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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.
Has libreoffice fixed the slow load times?
I think it has, I use Libreoffice on Linux Mint on an oldish Dell laptop. It loads pretty well on that.
My son has been using it as his Office Suite for homework on a reasonably good Toshiba laptop and when I ask him if he likes using it he just shrugs and says "It works just as well as anything else". 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.
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 ]
This comment is pure FUD. I write a lot in my work. Large complicated documents with outlines, headings, indices, tables, you name it. Needless to say, I and my colleagues use MS Office in its various versions at the office. I have used LO at home since it forked and OO before that. In recent years I have had almost 0 compatibility/formatting issues. LO is more compatible with MS than the various versions of MS are with each other!
COE
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...