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LibreOffice 5.0 Released
New submitter ssam writes: The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project, bringing new features including Windows 10, Android and Ubuntu touch compatibility, superior interoperability features, an updated UI, and lots of under the hood improvements. For people still running OpenOffice it is probably time to move over.
So what is the story between the two? I know that LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and that some/most/all of the devs moved to LibreOffice.
Is LibreOffice now far enough ahead to say forget about OpenOffice?
wot no sig
LibreOffice now supports amd64, which is a huge boon for people that work with very large documents. It purports to have better .docx compatibility, although I myself have found that MSWord is more likely to screw up the formatting in .docx documents than LibreOffice is.
All-in-all, a good day for free software, and a bad day for Microsoft.
Having no release manager and no one contributing code for 9 months seems like more of a "Dead but hasn't stopped twitching" sort of state.
That's quite a long time, and by the way, open office was not massive pile of shit. It worked great for me 7 years ago. I've been using libre office instead of open office ever since libre office was released.
As for starting up, libre office writer seems to start about as fast as word 2010, which is a massive pile of shit. And you can use that quick start thing, that loads on windows start.
LibreOffice Writer seems to start in around 0.35 seconds on this PC*. I'm not certain about that, because it's really hard to measure something that fast.
*i7-4790, 8 GB RAM, SSD, Gentoo Linux
I remember starting OpenOffice 6 or 7 years ago, and it was indeed painfully slow at starting back then.
Usability seems fine to me, but I'm not a power office suite user.
I like the old UI. It works well for those of us who are working on desktops and laptops.
Hope they have the old UI or something similar as the default when it realises you don't have a touch screen.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
As for starting up, libre office writer seems to start about as fast as word 2010, which is a massive pile of shit.
Massive pile of shit? Word 2010 usually starts in 2 seconds.
Oracle bought out Sun. When they looked at their IP portfolio, they appeared to have lost their minds, and assert their ownership over several open-source projects. Yes, I believe it was some 26 programmers who left Open-Office and started LibreOffice. Then Oracle was falling out of brainshare, and didn't seem want to appear as an orgre, but it was already out of its cave by then.
What happened: Oracle's possessiveness made LibrieOffice into the superior office suite it is today!
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Grab LibreOffice and check it out. If startup time is a key point for you, install and enable the QuickStart feature. It'll pre-load part of LibreOffice as Windows starts up and then let it sit idle in the background, just like Microsoft Office does to improve startup time.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project, bringing new features including Windows 10, Android, and Ubuntu touch compatibility; superior interoperability features; an updated UI; and lots of under the hood improvements. For people still running OpenOffice, it is probably time to move over.
Appropriate use of commas and semicolons. This doesn't even cover the poor sentence structure (is The Document Foundation bringing new features, or is LibreOffice 5.0? Methinks submitter meant "which brings").
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Last time I tried using Open Office 6 or 7 years ago it was a massive pile of shit. Is LibreOffice a significant improvement? Does the word processor start up as fast as M$ Word?
At work, "M$ Word" takes approximately half a working day to start up, so you're setting a pretty low bar.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I understand why you're hesitant to try it out and see for yourself, being such a costly program and all.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Last time I tried using Open Office 6 or 7 years ago it was a massive pile of shit.
I standardized our company on OpenOffice (and later LibreOffice) about 5 years ago. It's worked great. There may be specific features in Microsoft Office that make it a non-starter for some people but I think most people will hardly notice the difference. If your company already is tied to Microsoft then switching might be painful but if you are starting from scratch I would go with LibreOffice in most cases over Microsoft Office.
Is LibreOffice a significant improvement?
OpenOffice in my experience has been progressing more slowly than LibreOffice for the last few years. I switched our company to LibreOffice as a result.
Does the word processor start up as fast as M$ Word?
Kind of a meaningless question. Both can be loaded on system startup and thus will "start up" in just a few seconds as a result. If that is your biggest concern however I think you really didn't take a very hard look at OpenOffice "6 or 7 years ago".
"Massive pile of shit? Word 2010 usually starts in 2 seconds."
But it is still a massive pile of shit.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
I switched from OO to Libre because OO could be painfully slow.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Grab LibreOffice and check it out. If startup time is a key point for you, install and enable the QuickStart feature. It'll pre-load part of LibreOffice as Windows starts up and then let it sit idle in the background, just like Microsoft Office does to improve startup time.
FYI - OpenOffice has long had that feature, even back in version 3.0.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Why did apache foundation agree to take on responsibility for openoffice? It was kind of a poisoned chalice.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
If you still need it, forget this silly charade and stick with Microsoft, for real compatibility with your workmates.
My coworkers use MSWord. When they send me files, the formatting gets fucked up in MSWord, but look just fine in LibreOffice. How that is even possible, I don't even know, but you know what the moral of the story is? ... If you want real compatibility with your coworkers on MSOffice, use LibreOffice.
You may reach a level of professional success and responsibility where you measure cost not in dollars but in total time required to get from start to finish.
Money is fungible, time is precious. This is why many "free" alternatives really aren't. I support the principals of FOSS and eagerly adopt FOSS tools wherever they pass an honest cost/benefit analysis. I think the FOSS community would have more success if they stopped thinking "free" is their main advantage. Cost is measured in time/hassle/fuss.
Is there anything out there that straightforwardly automates databinding LibreOffice controls to an XML data structure?
I'm talking primarily about controls where you can type in text and that text will automatically appear in other content controls that are bound to the same XML data node.
I've done it in Word via VBA, but it's not something that I would recommend for others to use. Is there something like this for LibreOffice that makes the process easy for the user.
LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release
Version 5 = 10th major release? Were they using excel to calculate their version number?
I know. It's been in OO since before LO existed. Just wasn't sure if the poster was aware of it.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I don't understand why either of these guys (Open OR Libre) can't get their act together and implement something with the functionality of MS Word's Outline Mode. This has probably been the singe most requested feature in Open/Libre Office for *years* (requests go back to at least 2002), and it has steadily been ignored. It's the *only* reason I continue to use Word...
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Oh, you silly kids! What the OSS fanatics fail to understand is that once a person leaves graduate school to get a "real job" in the "real world" that time suddenly becomes much more important to money for many, many people. Saving a few hundred bucks on software is pointless (to me) if I have to spend more than an hour dicking with it, for example.
I understand exactly what you're talking about, and I agree that cost-benefit analyses have to be made.
But there is also a problem in corporate culture where cost-benefit analyses are focused too much on the immediate future. Paying $100/year to license software may seem worth it if you're just using that software for a year and retraining may require a few hours.
But what about after 3 years? Or 5 years? Or 10 years? And what about other fringe benefits of OSS, like your ability to customize the code yourself if you want a new feature? If you're a big business and you want to complain that you lack feature X in LibreOffice, you could either pay Microsoft thousands of dollars annually (perhaps tens of thousands, in a big company), or you could use that money to pay a developer to add feature X to LibreOffice and customize it to do exactly what you want (rather than what Microsoft gives you).
And then there's end-of-life concerns, too. Do you want to pay to retrain all your employees when Microsoft decides whatever its next random mutation of UI happens? Or do you pay Microsoft extra to continue security patches after your version is no longer supported? Or do you just use that money to pay people who can patch your free OSS suite, which can be maintained by anyone since the source is available?
These are all cost-benefit analyses. But often they aren't actually decided on that basis by large corporations -- they are decided because "Microsoft Office is the standard" and people in power to make decisions don't want to have to deal with the switch or don't believe "free" could possibly be as good, or they don't consider alternatives to get the features they want in OSS that might be cheaper than paying licensing fees for many years.
...once a person leaves graduate school to get a "real job" in the "real world"...time suddenly becomes much more important to money for many, many people. Saving a few hundred bucks on software is pointless (to me) if I have to spend more than an hour dicking with it, for example. For other people, a few hundred bucks (actually Office 365 is only $100/year) might be worth two hours of their time to dick with. Anything more than that, and it's not worth my time
Well, whatever works best for you, works best for you, of course. But my mileage has varied.
Whenever I've started a job someplace that uses a lot of proprietary, licensed software, it always takes quite a while for me to get a license. I invariably have to explicitly ask my manager or the IT department to get me a license, even though there's no possible way I would have been able do my job without it. I can only ask for the license after I find out I need a particular product, of course, and in extreme cases it may take a few days just to find that out, because for some reason people try to conceal the very need for a license like it's Voldemort's name or something. Whoever I ask first is never authorized to just buy these things and hand them out, and so they have to run the request past three more layers of management and the accounting department. Half the time the answer comes back "no", in which case you, the new guy, have to go before some tribunal of trolls to argue your case. Or they might tell you to "share" the license with some other guy, maybe by (illegally) sharing a login, maybe by passing a physical device back and forth. Multiply all this wasted time by the number of licensed products in use, and the amount of time sucked starts to get significant.
Compare this to: "Oh, we use Apache Gimmudgy. Just download it from their site."
Then there's the whole multiplatform issue. Maybe a third of the team uses Linux, a third uses Windows, and a third use Macs. Proprietary packages aren't really great about working across platforms. Neither is FOSS, of course, but it is usually a little better about it--or at least they're more likely to use an open format for their save files.
Or people who hate wasting a sheet of paper at the end of every document because they just can't remove that final page break if it comes after a table. Either/or.
I wanted to buy an MS office license (real, not that 365 crap), so I went online. I could only get something shipped, which is beyond stupid, and I wanted the license /now/ so I went to a store and bought a copy.
I got the box home and it contained a license key, which I had to use to download the installer, then run the installer, then use the key again to activate the license.
Time to license and install MS Office? About 90 minutes.
Or I could have just downloaded OOo or LO and been up and running in about 4 minutes.
(I needed the license for an employee who needed "real" Office because they "send documents to customers". Eyeroll. I've used OOo/LO for 10 years and never had a problem, but I tend to write and receive sane documents and not "works of art" with way too much formatting and all that obnoxious stuff word processors will let you add for no good reason.)
If your distro (e.g. CentOS 6) doesn't carry the latest LibreOffice release, then you have to download it from the official LibreOffice site. Unfortunately, a litany of RPM packaging disasters still abound with 5.0. I've never seen any Open Source software as badly RPM-packaged as the official LibreOffice RPMs!
He's on AOL dial-up, you insensitive clod.
We've only been doing word processors for decades now.
Why do word processors need new features at this point? Why is this not a "done" thing?
So many software projects are destroyed by the inability of developers to say "Well, that tool is finished."
When are we going to see LibreOfficeOS, I wonder. It kept the browser developers amused, maybe you guys should do that?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I know. It's been in OO since before LO existed. Just wasn't sure if the poster was aware of it.
I just wanted a fair comparison in the case of OO vs LO. That said, I believe one of them was working towards not needing it at all; but it's been a while since I saw that discussion, so it was probably LO that was doing that.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
So LO has a few more features, and hopefully fixed a few bugs.
But there is still no decent writing tool for our current needs.
When I need to write something, it usually doesn't need to be printed on A4 (or Letter) paper. It is to be viewed on some digital display. And it doesn't need to be pixel-precise. Just well structured to be understandable. So the natural format would be HTML with CSS, which has become a universal format that can be displayed on anything, and can even be searched as plain text with grep and the like when needed.
But there is no word processing program that produces sane HTML/CSS. The real word processing programs which have all the features and tools to help for writing produce totally insane HTML. The HTML tools are designed for programmers or "web designers" (whatever that really is these days), not for plain writing of content. In the end, I often just send an HTML email done in Thunderbird, or I use Amaya, and mostly a plain text editor with a browser window to re-read it. But none of this is a comfortable solution. The alternative is to write in MS Word or Libre/OpenOffice, and produce a f*ing PDF.
I have been longing for a modern "Ami Pro for HTML/CSS" for the last 15 years...
I for one welcome our well documented Libre Office code overlords.
But mostly because some of them are friends.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Button icons were huge at first, but i figured out how to fix that.
I don't really like the sidebar thing. Minimizing it is easy, but then there's a very dark, very obvious, poorly aligned button on the right side. Preferably i'd like to remove it entirely, but getting the color toned down might be an acceptable alternative.
They still have the messed up column and row header colors. Back in 2.1 the headers were a nice solid dark grey. Then sometime between then and 3.4 they added shading. The "inner" half of the headers is dark grey and the outer half is light grey. I find it visually distracting, and since the line runs right down the center it sometimes makes it a little hard to read the letters/numbers. I'm sure it doesn't bother most people at all, but i don't really see what the supposed benefit is and i wish there was a way to turn it off.
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I find it hard to believe that you have such a busy schedule that you can't take five minutes to download and fiddle around with a piece of free software yet you have plenty of time to post regularly on slashdot.
Furthermore, if it takes you more than an hour to figure out how to complete basic tasks in a word processor that uses UI metaphors that have been around since the eighties then I suspect your lack of free time comes not from your hyper productivity but from your inefficiency.
Sorry to be a bit snide, but you did just refer to me as a kid and a fanatic, on top of insinuating that I lead an unproductive lifestyle, so I guess it's par for the course.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Addendum: there is apparently no longer any local help. Going to Help->LibreOffice Help opens up a browser window to the online documentation. Searching for help on the internet is fine in general, but the search results in this site seem very cluttered and it seems far less convenient than the offline help present in OO 3.4.1. Not to mention the fact that i frequently have to use VPN software at work that disables my regular internet.
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Everyone makes so much money on their free time.
I have a lot better things to do with my free time than futz around with office suites. I've got Google Docs that I can get to from pretty much any device and I've got MS Office on my laptop and iPhone. That seems fine for me though my use cases are admittedly pretty basic.
Still Looks like Office 2003 with a terrible Icon Set. Still has Java Dependencies. Still hijacks file associations when you tell it not to (the QuickTime Player or Office Suites...).
Really, I tried LibreOffice on several occasions but I cannot get over the bloated menus and toolbars - and the fact that it can stop working at any time. Just start up and freeze, over and over again. Had that happen every time I tried the software. It also stole all file associations literally every time and I told it not to.
I ended up just buying Microsoft Office. It wasn't worth the trouble trying to fix the issue, and Office can Open-Edit-Save ODF fairly impeccably - even the Tablet and Online versions... I have been thinking about using it on my iMac, but I think I will just buy a perpetual Office 2016 License for that. The apps don't look native, at all, on either OS. I don't like the way it looks. It's ugly, and the ugliness is kind of distracting.
The Icon Set is a big problem because some of the icons they use are completely foreign compared to the common icons that thousands of Windows or Mac Apps use on those platforms.
I find it odd that they're adding B.S. like Beanshell scripting, etc. when they should be working on better bundled Templates for the Office Suite, making the apps actually look fully native. Why waste resources on that, when they should be making the original scripting engine/language/experience better instead, developing a decent set of stock templates, integrating cloud services (or is that off-limits, never know with F/OSS Politics).
Any why aren't they putting their apps on the Mac or Windows App Stores? It makes keeping them up to date stupid easy. Just put it up there for $0.99 for the convenience and call it a day.
1. Create .html text file .html text file in browser
2. Open
3. Write content in text editor.
4. Save file.
5. Refresh browser window
6. Fix any broken tags
7. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If all you're doing is creating content, that's all you need to do. If you want fancy WYSWIG features, you're barking up the wrong tree to expect to do it with "real" HTML support. WYSWIG implies that you have precise control over layouts; HTML presumes you have no precise control over layouts. The goals are incompatible.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I mean [W]hat[Y]ou[S]ee[I]s[W]hat[Y]ou[G]et.
Man I hate migraine days...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I guess every situation is different, but how much of that can he get away by just sending a PDF copy to his customers?
I actually try to do that as much as I can, even for internal use. Worst nightmare is that every person who receive it gives me back an amended copy, ending up babysitting 5 versions of same document. (I'd rather get comments out of band and make an adjustment myself.)
Windows is calculated 2 to the version number power. So, Windows 10 is 4 times as evil as Windows 8. Windows 10 has:
1) Forced updates for Windows Home users, even though Windows updates are often faulty.
2) Vastly reduced privacy.
3) Intent to take more anti-customer control, later, apparently.
4) Deletion of an important program, Windows Media Center, with no notice to those who use WMC for watching television and recording shows.
5) Too many more to mention.
If you take offense at being called an open source fanatic then you probably do not belong here. I am an open source fanatic. I also use closed source software. In fact, I am using a Windows OS right now on this laptop to type to you. I am still an open source fanatic. I love open source. I love the cost, I love the learning curve, I love being immersed in the culture. I love finding bugs and reporting them (or, better, seeing if I can figure out how it is fixed). When I do write software that I bother to release I release it with the do what the fuck you want license and let it be truly free. I like it because it is free... I am an open source fanatic and I am proud of it. I am not, on the other hand, an open source zealot. The difference is huge and, well, I suspect you are not aware of it for any one of a number of different reasons.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
If you are a fanatic are you ashamed of it? There is a difference between a fanatic and a zealot. Fan is short for fanatic. How could you, if you are, be ashamed of being a fan of open source? It is not derogatory even if they person said it as a pejorative. I am an open source fanatic. Closed source is fine too but I prefer open source. I will use the appropriate tool for the job. If that tool is open then I am even happier. If it is closed then, frankly, I do not care. I am a fan and not a zealot, there is a difference. I have no time and no respect for zealots, they are blinded by emotion and unable to be rational. It is okay to be a fan. I dare say it is normal to be a fan of things we like.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Your beliefs are not what determines another person's values. It is absurd that you think you can decide what the benefits are for other people. Being stupid and egotistical is no way to go through life. How you can have an ego that large with an intelligence level that small is astonishing but, then again, lots of people think they are smart when they are really about as numb as a cunt full of Novocaine. In case it is not obvious, yes, you fall within that category so you can, at least, feel good about fitting in somewhere.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
So it takes zero time to learn Microsoft Orifice?
That is exactly what I have been doing. It works fine for converting content into HTML. It is horrible for creating the content.
The important thing when writing is not pixel-precise rendering as the word processors do (on an obsolete A4/Letter format). It is to be able to just press a key for titles, subtitles, whatever, to have a visual representation of the structure. Without having to switch your thinking from content to tags, syntax and all that stuff which is totally irrelevant to what you want to concentrate on.
Anyway, I would be glad to contribute into a Kickstarter campaign for a resurrection of Amaya, or development of Kompozer, or a new project for an HTML "word processor". If only there were developers interested...
Currently, an alternative is to write in Word or *Office, and in the end export to .txt and do the HTML afterwards. It's sort of OK for the writing part, and then boring to have to do the HTML by hand.
I was extremely surprised when my Excel spreadsheet that uses a VBA macro opened perfectly in LibreOffice 4.4. I have no idea how complete the VBA compatibility is, but there definitely is some. I suggest you try your Excel spreadsheets using VBA in LibreOffice; they might just work, or might only need very minor changes. My VBA usage is not enormous, so my success may not be representative, but it's worth a shot.
-DwS