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LibreOffice 5.2 Officially Released (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate writes from a report via Softpedia: LibreOffice 5.2 is finally here, after it has been in development for the past four months, during which the development team behind one of the best free office suites have managed to implement dozens of new features and improvements to most of the application's components. Key features include more UI refinements to make it flexible for anyone, standards-based document classification, forecasting functions in Calc, the spreadsheet editor, as well as lots of Writer and Impress enhancements. A series of videos are provided to see what landed in the LibreOffice 5.2 office suite, which is now available for download for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Remember what a turd that thing was?! They sure have turned things around.
Until 5.0, Tables were the most missed spreadsheet feature in Calc. Now they are really catching up.
On my Dell XPS 13 Ultra book, used primarily for research, Face Book, Amazon, and web games, I installed LibreOffice in the off chance I may need to create, edit, or view a document. I opened it up a grand total of once... to make sure it worked after install.
For me, I no longer use a computer to create documents, and PDF's have become the gold standard for read-only digital documents and editable forms. My college days of typed reports are gone, and the cloud makes traditional file keeping less relevant.
In my experience it seems the "Office Suite" is becoming less and less relevant.
I tried Base once a few years ago, and it was a steaming pile of sh!t. I take that back; it was not coherent enough to be called a "pile".
Anybody try it recently?
Table-ized A.I.
To be fair, MS's "standards" are not standards, and poorly documented. One would have match Office kludge-for-kludge to make it truly compatible with Office.
MS has negative financial incentive to make it easier to migrate away from Office. Bad formats make them rich.
Table-ized A.I.
You insult without giving even the slightest detail, it almost looks like you did not even bother to test, even if you did try it you spend more than half a paragraph being nasty but give no detailed reason why. Yes you do not like the look but what makes it less usable (or is it just different and so slower for you as a experienced word user)? What failed when loading and how? What failed when saving and how? The type of failure and how it happens is important if you want to throw around such insults as it is quite possible to make Microsoft word documents that fail to transfer from word on windows to word on mac or visa versa (especially if you use fancy fonts and embedded media) so what exactly failed?
Base is the least "loved" part of the suite, programmers seem to end up using an independent SQL database, and most users end up on a spreadsheet, for better or for worse. This is more the case nowadays as home versions of MS Office lack Access. This is not to say they are not trying but at the moment the most of the Base work is going on swapping out the old Java based database engine for a better one (http://firebirdsql.org/) this is not quite finished yet, although at the current rate I would expect it in 5.3.
I bought 5 laptops that each came with a free year of Office 360.
I sold the Office 360 activations for $30 each and installed LibreOffice.
After using LibreOffice for about a year, I can't understand why anyone would buy Office 360.
You can try the portable version without even doing an install - run it from a flash stick even.
The portable version will be somewhat slow, but allows you to evaluate everything except speed.
If you plan to buy or renew an Office 360 subscription, download LibreOffice first.
It's free, easy and you might like it better.
I still find LO Writer to be utterly bug-ridden. It screws up styles and page formatting with dismal regularity, sometimes in unrecoverable ways. Its OK if you're writing small documents, letters, etc. If you want to write anything large or with anything more than the most basic sort of formats, you're better off looking at a DTP program, Writer is NOT your tool.
Calc is OK, but its VERY easy to crash. The data range functionality is buggy as all heck. Often its literally just impossible to declare some range or other, the program will simply crash with 100% regularity. OTOH it works pretty well in every other respect that I've needed.
I can't really say much about the other components. The illustrating package seems to do basic stuff OK, but I've rarely done anything challenging with it. Again, if you really want to do anything elaborate you're going to want to use something like Inkscape or one of the Adobe products.
Its a free program, I'm certainly not complaining. If you are willing to suffer some inconveniences you can do a lot with it, but IMHO I'd MUCH MUCH rather see the LO team focus on killing bugs in basic low level functionality than adding fancy new features that I'm unlikely to use if just basic 3 level hierarchical sections, paragraphs, tables, and simple text frames are so buggy.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
When one has the majority of the market share, and MS Word is a dictionary word, the "standards" Microsoft chooses to follow "ARE" the standards.
I've had zero problems with MSOffice compatibility. Admittedly, there may just not be a huge amount that I am asking of the program, but I generate simple documents and send them out as .docx all the time, and I don't get any complaints. Nor do I see that they're misformatted. Likewise I load MSOffice files, both Word and Excel, on a pretty regular basis. I've had zero word problems recently, and the only problems I had with Excel files were some very oddball macros that just didn't make it over correctly.
I'm not an LO fanboy by any means, I think its got some pretty annoying issues, and it certainly hasn't kept up with all the newest features of Word, but OTOH I don't need any of those features! Its a solid program for doing fairly basic stuff like letters, resumes, cards, and similar stuff. You can do a 100 page document if you don't care about any elaborate features either, though I am happy to admit it isn't the best tool for that.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I'm not sure what feature you mean. Pardon my ignorance.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I guess the real problem will be compatibility with MS Office. Microsoft will do their best to make that as hard as they can I would think.
The problem is that Microsoft can't actually do that much:
- Their "Office XML" is supposed to be a standard too (like Open Document) and they are supposed to follow their own standard (although for a very long time their own office suite wasn't actually compliant with their own standard that they've published. And still this standard is an horrible mess leaving much potential holes for abuse).
But in my experience (user of this suite for ~15 years - since StarOffice started to become opensource) compatibility has progressed a lot.
In the past few years: .docx (Word XML) files (and even older .doc plain Word) tend to open flawlessly in LibreOffice Writer. .doc version) page-setting weirdness that is printer-driver dependent (Yes. Actually. Try changing the printer you're targeting in "print setup..." in older versions of Word, the page layout will subtly change). .xlsx (Excel XML) files (and even older .xls plain Excel) have never failed me in LibreOffice Calc.
(Save the very rare slight mis-alignement of one embed object OLE/COM).
Most actual differences come from:
- missing font libraries. (But most modern Linux distribution feature scripts to download most common fonts)
- (with older
- (Sadly, still happening. Luckily, not a lot) the original layout is an absolute clusterfuck (like indentations and centering done with "space bar")
As I said, they are very rare.
Including all the formulas that they contains. (only complex scripts written in VBA have given me problems).
And with this, nearly everything I encounter at work seems to be okay, so I can be productive under Linux for the past few years.
On the other hand, presentation (.pptx and .ppt) seem to be a hit-and-miss with LibreOffice Impress.
Simple presentations seem to work.
Specially when done correctly (elements are correctly connected together)
But lots of document have weird layouts (all the text is in the same box, and relies on empty row to make room for pictures. Arrows and boxes were just put as-is and then align approximately by keyboard, etc.)
and these convert badly.
Luckily for me, lots of people export them to PDF.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
>Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Only use anything on Windows that you want the US government to have access to.
Just a heads up.
Surprisingly, MS Offce 6.0 and 97 was probably the best Office release from Microsoft. Then MS turned it into a pile of crap. So I would say that's a good thing.
If it was any good of not. I'm running an old version of MS Office. Previous experiences with Office clones were disappointing: slow, non-native GUIs, didn't act as you'd expect. Is this stuff fixed yet? Is ApacheOpenOffice better? Wot?
and still no email/calendar tool like Outlook....
My vote for best Office version is 2003. Maximum functionality before the damn ribbon entered the picture and killed productivity for moderately proficient users.
see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_table
most normal/light users don't use them as they make most seance for large datasets, particularly spreadsheet as a database type uses.
I already migrated half of the technical documentation I maintain to LaTeX. What a buggy piece of software LO is.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
Several years ago, I was a heavy MS Office user that used Outlook for email, wrote 20-60 page reports in Word, produced a couple of Excel spreadsheets daily with scientific and financial data, and created many presentations in PowerPoint. A large part of every working day was spent in MS Office.
A few issues had me looking for an alternative;
1) My Word documents would often become corrupted, growing from a couple of megabyte to tens of megabytes for no reason. Most of the time copy and pasting the whole document into a new document fixed this.
2) MS Office applications would crash regularly, particularly Word, destroying my productivity and making for a miserable working day.
3) When the stupid ribbon interface appeared in MS Office, is took longer to do making basic tasks that were efficiently achieved with traditional menus.
4) I wanted a cross platform office suite so that working Linux was easier.
OpenOffice, then LibreOffice, became that alternative and Office application crashes were a thing of the past. In early versions, MS Office documents were not always accurately rendered by my alternative so I would have to open some documents in MS Office. There were missing features that had me using MS Office for certain tasks, particularly with spreadsheets that Excel did better. Collaborating with colleagues that used MS Office exclusively could be a bit of a pain.
Today, I have no issues opening MS Office documents or saving in an MS Office format for colleagues to use. The issue of missing features is almost entirely gone and it is only my stubbornness for doing things a certain way that ever means that Excel is used. Many people have seen me using LibreOffice and have been converted from MS Office, although subscription models and other MS policies has helped with this. LibreOffice is the only office suite I really use, with MS Office on hanging around as a backup.
LibreOffice just gets better with every release, while MS Office tries to screw their customers more with every release...
As the summary points out, they added a whole ton of new features. What this and most open source applications need are not new features (at least not right away). They need all existing features cleaned up and made to run as bullet proof as possible. Get rid of most or all the bugs before moving on to release with new features. They should have a lock down for maybe a year and a half and just clear every single bug report they have. Same thing with KDE for sure.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
MS Office 97? There was a horrible MS Word incompatibility bug in that which meant slightly different versions with identical box labels could not open files from each other. I and a couple of others had the annoying task of reinstalling MS Word on all of the computers in a university engineering department using the same media to make sure that they would play nice together. We couldn't budget for IT staff but postgraduate students are free.
I wish the document compare feature worked better (i.e., more like MS Word). This is one of the main roadblocks to using LibreOffice as my daily driver.
Your fairness is false, look up ISO/IEC 29500.
is there any advantage to Libre? I have a full license for Office 365 through my job, so the obvious price advantage isn't relevant to me. I also only use linux headless on my servers, so platform support isn't an issue. Is there anything Libre has/does that MS Office doesn't? Unique or improved features I might like? (feel free to make wild assumptions about my preferences)
..and still almost no development on Base.
Rather than re-invent the wheel, why not incorporate MariaDB (for example) as the back end and focus on forms work?
NOTE: I hate to complain about any Open Source project but Base truly is getting short shrift.
Libreoffice developers run into trouble when people try to make Linux packages for the separate parts because so much is shared that it isn't worth it. It's all "soffice.bin" under the hood, the application specific start programs are just links using command line flags. If you think about it graphs in word should be using the same code as the spreadsheet, so the data tables should use the spread sheet code too, the text rendering engine should be the same for all applications, image handing should be shared with all document types, and so on. In the end so much is shared that making them separate is more trouble than it is worth, if MS Office is different then this does not say good things about how it is architecture is set out, only outlook and possibly Access are separate enough that they makes seance as a truly separate application, and they still should share a lot of code.
Why are they using crappy 'flat' icons? Can't ANY company just produce what works best, instead of blindly following the crowd?
http://firebirdsql.org/
This is more embeddable than MariaDB, but wont be finished until later versions (i.e. 5.3) I don't know how much of the reduced attention on the front end is due to the work not being worthwhile until after the switch.
It's faster, depending on the OS you use the GUI may well be more "native", but as for working "as you expect" that depends on you, since you have used similar programs that are not the same getting some unexpected differences in an otherwise similar set-up etc is normal. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npjOSLCR2hE ... so the program still works but it is not getting more than the smallest occasional updates (and at this point not even those) and is steadily getting more behind.
As for ApacheOpenOffice If the project was a fish it would be belly up and if it was a parrot I would suggest it is just resting
MS Office tries to screw their customers more with every release...
Microsoft has been delivering so much evil that Microsoft top managers have proudly decided to change the company's name to EVILsoft.
I know people will think that is a joke, but... maybe it's true.
Hence the bogus flat icons, try Tools > Options > View > Icon size and style:
That's a standard for exchanging documents in XML format, not documentation on the existing Office file formats. I just opened a .docx document in an editor, and it's not XML (unless it's somehow compressed or encrypted XML). One would have to do a Save-As in Office to get an XML version.
The "test" here is for a non-MS product be able to open and read an Office file as-is and render it the same way it would in MS-Office.
Further, the mere existence of a written standard says nothing about the quality or accuracy of it.
Table-ized A.I.
Microsoft forum PR team?
Windows anniversary 10 is still FREE? fucking bitch ass faggots.
LibreOffice is very good. All formats supported. If you are using Windows (at all) (you shouldn't) you should use the portable versions from portableapps.com ... there are a lot of programs from there and they don't use your registry at all. This prevents your piece of shit Windows from having a cardiac arrest if you bump sticky keys or fucking any other stupid shit.
A lot of the programs on portableapps.com are ported from Linux. They are all available in Linux along with much more.
Windows is just pure spyware they need to fuck off and literally die for backstabbing the global population like they do. Bill Gates has 80 billion dollars selling that bullfuckingshit. Now he just hides and they do nice philanthropy stories about him on gay sites.
Bill Gates is vermin.
>prisoninmate writes from a report via Softpedia:
Are you really trying to spook Slashdot readers mother fuckers? You point to a site "Softpedia" that is known to host infected shareware for over a decade. Is this really the smart news source for your feeds?
prisoninmate writes? Really cunt? People actually think this is a catchy nickname for a tech board?
Slashdot has loose booty.
From watching people use office 360 usability is one of it's problems, and looks for something you find hard to use are neither here nor there (indeed beyond looking acceptably professional looks are irrelevant for a business).
For document management systems Libreoffice added CMIS support in 4.0, and at this point the open/save remote files dialogue has a fairly long list of possible systems, including SharePoint, but I haven't used these features in MS Office, are they better?
Collaborative editing features are an area of current work, revision history and annotation have recently seen many improvements and they are currently working on the ODF collaborative editing features, so not at parity yet but good enough for a good portion of smaller enterprises and for those needing on-line collaborative edits maybe worth a look next version.
As for ERP integration, I have no idea how easy it is but both Microsoft office and Libreoffice have their own add on system. This will however only matter for enterprises who want to integrate their ERP systems with their document creation tools, and for whom replacement of their current systems is practical and has a respectable business case. Depending on what current systems are in place this will be irrelevant for most businesses, at least until they decide to upgrade existing ERP components, I guess for you this represents a growth opportunity. You should watch out however for the platform bit, Microsoft has for a long time viewed windows as a platform but this wasn't always good for the other companies using that platform, if they decide to move into this area themselves you could easy become another Word Perfect or Netscape.
Of course it's not XML - it's a ZIP file full of XML, JPG, PNG and what-have-you files.
The "PK" at the very beginning of the file should have been a huge hint...
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole