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.

Comments

Dodged a bullet there

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you imagine what Oracle would have done to companies and governments that switched to open document standards?

I switched to LibreOffice and never looked back

[Anonymous Coward]

Libreoffice had all the cool new stuff while OpenOffice didn't want to change so I switched and have not regretted it.

Re:I switched to LibreOffice and never looked back

[GameboyRMH]

Same here, AFAIK LibreOffice was better than OO.org right out of the box. The project was overdue for a fork and just needed some motivation for it to happen, and Oracle provided it.

Neato

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Office is 24. That's 4.8x better!

Re:Neato

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like you're starting a flamewar. Would you like help?

Re:Neato

[KGIII]

There was a Clippy for Linux project, I found an online variant at one point as well but that was AJAX but one could port it I suppose. I should revive that project as an add-on for LibreOffice. I guess it would be better for the terminal. "I see you're trying to invoke sudo, would you like the man pages for that?" I'm pretty sure that I'd lose any shred of remaining credibility at that point.

Switching

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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?

Re:Switching

[mlw4428]

Frankly it depends more on what you use the word processor for. If it's business and most of your clients use MS Office, then cough up the $100 a year and get Office 365 (includes an offline copy of Office). If it's for personal use you could arguably do alright (I've not had many problems with *.docx files) with LO. However, and I know this will get attacked, for $150 it's a one-time fee and you get the full copy of Office (or you could pay $100/year and get an always updated copy of it).

Re: Switching

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.

Re:Switching

[GodWasAnAlien]

> 3) Do either of them save as .DOCX or .DOC, since that seems to be what most employers and recruiters insist on sending/receiving?

Since you mentioned employers/recruiters, I assume you are talking about a resume?

If so, use PDF for resumes. Sending resume as and .doc/.docx is not professional.

 

Re: Switching

[halivar]

Agreed on saving .docx, but I think it does better at opening them than MS Word, especially those created by older versions. When someone has problems rescuing an old or corrupted .docx, and Word barfs all over it, the first thing I do is fire up my trusty LibreOffice.

Re: Switching

[gQuigs]

>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.

Then you better use the same exact version of MS Office with the same fonts installed on your machine....

Re:Switching

[jones_supa]

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.

Re:Switching

[Dragonslicer]

2) Do either of them properly open those f*cking .DOCX files?

Nothing properly opens DOCX files, including most versions of Microsoft Office.

Re: Switching

[Anonymous Coward]

It's docx. Don't rely on a document created on one computer, even using MS Word, to look like it will on another computer. Lines and pagination will change. Tables will change. Anything with spacing will change. Trying to open the document in another word processor, like LibreOffice, pretty much guarantees that layout will not be the same. Your beautiful one-page form with blanks extending across the page to the right margin and tables and hookers and blow will turn into two pages that don't align, and your hookers will turn out to be trannies who have already snorted all your blow.

This is why many people prefer LaTeX: LaTeX is a psychobitchmistress who won't even respond unless you please her just right, and she'll never give you what you expected, but it will always be mindblowingly good when you do get something out of her.

Re: Switching

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Switching

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of fucked up documents are you trying to open?

I've never had a problem with DOCX. Now, DOC on the other hand, was a complete clusterfuck. It was all OLE'ed to hell and back and would shit itself at the slightest provocation. DOCX is just XML in a ZIP file, and is structurally not that different from ODF or even Pages/Numbers files.

The top three reasons shit goes wrong with Office documents are:
1) Your computer has different fonts and/or font substitution rules than the computer the document was created on.
2) Your printer manufacturer couldn't write a driver to save their ass, and upon installation it permanently fucks up the default page layout stuff in Windows' common GDI library, causing margins and spacing to be fucked forevermore in every program, including Word (or whatever Office app).
3) You're a dumbass that didn't immediately Save As the document into the latest format supported by your copy of Word (or whatever Office app) prior to editing it. Due to this, format ambiguities have been handled differently than they should have been and the file is now corrupt. The Save As process treats every file with kid gloves and won't break/overwrite the existing file if conversion fails.

These are not easily solved, or even avoidable problems for a general purpose office suite, and both OO and LO suffer from similar issues.

Re: Switching

[noldrin]

> 2) Compatibility with .docx sucks. Compatibility with Excel is _terrible_.

True, although I have the same problem with Excel. Micrsoft broke excel document compatibility, and all of a sudden, all of my users could no longer open the excel generated by our local servers. I had to switch everyone to LibreOffice so people could do continue to do their jobs.

Re:Switching

[Anonymous Coward]

$10/mo for this, $20/mo for that.. I refuse to pay for SaaS.

Re: Switching

[tibit]

I know that we've all heard it before somewhere, but I'm firm in my belief that people really don't seem to have a clue how to format MS Office documents properly. You should not depend on spacing. You should style, anchor and otherwise set everything up so that when spacing does inevitably change, things still work. That's very much doable - heck, I've had wonderful, LaTeX-like lab reports done in ~1998 that gasp open fine and look right on LibreOffice 5 on Mac. We're talking of 17 year old .doc files with nice flow, equations and drawings, last edited on Windows NT 4 and Office 95...

Re:WYSIWYG is the wrong way to approach documents.

[budgenator]

TROFF and ED, you heathen!

Re:WordPerfect?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

My guess is probably better than opening the previous version of a Word file in the current version of Word.

LO vs OO

[sjbe]

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.

OneNote

[camperdave]

Five years and still no sign of a OneNote clone.

Re:Still waiting...

[KGIII]

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*

Tell your friends OpenOffice is dead. Seriously!

[Xtifr]

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!

Governments: Make LibreOffice the standard!

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

Re:Governments: Make LibreOffice the standard!

[Voyager529]

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.

More ideas about a realistic assessment.

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

Re:Five years...

[LQ]

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.