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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.
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.
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.
My vote for best Office version is 2003. Maximum functionality before the damn ribbon entered the picture and killed productivity for moderately proficient users.
MS Office regularly crashes on me. The document recovery feature in MS Office is also absolutely horrible. It offers the user multiple copies but it is never clear which copy has the most recent updates.
I have had LibreOffice crash on me as well, but the document recovery feature in LibreOffice is so smooth I never worry. It recovers easily and flawlessly even after the loss of power.
-rd
LO realizes that this groupware stuff should not be part of an office suite.
There are plenty of others in the open source world. Thunderbird, Evolution, Kmail/Kontact, etc. Take your pick.
A decade old version of Office is better than a recent version of Office.
LO has been getting progressively better. Office has been getting progressively worse.
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.
If you look at the official release notes impress/presentation is always an afterthought. (Why the hell does slashdot link to a random softpedia article?) This is true for every release. I wish we could get some development/love on impress. I use it for all of my class lectures.
The auto size text to box was broken so long that after 3 years , I had enough and spent a week learning the code so I could fix it. Which ended up adding only a single line of code.