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LibreOffice Turns Five
An anonymous reader writes: Italo Vignoli, founding member of The Document Foundation, reflects on the project's five-year mark in an article on Opensource.com: "LibreOffice was launched as a fork of OpenOffice.org on September 28, 2010, by a tiny group of people representing the community in their capacity as community project leaders. At the time, forking the office suite was a brave -- and necessary -- decision, because the open source community did not expect OpenOffice.org to survive for long under Oracle stewardship."
The project that was OpenOffice.org does still exist, in the form of Apache Open Office, but along with most Linux distros, I've switched completely to LibreOffice, after some initial misgivings.
1) Libre is preferable to Open - it has more developers and because of how it's licensed it can adopt all the changes Open makes - not so the other way around.
2) Compatibility with .docx sucks. Compatibility with Excel is _terrible_.
3) I don't trust LibreOffice to output documents that won't embarrass me in front of my boss. People will say "PDF", but bosses always want to edit things.
I'm sure it's a useful office suite - it frustrates me no more than MS Office does when I have to use it. And some of its tricks like opening PDF documents for editing (in Draw) are very useful.
But I keep a Windows VM for various programs, and Office is one of them. Bottom line is, the only code that's good at being compatible with MS Office is.... MS Office.
If I had my way we'd do everything as version controlled Markdown, but I'll never get my way.
1) Are there any genuinely significant differences between them that make one preferable to the other?
Mostly that LibreOffice seems to have the more vibrant development effort behind it. OpenOffice seems to stagnate by comparison. I'd recommend trying both (they're free after all) but LibreOffice will fit most people's needs better I think. I think LO is a bit more feature rich today.
2) Do either of them properly open those f*cking .DOCX files?
Usually but no guarantees. The more complex the document the worse the chances of it working well. That said, I've standardized our company on LibreOffice and it's been quite a while since I've had to drag out a copy of Word to view a document.
3) Do either of them save as .DOCX or .DOC, since that seems to be what most employers and recruiters insist on sending/receiving?
Yes they can do it and it does DOC fairly well in most cases. Just don't get too fancy with the formatting. I usually send PDFs to employers however.
I wouldn't even consider OpenOffice at this point. LibreOffice is where all the big development happens. However there is still a risk that it will mess the formatting of Word docs. I personally plan to just purchase the fresh Office 2016 and live a relaxing life.
This.
Documents with all but the most basic formatting usually end up reformatted poorly by both LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org. If you need to have professional communications using Microsoft office documents as a base, you need to go with Microsoft.
That said, I've found that more often than not, my clients can accept an OpenDocument file. When Microsoft Word butchers that, I tell them Microsoft Word is fucked up. Blaming MSO for not supporting a standard document format places the blame on MS, and not some "weird program" I'm using to write docs.
Look, it's like this: Microsoft Office products get things right 80% of the time. Windows (or MacOS) also gets things right 80% of the time. Printer Drivers get stuff right 80% of the time. So half the time, things go wrong, and figuring out why takes way too much time. LibreOffice has some kind of nuisance/showstopper fault 40% of the time (so "Gets stuff right" 60% of the time). Every time I've run a presentation through Impress, some slides have been seriously screwed up (after all, go to a random site, get a random computer, and tell me it's going to render the Liberation font correctly). The last time I used LibreOffice for a publicly-read paper, I had it printed on-site right before I went on. I got handed the text, and went live. Somehow, each word was printed backwards, in some horrific pitch. I don't care whose fault it was, the result was not readable. The paper I presented, of course, was one of my best -- the printed version should only be a prop, dudes. But using LO to prepare stuff for print? I have to switch between Word and LO, and LO keeps throwing tabs into my footnotes. What's up with that?
I'd love to see this happen. Really, I would. However, let's take a walk down Pragmatism Road for a moment...
Government decides, "screw MS Office 2016, LibreOffice from here on out." They begin the rollout. And the user training. They train all the users who have /just/ gotten used to the Ribbon that "lol jk no more ribbon". This is the high point of the transition.
LibreOffice has no meaningful replacement for Outlook. Thunderbird doesn't do ActiveSync natively, and it's missing a number of advanced features. To hand-wave this into the "done" pile, we'll just assume that they get a sweet deal on a volume license for eM Client, somehow managing to convert all of the Offline Archived PST files into a useful format along the way, assuming no Outlook Add-Ins are in play (not the least of which are the virus scanning modules), and assuming that they'll hand-wave away the simplicity of "start outlook -> click 'next' twice -> click 'finish'" setup that Outlook provides and eM doesn't, in the case of internal Exchange.
Now, we need to deal with the SharePoint integration. The government uses SharePoint. A lot. The implementations span the gamut from "by some miracle, working as intended" to "being the running gag of the office for being mostly-broken, all of the time". Office integrates well with SharePoint, LibreOffice does not. In theory, they could just download-edit-upload, but now we lose any ability to do multi-user mode editing of files. And thus, they move all of their SharePoint installations to Alfresco, migrating all of the existing data, SQL data from SQL Server to MariaDB, and somehow, making all of THAT work, hoping that none of the other internal systems that rely on SharePoint information to function will notice the difference...
Now, let's head back to the desktop. Excel add-ins and macros don't work. Report generation software gets messy, documents that reference other documents give questionable numbers because LO can read some sheets but not others, with no add-ins to verify that the numbers match what they should. Access databases don't open, and yes, there are plenty. Powerpoint slides lose most of their transitions and WordArt (hey, silver lining to everything...), and you'll be hard pressed to find me a single secretary that can make a flyer in Scribus that was otherwise capable of making something remotely useful in Publisher.
Move to LibreOffice? I'd love it. It makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons. In practice, and given the amount of inertia which it will be fighting, I see the transitional process being so incredibly painful and problematic that, the following year, Microsoft will start getting blank checks from Uncle Sam.