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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.
I remember going with OpenOffice for the first time because it loaded very quickly compared to ms office. I switched back because the opposite later became true. Has libreoffice fixed the slow load times?
I'd actually prefer a really nice web driven office suite that runs locally however. Something to the effect of having a daemon running on my NAS along with sickrage, couchpotato, and rtorrent.
Until 5.0, Tables were the most missed spreadsheet feature in Calc. Now they are really catching up.
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.
Yes, it does load quickly now, especially if you enable the quickstarter option found in
Tools > Options > Memory and tick the "Enable Systray Quickstarter" box
It loads instantly on my SSD
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.
"It works just as well as anything else".
That just about sums it up. How much more can you cram into a digital typewriter that 99% of the population needs?
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.
With modern SS drives, nearly anything loads instantly!
I remember counting program load times in minutes, now it's like an Olympic finish.
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 ]
I think so. Pre 5.x version, I wasn't happy with it. It was dog slow with images. I complained about, others have complained about it for months. Since going to 5.x, I've been quite pleased with it lately. I would love for there to be improvements to the hardware acceleration. (Supposedly 5.2.x is supposed to fix the hardware acceleration stuff).
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.
I use Apache OpenOffice, not "LibreOffice". It may not have some fringe features due to licensing differences (LibreOffice can swipe any Apache code, but not the same is not necessarily true the other way around), but nothing I am missing.
Apache uses its own license, like pretty much every thing else they do, which did cause some delay in getting the initial Apache version out as they cleaned-up and rewrote code as needed; but it is the true successor to Star/OpenOffice, not put out by a bunch of whiny crybabies who couldn't wait two fucking months for Oracle to get their shit together....
That's right, not two months after those fuckers splintered from OpenOffice, while people were still laughing at and debating the stupidness of the "LibreOffice" name (it may be better than "Ubuntu", but still, it's a shitty name nonetheless), Oracle gave the code and trademarks away - to Apache Software Foundation, instead. It was at that point when the LibreOffice people should have regrouped and joined the new Apache project instead of continuing their own. The product of the combined teams would have been better than either one individually. IBM later donated its Symphony code to Apache as well.
I trust Apache far more than I would trust LibreOffice developers, because I have trusted them for twenty years already (with httpd, among other things), while LibreOffice developers had already proven themselves to be unreliable and unstable even before their own initial release.
Like LibreOffice and every other "office" program (even Microsoft's own in some cases), Apache OpenOffice has some difficulty preserving formatting of complex Microsoft Office documents, but sticking with native formats, everything is just fine, as is opening up and even resaving simple documents (the type most people work with) in non-native formats. I set OpenOffice to be the the default for Microsoft's file types, and haven't run into any issues that made me go back to a Microsoft program to re-edit a document, everything I've needed to do could be done in OpenOffice just fine.
Has libreoffice fixed the slow load times?
Just tested: 1 second for LibreOffice Writer cold (ie first time opened since turning on laptop). Hardware: Macbook Retine Pro 13"; Software: Ubuntu Gnome with LibreOffice 5.1.4.2 installed directly from repositories. Subsequent starts of LibreOffice are effectively instantaneous.
Based on experience with my rather more powerful work laptop, that's considerably faster than MS Office.
What are you on about? Two months? Closer to two years! LO started in 2010. OpenOffice was, as far as anyone could tell, a dead project at that time. The LO folks spent a full year cleaning up the code before making their initial release in early 2011. It was half a year later that Oracle finally (after a year and a half!) announced they'd be relicensing the old OOo code and donating to Apache. What was LO supposed to do? Stop everything and wait to see if this promised code drop (of code they'd already spent a year cleaning up, and another six months improving and adding features to) actually happened, and start over from scratch? That would be dumb!
Now, for a while there, things might have gone in all sorts of different ways. I installed both, and was happy to go with whichever one turned out the best. But AOO completely failed to attract developers. They had some strong support from IBM for a while, but IBM seems to have abandoned them at this point. They're down to a tiny handful of developers, and they currently have a major security bug (CVE 2016-1513), and they can't even figure out how to get updates to their users, even though they have a patch!
I've got no skin in the game. I like Apache too. Have several friends who are members of the Foundation. But it's clear to me at this point that LO has won, and AOO is a dead project walking. AOO has about a dozen people who have contributed in the last year. LO has hundreds. LO has more changesets accepted per day than AOO has in months! LO has backing from several major companies, most notably RedHat and Collabora. AOO lost their only corporate sponsor, IBM, over a year ago.
You use what you want to. AOO is gone from my system, and I don't miss it at all. Being supported by Apache doesn't mean much if you haven't got any developers, and can't even figure out how to get a security fix out to your users!
You don't actually use word processors, I'm guessing. LibreOffice can't even do the most basic formatting correctly, it's so brain dead. It's a fine free option for people who just need to write a letter a few times a year. For anything more, it's painful. I hate Windows but give Office its due, even a decade-old version of Office is far better than LO.
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Bull. How about you list those basics it doesn't do?
My vote for best Office version is 2003. Maximum functionality before the damn ribbon entered the picture and killed productivity for moderately proficient users.
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.
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...
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.
Owncloud does that for a few file formats. It means having to run a webserver locally if you want to have a web driven office suite when you are offline though.
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.
Let me guess. Calibri is a top notch font you say?
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)
There's this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_office_suites#Online_office_suites
however I'm keeping an eye on these:
https://open365.io
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/
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.
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.
You don't actually use word processors, I'm guessing.
Actually I have used various office suites for several decades, an old Atari 800 word processor, Claris Works on the Mac, and versions of Microsoft Office since the Windows 3.1 days, and several open source projects. I have written years of reports, brochures, and resumes in varying versions of Word. I have created countless Power Point slide shows, and as a Biology major, crunched many numbers and charts in Excel. I have edited and maintained MS Access front end interfaces connected to SQL Databases. Oh, and I use Visio to build network diagrams.
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