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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.
Could you imagine what Oracle would have done to companies and governments that switched to open document standards?
Libreoffice had all the cool new stuff while OpenOffice didn't want to change so I switched and have not regretted it.
Microsoft Office is 24. That's 4.8x better!
I'm still using a crusty old copy of MS Word/Excel 2002 but I'm considering switching to either Open Office or LibreOffice...LO seems to have been kept more current, but I suspect either of them would suffice for my modest needs (word processing and the occasional spreadsheet).
Could anyone tell me...
1) Are there any genuinely significant differences between them that make one preferable to the other?
2) Do either of them properly open those f*cking .DOCX files? I'm using the MS Word inline converter but opening and saving are a crap shoot. Sometimes it works, sometimes it scrambles shit beyond comprehension.
3) Do either of them save as .DOCX or .DOC, since that seems to be what most employers and recruiters insist on sending/receiving?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If you aren't using TeX with a version control system, you are doing it completely wrong.
My guess is probably better than opening the previous version of a Word file in the current version of Word.
Time to offend someone
Amen to that - Corporate knowledge ends up as a morass of write-only Office documents when it should be a Gollum wiki with peer reviewed changes (as much for the knowledge dissemination as the actual approval).
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 haven't seen such a thing since the '90s, so, good I guess?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Five years and still no sign of a OneNote clone.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
sudo apt-get update
That'll get your Windows box upgraded to the new version just fine. *nods*
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I suffered a lot of stress trying to get a final year university assignment finished in time for submission. One of the simplest operations - embedding audio clips within presentation slides - is still extremely flawed. In LibreOffice, it causes a 10-30 second hang after opening each slide. Completely unacceptable in any situation. On the other hand, Apache OpenOffice 4 works normally, exactly as it should.
Then, there's the issue of exporting to MS formats. Some of my university papers require documents to be submitted in MS formats. When exporting from Libre Office, the result is a document that gets completely distorted opening up in MS Office. Spacing, formatting, indentations, layout get completely screwed. This cost me significant marks in the past with a couple of papers before I started arranging with lecturers to accept PDFs.
Yes, LibreOffice is a knight in shining armour. But a lot of the armour is more like tinfoil.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Ok, we can argue all day about the relative merits of LO vs. MSO. That's nice and all, and I don't really care which one you prefer. That's up to you. But there's still something important we should be doing; even those of us who prefer MSO. Tell your friends that OpenOffice is dead, and they should look for LibreOffice instead!
OpenOffice is the name that people know. It's been around for years. And a lot of people have tried it and found it satisfactory. You'd be surprised. And a lot of these people don't know about LibreOffice. Some of them may even still be using OOo. (I had one friend-of-a-friend who had been puzzled by the lack of updates for the last several years, but had never bothered to investigate further.)
Now, claiming that OpenOffice is actually dead may be a mild exaggeration, but I think it's close enough to true to make it worth saying. The project seems to have lost most of its IBM support, which is really the only thing that gave it any hope, post-Oracle. It operated without a release manager for nearly a year, and recently lost its project lead. It's been being distributed with a known security vulnerability since April, and they haven't even been able to put together a point-fix release, let alone a full new release! That's an effectively-dead project.
Open Office is dead! Tell your friends to get LibreOffice instead, if they're interested in something like that!
Forget about whether you think LO is adequate or not. Forget about whether it fits your needs. Tell your friends that they should get LO instead of OO! If you're on social media, post something there. Let people know about LO. I think you'll be stunned to find how many of your not-so-geeky friends are quietly running AOO or even OOo, and really need to know that they should switch to LO!
WAY better than Word 2010.
If your WPD has anything fancy or long, Word will show what it understands and chop-off the rest.
But in LO just works.
MS Office does not have to work well anymore. The Lemmings follow the previous lemmings. (or the head lemming get a free round of golf with a MS rep...)
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Governments don't understand how important LibreOffice is. They should support LibreOffice for all government work. The would be FAR cheaper than being abused by Microsoft.
Government employees would soon learn to use LibreOffice.
But: The user interface of LibreOffice needs to be improved. There are many, many hassles, at present.
Also, it seems that Microsoft Word has problems that even people at Microsoft don't understand. I've gotten the impression that the code and underlying design is a mess.
you are "so last decade"
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
What are you putting in your documents? I'd say at least 90% of the things I use Word for would either fail miserably in a general text editor OR take longer to do and look like shit (ie embedded lists in note taking)
How so? LibreOffice still has not caught up to a version of software released *fifteen years ago*.
not dead yet but on life support
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Namecalling isn't a valid method of argumentation either.
When I'm printing rows that I want to easily discern from one another, I shade alternating rows. Copying grey cells on a copy machine is unreliable, usually losing the shading over a few generations. Instead, I prefer to use hatching patterns.
Unfortunately, LibreOffice doesn't offer this feature in Calc. Neither does OpenOffice, though the feature was requested 12 years ago.
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?
Sometimes negative feedback is better than no feedback. At least you get the sense there is a human on the other side that is aware you are a user and don't like something, even if they tell you "you are existing wrong", S. Jobs style.
Table-ized A.I.
Mod parent up. That, it seems to me, is the beginning of a realistic assessment of the difficulties.
These ideas may be useful in seeing more of the long, difficult story:
1) Governments are spending billions. There is money for doing the job correctly.
2) Libre Office could have an option to make the user interface whatever is familiar to the user.
3) The MariaDB CEO seems sensible to me. He seems like the kind of person who could coordinate moving away from what I understand are the many, many problems of SharePoint. (But, of course, I haven't investigated that in detail. I had only a short conversation with him.)
4) The "transitional process" could be carefully designed to take one step at a time.
5) The Excel transition seems difficult to me. I have ideas about that too complicated to mention here.
6) Microsoft has, apparently, been slowly killing Mozilla Thunderbird. Most of Mozilla Foundation's money comes from Microsoft through Yahoo for making "Yahoo Search", which is actually Microsoft Bing search, the default in Firefox. Somehow the Thunderbird user interface is being damaged. The damage looks deliberate to me. So, the world needs a comprehensive open source email client.
7) I've noticed that technically-knowledgeable people usually don't deal very well with conflicts or abuse. That is, however, what we need.
8) Microsoft's business is deflating. Sooner or later people won't need another version of an operating system, or another version of office software. So, Microsoft is trying to get more control of Windows customers by making Windows 10 even more dependent on Microsoft. It is easy to guess that the unhealthy dependence that exists now will become far worse in the future.
9) Governments can say that they will buy no more new versions, only additional copies if needed.
10) I wrote an example of ideas about living with older software: Microsoft Windows XP "end of life": Conflict of interest. Many people who do routine things every day don't want new software, with what they view as the annoying necessity of learning new methods of doing the things they already know how to do robotically.
11) There is comflict of interest. If Microsoft delivers very few needed improvements in each version, Microsoft can sell more versions.
12) Unfortunately, the world doesn't have very many people who are both technically knowledgable and socially sophisticated enough to coordinate that work.
Those are 12 more ideas. I'd love to see 100 more. Humans found a way to cure polio. We can find a way to cure unhealthy dependence on flawed software.
"'E's not dead! 'E's resting! You stunned him, just as he was wakin' up! Norwegian Blues stun easily, major." :)
As I said, "dead" is a mild exaggeration, but close enough that trying to explain the difference isn't worth it. "Lost their funding, lost most of their developers, haven't been able to release even a bug-fix for a major security hole, let alone an actual new release with new features, and only clinging to a vague semblance of life because a handful of folks got way too emotionally invested, and spent way too much time telling everyone that AOO was guaranteed to beat the pants off LO, and simply can't swallow enough pride to admit they were wrong, and it's over...but not actually dead," is just not as succinct.
I'll stick with my version, especially when talking to non-technical folks. :)
Five years and it's still junk. Barely compares to MS Office 2000.
It's ok. It's not wonderful but it's not junk. It does the job for free on *nix and Windows. Go buy MS Office if you want.