have going for you is that name you inherited for Oracle. By carrying on with this project you're just continuing a fork that serves no purpose to the community. In fact it harms the community, because new-comers try AOO and think it's the best that the community can do, when LO has shown we can do so much better.
The only upside, is that LO can import your work and benefit from what little improvements your small team are able to produce.
For most users that I've known who were willing to try OpenOffice, Calc worked fine for them.
Er, not for me. Libre and Open Office (latest as of 2/74) spreadsheets did NOT work. A tax template (from 1040excel.com) had me owing ~$200 more tax then when opened in MS Excel, and some of my wife's environmental-compliance baroque* EXcel spreadsheets simply would not open (crashed). Some Word files also had problems.
* Should have been done in a database, but the client dictated Excel.
It's NOT because I wasn't willing to try - indeed I'm desperate to leave MS after using Win 8.1...
Just bought a new laptop with Office 2013 Home / Student edition included. Went through the Office licence activation fine then got an obscure error message that Office installation cannot be completed because it is already partly installed. It gave a link to the MS website which gave no help at all; essentially it was an unknown problem. Tried rebooting and going through the install/activation process again a few times but always the same useless error message. In the end I thought "f*ck it" and completely unistalled Office. I'm now considering whether to install LIbreOffice or Apache OpenOffice; Microsoft had their chance and blew it.
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Macros are the main problem keeping back a switch to LibreOffice or OO.o. Also, paid commercial support (so that Joe Smith can call up an "engineer" at 3 AM on a holiday Sunday with an urgent issue and get a hotfix issued by 7 AM).
The macro problem is bigger than most people (i.e., those outside Corporate or Public Sector America) realize. On many large enterprise systems, the computer is so locked down that to develop almost any kind of automation, or work productivity software, is nigh impossible. So, assuming you know some basic stuff about software development and you're tired of clicking and dragging on the same cells in Excel 500 billion times, you have two choices: either suck it up and click until you get a repetitive stress injury, or break out the VBA.
Most enterprises (at least, those I've worked at) don't restrict the use of VBA macros, so they've become a sort of "programming environment of last resort" for worker bees in companies that are either too cheap, or too stupid to deploy actual development software like Visual Studio or Eclipse. And even those employees who decide to go off-roading and fly in the face of corporate policy to install "un-approved" software (heretics; how dare they!) will run into major roadblocks related to not having administrative privileges on their system.
VBA code does not port seamlessly without major changes to the LibreOffice/OpenOffice environment; it basically has to be rewritten, depending on the complexity. Long story short, there are entire enterprise systems implemented in VBA (typically based on MS Access or MS Excel), often with copious use of Win32 API functions, which include networking, databases, custom file formats, custom GUIs (UserForms), and so on and so forth. These systems can save hundreds of hours of manual labor and improve the quality of life for people who work for a living and are just trying to get shit done, despite cloistered "departments" impinging from all sides, trying to impede their progress to the fullest extent possible due to NIH and general paranoia about software that they themselves didn't select (but when one of the IT guys who pulls the strings decides they really like some cool new program that helps THEM in THEIR job, of course it gets immediately installed on everyone's systems without so much as a security sniff-test).
Hiring an intern to work on one of these for a summer or two, or hoping and praying that you recruit someone who's willing to work for near-minimum-wage with a background in programming, is often the only thing separating corporate drones from RSI-inducing repetitive work. And don't go to the IT department and ask them to develop or buy a system, oh no; they never have the budget, and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to sit down with your boss's boss's boss for a Project Scope Agreement meeting until July 2017.
VBA, from a pragmatic perspective, is a loophole that skunkworks people have been gleefully exploiting for close to 20 years now. If you propose to do away with it by removing Office from peoples' computers and putting OO.o or LO in its place, you'll incite a riot. If you do it anyway, your business will grind to a halt as productivity and efficiency drop by a factor of 100.
If you're an IT director with a hand in a decision like this, I urge you to survey ALL your employees -- not just the managers who have no clue what their employees do -- to see what impact a transition from MS Office to LO/OO.o would have. I'm not saying a move is impossible, but you need to do it in cooperation and coordination with your employees. Yes, even the inconvenient ones who like to download zipballs with those "Open Sauce" EXEs that you don't trust. They're the good guys; they're helping your company; and they're just trying to get their work done as efficiently as possible.
People who do "serious" work with Office have real problems migrating.
I'm one of those people who does "serious" spreadsheet work. By and large switching between the Excel and OOo/LO works pretty well. Occasional formatting issues and the odd formula incompatibility but mostly it works fine. I try to use macros as little as possible so I can't speak to compatibility there but I would expect it to be something of a creeping horror.
Write and Word do have incompatibilities.
Sadly yes. Quite a few of them in fact.
I never tried to open a MS Access database in OpenOffice Base,
I have and it generally works but probably not exactly the way you expect. Base isn't really the same thing as Access. It's more of a connector application than a standalone database product. I use it primarily to do ODBC connections between spreadsheets and a database. Unfortunately they tend to break their ODBC code between versions so I've been stuck on a pretty old version of OO for quite a while.
Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice / LibreOffice is not easy at all for power users. To put into geek terms: imagine switching from Apache to Lighttpd. For most things, it will be great. But, if you have some serious .htaccess magic going on or are relying on mods which exist only for Apache - well, you are out of luck and you are probably not going anywhere.
Bingo. If you have a heavily macro'd set of Excel spreadsheets or the like you probably aren't going to want to switch. Just way too painful. But most people could probably switch with only modest problems here and there.
Only 1 million actual users who use it on a daily basis (I am just guessing here to prove a point). Downloads mean absolutely nothing, unless they have stats on if people actually use it and or keep it installed.
My wife has a lot of technically unsophisticated clients. More than half came back with "I can't open this." Not worth the time to educate them, so we went back to Office.
It is unwise to ascribe motive
(posting as AC because I modded the thread)
The reason why the government isn't using a free alternative like Open Office or Libre Office, and it's called lobbying and buying legislators to make sure that MS gets some government change. It wouldn't take much to convert. Other governments have done it, but the powerbrokers that control the government would never support anything that is "free".
I would love to see an alternative to Adobe for Photoshop, Acrobat and Illustrator. I have used Photoshop and Illustrator (licensed owner) since versions 1.0 and now have CS4. I don't want Adobe's Cloud version. I don't want to deal with the cloud or subscription based software. CS6 won't save files in CS4 format so I don't want it for that reason too. Just as we have OpenOffice it would be nice to have OpenCS.
Give Gnumeric a try.
I'd *love* to ditch MS Office for any version of Open Office, but none of them give me MS Word's Outline Mode, an integral part of Word since Word for Windows back in the '90s.
For you real old-timers, it's not KAMAS (a CP/M based outliner that I maintain has never been surpassed), but it's the only thing current that comes within shouting distance
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Ah, that would be the incremental saving of changes - good times! Another workaround was to use the Save as... function to save a fresh document with no incremental stuff in it. It even used to be posted on the Microsoft support site. AFAIK, they never got this feature right, and gave up on it when implementing the .docx format (I could be wrong!)
Wow, this must have been the first time I said something "positive" about OOXML.
When the government spends a million dollars on MS Office, let's guess that something like 1/3rd of those resources go to marketing, 1/3rd go to development, and 1/3rd to administration. So for $1,000,000 in spending, $300,000 of utility (goodness) is produced, the economy has $300,000 more utility in it that gets divided up between people.
If instead, the government spent the same million on OpenOffice, 80% would go to development, 20% to administration, and 0% to marketing. Therefore, $800,000 of development work would be done, adding $800,000 of utility which gets spread around. We see that spending the same money on OpenOffice results in over twice as much utility being added to the economy, meaning twice as much good stuff is available to be spread around.
Int he more likely case, the government would spend only 1/10th as much on OpenOffice. That leaves $900,000 either in the hands of taxpayers to spend on good stuff they want, or for the government to spend on things like literacy and job training programs. Which provides more value to the economy - handing money to Microsoft, or using it to increase literacy and job skills?
100 million downloads on a good day would mean 30 million people installing it.
Of those, how many kept using it?
My experience with OpenOffice, in all of its forms, has always been and continues to be negative.
In terms of hours lost, Microsoft Office is a bargain compared to this buggy code-what-pleases-you piece of shit.
Futurist Traditionalism
According to real life experience, you've cherry-picked your audience as usual.
Futurist Traditionalism
1. The check is in the mail.
2. I promise I won't come inside you.
3. I hate Word.
You evade, which does you no credit. Offering a survey that you know will be answered by fanboys inevitably produces bad results. The rest of the audience isn't bothering to answer this.
You'd also need to ask them at a longer duration from the download to see if they kept using it. There are many ways to cherry-pick data, and the first is to be careful about who you ask.
Futurist Traditionalism
"...But what does the community at Apache need to do to get the next 100 million?"
Um... just keep the servers running?
Mod parent up. That's my favorite Word feature and my biggest disappointment with Libre/OpenOffice.
dealing with bug/enhancement issues that have been pending for more than twelve years. Issue #3959 (notice the position in the queue?) has been either ignored or brushed off as unimportant since April of 2002, despite seniority and votes in the issues list.
Classic case of writers telling programmers "this is a must-have function" and programmers responding with "I don't use it so neither do you."
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Sure, people are reasonable when it comes to brand identification.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg (I want an iphone)
Have you tried XMind? I was recently searching for an outlining tool and found it to be pretty good for my purposes. The basic version is free.
It's really surprising 100 million managed to download openoffice. I mean i clicked a few links on the apache site stating "open office available now" got to a few pages, wiki pages, whats new notes, and a list of a hundred or so language packs and links to rpm debian etc. files.
Sure must be hard to guess the browser language and operating system to get to a download now buttons similar to firefox, chrome etc.
Our family has used Open/Libre for years. What I really WANT is an iPad version....
I'm pretty sure I account for about 1% of those downloads from trying every fucking build multiple times to find one that fucking works (or breaks in different but more-tolerable ways) when opening various MS Office documents.
Ah, yes. Issue number 3959. Originally filed April 10, 2002. More than twelve years ago. In that time it has remained in the top-voted issue list year-in and year-out. Others come and go, but 3959 keeps on pissing off users. At last look, there are about ten duplicates requests on file.
Every few years some developer wanders by and tells the people following it that nobody needs outline view, or that there are tools available to do it, or whatever. Often, they close the issue. In effect, "I don't use outline mode so obviously it's not important." The mailing list heats up for a while, the developer either mumbles something about maybe the team should look into it and vanishes or else just vanishes, but the issue is either reopened or left open. I've seen at least four of those cycles so far. We're probably due for another one.
At this point, I suspect that 3959 will outlive (Open|Libre|Star)Office for the classic open-source software reason: if it doesn't scratch a developer's itch, it ain't happening. And apparently, developers don't outline, edit, or otherwise structure their writing or much care about the people who do.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Does it let you restructure an existing document?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I wanted compatibility. Microsoft office is availble for OSX also, but it isn't really compatible between the two. Before people jump on that, build a complex Powerpoint document, and open it in The Mac version - just as one example.
So I installed OO on all of the machines. It made them compatible. Microsoft Office is becoming the outlier now.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sure. You can collapse sections and then move them (and all of the contained text and subsections) to anywhere in the document. In addition, you can easily promote and demote sections and the indentation and numbering get adjusted automatically. Paragraph styles are used (e.g., heading 1, heading 2) and those are updated to reflect the changes.
Sorry -- I wrote that for the following comment (WRT XMind) and then posted it here.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It's called GIMP and it works beautifully.
Replace Outlook and AOO wins Until then Open Office doesn't have a chance.
Repeated survey isn't the same as a followup.
Are you going to post any more deceptive evasions?
Futurist Traditionalism
You're right, this guy is a liar.
I notice he tried to dodge the question of the validity of the survey with "Well we repeated it three times!" ...blatant dishonesty, or mental retardation, I can't tell.
Futurist Traditionalism
Yes, XMind allows you to grab any node and drag it (with the hierarchy under it intact) into any other part of the hierarchy. That was one of my requirements, which a few other mind mapping tools I tested didn't seem to support (or, at least, I couldn't find a way to do it with other tools with just a few minutes of poking around). You can also collapse/expand any node.
Three things made me change from MSFT office.
1. The first 64-bit version, 2007, was extremely buggy. 64-bit 2010 was also buggy and crashed regulary. Unusable junk.
2. Ribbon. This piece of junk UI makes the all apps in the suit a pain to use.
3. Excel graphing tool got worse, while LO and Gnumeric stayed the same. Simple things like formatting a date axis. Such function should be the most basic and usable feature of a spreadsheet app.
Thus, I didn't want to switch from MSFT, but I got forced to be able to do my regular work.
so its less buggy than an over decade old product?
What a moron!
Read the post. My use of the past tense should have been a clue that it happened in the past and mentioning it was used by corporate edict should have been a clue that MS Word was in its support period, i.e. current. For completeness, that happened in the fall of 2004, but you probably don't care. You are probably now going to object that MS Word being so "young", how could I expect it to not be buggy? I probably should have waited a few more years before they had the bugs worked out?
Now, regardless of when that happened I would expect a piece of software that cost several 100 dollars to be better able to handle it's own f***g proprietary file format than a freebee that had to reverse engineer it, regardless how long it has been since you bought it.
Oh Interesting. http://www.apple.com/icloud/se... . Seems that iCloud no longer supports account creation directly without at least one OSX or iOS device. That's a change.
Perhaps for programmers the need is not evident, but for anyone who writes long documents, it's indispensable. It's indispensable enough that I am still using Microsoft Word for anything that has any sort of header/subheader structure. OO and LO are OK for short letters and memos, but if it has more than 2 headings it gets clunky because of the lack of outline mode.
The core difference between writing text and writing code, which apparently the programmers working on OO and LO fail to grasp, is that writers are producing text which will be read by humans, not executed by machines.You can't just comment out the cruft and do a GOTO jump over that module you decided you don't want, then tell them to go back 17 pages to pick up the information in paragraph 3. Writing needs structure and flow to lead the reader through the material in a way that make the content comprehensible. It needs primary and subordinate ideas. Order and levels of importance are important. In Microsoft Word, collapsing the document into Outline mode and seeing the heading and subheading structure makes the flow of the document visible, and more important, the means to change that flow is on the same screen. There is no interruption in the work flow.
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/ seems to understand it, going the other direction: most real code isn't actually in a form that can be simply read .... in order to grok it I have to essentially rewrite it. I'll start by renaming a few things so they make more sense to me and then I'll move things around to suit my ideas about how to organize code. Pretty soon I'll have gotten deep into the abstractions (or lack thereof) of the code and will start making bigger changes to the structure of the code. Once I've completely rewritten the thing I usually understand it pretty well and can even go back to the original and understand it too.
Which leads me to "Issue 3959", wherein writers asked for this on 2002-04-10 20:39:19 UTC ... it's ranked as "Trivial" now. It has nothing to prevent implementation except the inability of the code maintainers to accept that writers really do know what they need in their tools.
Here's the overview of Bug 3959 ... https://issues.apache.org/ooo/...
As the wisdom of XKCD proves - http://www.xkcd.com/619/
I have downloaded various versions of OpenOffice and LibreOffice over the past years, probably accounting for 20+ downloads on various devices. None has been really used as the package falls short of my expectations each time. Same for many "free" downloads of other software, such as UML modelling, server, dB and CRM software. I have ended up buying the professional package nearly every time. Money on the table says I've made a commitment (ok, yes, or that I should be committed to the funny farm for even considering purchasing software) - downloading a stream of bits for free means very little. Can they track activations? Active use? I suspect the figures for active, committed, use are far, far, lower. How many documents do you see floating around, created in OpenOffice (rather than exported to .odf which, btw, MS Office does very cleanly).
And there is the question of the ODF standard: which of the multiple OpenOffice and LibreOffice builds actually generates ISO-compliant ODF? They all seem to generate slight forks or use as-yet-not-ISO-compliant versions that don't play well together.
Really? I finished a novel in vim, and if I need structure I just use LaTeX. Real geeks don't need Microsoft Word.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I have no idea what that incoherent blob of text is even attempting to say, maybe people would understand you better if you stuck to one thought per paragraph and not ASSume
Truly sad Apache promote terrible software, LibreOffice -so- much better why they not ashamed of promote Apache OpenOffice when it buggier slower and no features ? This horrible news - Tech. press need to get message over.
Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice / LibreOffice is not easy at all for power users. To put into geek terms: imagine switching from Apache to Lighttpd. For most things, it will be great. But, if you have some serious .htaccess magic going on or are relying on mods which exist only for Apache - well, you are out of luck and you are probably not going anywhere.
If you rely on that much complicated Excel Spreadsheet, you'll have to wonder if you're using the correct tool for the job.
I'm not dismissing that fact that LibreOffice would need better import/export capabilities with more compatibile exchange with Microsoft Excel. (that needs to be done anyway).
But if you push Excel to its edge, maybe instead you should consider switching your workflow to a package/software suite which is more geared to your data analysis and plotting needs. (things like statistical software, for example)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]