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LibreOffice 5.1 Officially Released
prisoninmate writes: After being in development for the last three months or so, LibreOffice 5.1 comes today to a desktop environment near you with some of the most attractive features you've ever seen in an open-source office suite software product, no matter the operating system used. The release highlights of LibreOffice 5.1 include a redesigned user interface for improved ease of use, better interoperability with OOXML files, support for reading and writing files on cloud servers, enhanced support for the ODF 1.2 file format, as well as additional Spreadsheet functions and features. Yesterday, even with the previous version, I was able to successfully use a moderately complex docx template without a hitch — the kind of thing that would have been a pipe-dream not too long ago.
OpenOffice kind of sucked.
Want to know what sucked and sucked really badly? Having to pay for the mighty flagship Microsoft Office for the PC. Then paying for the mighty flagship Microsoft Office for the Mac. Then when you take a document from one to the other, they hardly resemble each other. If' I'm paying for a program on two computers it might be nice to have the same document look the same on each computer
After standardizing on the supposedly inferior free Office on my Mac's my PC's and My Linux boxes, documents are passed back and forth without an issue. Been several years now, and Microsoft Office is the incompatible one, the outlier.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Want to know what sucked and sucked really badly? Having to pay for the mighty flagship Microsoft Office for the PC. Then paying for the mighty flagship Microsoft Office for the Mac. Then when you take a document from one to the other, they hardly resemble each other. If' I'm paying for a program on two computers it might be nice to have the same document look the same on each computer
It's worse than that. How about setting up a document, getting pagination, margins, font size, etc, all figured out, so it looks perfect. Then, you go to print it, and change the printer from your cheapo inkjet to your good laser, and suddenly your document formatting takes a dump.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Yep. I always use LibreOffice to edit and send back documents for work. It usually works OK, but with frequent glitches. I worried about that, so I once asked our admin if she had a problem with the docs I sent back. She said mine were no worse than those she got from everybody else, and she had never realized I wasn't actually using MS word to edit them. Glitches and formatting errors is apparently completely normal even with the same version of MS word on different computers.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The only way nowadays to open old doc and docx files that were created with ancient versions of MS Office is to use LibreOffice since MS likes to drop support for its own file formats.
I've heard this repeated time and time again on Slashdot and in other nerd circles without a single example of such a document file ever posted to back up the claims. Do you actually have one to back up your claims? I routinely open doc files created back in Office 97 that open just fine in 2010 and beyond. Even saved back out and work perfectly fine in the older versions of Office as well.
I've (finally) installed Linux Mint end of last year (dual booting with Win7 ATM) as well as LibreOffice 5.0. Here are my particular observations (YMMV):
* I have a quick&dirty (not too dirty for continued use though) tool made in Excel using Macros, for I18N purposes. It takes tabular data and generates plain text .properties files from it (a bit more complicated than exporting to .CSV). The macros worked "almost"-as-is in Libre Office, it took me no more than half an hour to port it. Very happy to use LO for that in future.
* I occasionally (freelance) write some information material that gets sent to customers. The volume does not warrant professional brochure printing, but given that it is inkjet printed, one would still like to put a nice neat "publishing" touch to it. MS Word worked very nice for this kind of "light desktop publishing". Admittedly, it does have some slightly more "advanced" features like paragraph styles, custom gradient backgrounds behind graphics with transparent areas, text flowing around graphics, page headers and footers, custom borders. Gets broken by LO. Also, as of yet I have not been able to create an equivalent document from scratch in LO, it seems not to have all the functions. So stuck with Win+MSOffice on this one for now.
* I regularly give talks and relied heavily on PowerPoint for slides. What is especially nice for me in PP is that I am able to enter slide notes on the same screen as the main slide. Also presenter view, which shows (on the presenter's local screen) the current slide, notes, thumbnails of the following slides, as well as a timer. Afterwards, the presentation file is often requested by members of the audience. Currently using LO, but in a limited fashion. Conversion to/from Powerpoint is not viable, fonts for one get lost as well as some of the graphical effects. The way I make it work for me is to export to PDF and use that for slides. Notes are handheld/handwritten (still need to finetune this), timer gets delegated to a timer on the mobile phone. There are some nice 3rd party templates for LO to be downloaded, although not quite on the level of a PP "theme" that also does fonts and suggested color combinations and generally makes the look&feel a no-brainer. Not ideal but workable. On the positive side this frees me from the lectern with the notebook running the presentation, so I can move about on the stage and even in the audience.
* Oh, and apart from MS Office the other thing that I haven't gotten lucky/happy with on Linux is Sketchup.
So I will certainly be upgrading and trying this with a lot of interest, and be hoping it will get me closer to my goal of ditching MSOffice. On the other hand, I doubt that that will happen soon for people that are "almost" power users of MS Office as its not only a matter of menu option position and maybe file format, but extends all the way to how these apps are actually used.