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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.
I just don't have the time for incompatibility for the sake of incompatibility.
You've hit on the crux of the issue with alternatives to MS Office. People expect to be able to open a document to and have it look right, and if it doesn't it's the senders fault, not theirs. In a work environment. That's a show stopper. Sure PDFs are great but if you have to send an editable document your SOL. I used to recommend a free OSS Office product to friends who were sending kids to school since for most of what they needed to do, at zero cost, that solution works as long as they remember to save it as a .doc file; but since many schools now offer Office360 for free that's a better solution since it simply works.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Most of the time, although not all of the time, it is due to either a very poorly formatted document, or using non-standard fonts, or both.
Doesn't matter. That's still denialism. It still does not work. The end user will throw the software in trash. There must be compatibility even for badly-designed documents, because in real life we have those as well.
Often Linux is defended by saying that the BIOS writers simply did a bad job. Well, maybe they did, but at the end of the day, we just want a computer that works. So in the operating system we must write good workarounds for firmware bugs if we want a good user experience.