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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.
"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?
Version 5.0 finally "turns the tables" on the competition!
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.
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
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 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).
Yes, that is true. I did mean to convey that in my post. ;)
But it seems that unless you are working a job where specific documents are required, these days a student or worker could just as easily write an essay in Gmail and let auto-correct fix spelling mistakes, without the need to use a full-scale Office Suite.
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!
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.
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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...
Tables are not pivot tables, which LO has had for ages. Tables are a crucial spreadsheet feature, providing structured references to rectangular arrays of data. Elementwise operations become trivial with tables. A collection of tables can be used similarly to a relational database.
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.
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There are a few areas they it has advantages in, for example it supports a much wider range of file formats, works on more platforms (does not not limit features by platform (e.g. ms access is not in mac office)), can run from a USB stick, can be scripted in python, can make hybrid PDF files... But then it also misses some features of MS office, so it depends on which of the unique features are more useful for you. https://wiki.documentfoundatio...
You CAN do that in Google Sheets, which has some quite advanced features (though it also is somewhat more clunky to do some fairly routine things).
I'm not sure what Excel has though vs what Calc has. In calc you can use VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP (and there are a couple other flavors too) and you can use those with rectangular data ranges. The result is PRETTY flexible in many respects, BUT you definitely lack things like subqueries, or even the ability to do searches on more than one column value or complex sorting. Generally you just have to create some additional columns that contain the data you need in the right format, but it can be a pain.
I'd definitely vote for more powerful capabilities in this area though. A lot of stuff is POSSIBLE, but even a lot of relatively easy stuff to describe is HARD to implement.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson