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The LibreOffice Story
An anonymous reader writes: Jono Bacon in his latest column writes about the story of LibreOffice and how it rose out of the ashes of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. Bacon also touches on why he feels LibreOffice is such a key piece of Open Source for communities across the world. Jono says: "To look at LibreOffice today and compare it to Microsoft Office can be tempting. Sure, LibreOffice does not provide the same level of features and finesse Microsoft's suite may boast, but when I think of the before and after vanity shots of the suite back in 1999 and today, what the community has accomplished is phenomenal. Developing LibreOffice has been hard, technically challenging, and at times demotivating work, and contributors' efforts can be seen by millions of users across the world."
LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice over a licensing dispute several years ago. It didn't rise from the ashes. StarOffice was around until 2010 until getting merged into Oracle OpenOffice, which lives on in Apache OpenOffice? Confused yet? The project would probably be farther along if there was simply one branch of development and not so many forks.
Assuming they are on Windows then MS Office 365 Home was what you likely should have recommended. $99 per year, up to 5 PCs and 5 phone/tablets and up to 5 users each of whom get a TB of space on OneDrive. Then you don't have to fiddle around with backup drives and taking them offsite or getting carbonite subscriptions for each of them, etc. Show them how to put their data into the OneDrive folder and let it sync and you are done. Next time they want to rebuild a machine or the drive crashes all their data comes back magically.
There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office.
Not even MS Office has that, and that doesn't seem to matter. No, that is not where the problem lies. The compatibility only has to be good enough, and for pretty much everything it is.
Quite often it is even better than MS Office. I have used Libre Office to rescue documents which MS Office stopped loading because something broke in them. And that did not sway people enough to even make them try out Libre Office. Compatibility is a non-issue. It's all inertia.
No. The compatibility is *not* "good enough" for "pretty much everything". I can (and do) see breakages in just about every document I ever try to convert.
For instance, look at the indentation of bullet point items. This isn't hard, the rule is perfectly simple. Yet to this day, LibreOffice can't correctly convert from a document saved in MS Word.
Or headers and footers. The spacing is screwed up, and sometimes the fonts change for no reason. The same thing sometimes happens with styles. Unless you stick with the default fonts, it seems LibreOffice just doesn't care.
These are not obscure, edge-case, one-in-a-million features. I use them in pretty much every document I produce, and so do lots of other people I know.