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LibreOffice 6.0 Released: Features Superior Microsoft Office Interoperability, OpenPGP Support (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate writes: LibreOffice 6.0 comes two and a half years after the LibreOffice 5.x series, and it's the biggest release of the open-source and cross-platform office suite so far. It introduces a revamped design with new table styles, improved Notebookbars, new gradients, new Elementary icons, menu and toolbar improvements, and updated motif/splash screen.
LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project. Many great improvements were made to the OOXML and ODF filters, as well as in the EMF+, Adobe Freehand, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Pagemaker, FictionBook, Apple Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as well as Quattro Pro import functionality, and to the XHTML export. LibreOffice Online received numerous improvements as well in this major release of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project. Many great improvements were made to the OOXML and ODF filters, as well as in the EMF+, Adobe Freehand, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Pagemaker, FictionBook, Apple Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as well as Quattro Pro import functionality, and to the XHTML export. LibreOffice Online received numerous improvements as well in this major release of LibreOffice.
Despite years of feature requests, they still lack the most important feature of any office suite! Seriously, who is going to even bother with this software if doesn't have Clippy?! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
What about for people like me who can't get a job and post on Slashdot all day? What are we supposed to use?
...no ransom..erh...yearly license fees.
Stone and chisel?
I'm not a particularly advanced user of it. I mainly use it for writing simple letters, and sometimes maintaining pretty basic spreadsheets. But each and every time I have to use it I'm astounded at how slow and bloated it feels.
It reminds me of Firefox in many ways. It feels like I have to wait longer than I should for simple actions to complete. It just doesn't feel as responsive as its competitors.
Why is this such a common theme when it comes to open source software? LibreOffice, the main open source office suite, feels slow and bloated to me. Firefox, the main open source web browser, feels slow and bloated to me. GCC, the main open source compiler suite, feels slow and bloated to me. KDE, the main open source desktop environment, feels slow and bloated to me. Thunderbird, the main open source mail client, feels slow and bloated to me.
I don't think it's because the software itself is open source. I mean, we have a web browser like Chrome that's open source, but that is also fast and light. We also have the open source LLVM+Clang compiler system, which is fast and light.
The main difference I see is that the open source projects that are fast and light are developed by for-profit corporations, while the open source projects that tend to feel slow and bloated to me are developed by "foundations" or by the community.
Regardless of the cause, I wish that projects like OpenOffice and Firefox would put more effort into giving users that same fast and light feel that we get from their competitors.
True, but what office suite is right for me?
LibreOffice is still a clunky piece of garbage that is difficult to use and is generally awful. Build a new office suite from scratch and throw this one in the trash where it belongs.
You must have tried the new version and evaluated it very quickly!
It is a solid option when you do not get office through your work or want to pay the small monthly fee for the home edition.
I would actually consider to use it if it was compatible with all my VBA macros for excel. No work around for these since they are shared with others who use office.
Still, for free.. It is "fine".
Before you look, be sure to fix your hosts file. God knows what kind of skewed result you'll get otherwise. Why just yesterday, I was getting something out of the fridge, and it had gone bad! "Oh!" I cried. "Why didn't I put the chinese food in the hosts file, and it would have blocked those evil bacteria!"
It's a true story!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"What's the excuse for anything less than 100% compatibility now?"
Maybe there are deliberate file irregularities that Microsoft uses to try to force people to buy new versions of Microsoft Office. If the CEO always wants the latest version of Office, everyone else would then be forced to have the new version, also.
Software companies have found that people who have no interest in technical details are easily abused. Now some software companies are renting their software, and no longer selling it.
A long time ago, I spent several hours writing a document in Microsoft Office. Later I discovered that Office was not able to open the file it had generated.
I was able to open the document in Libre Office. Since then, I use only Libre Office.
Is it possible that most people who have trouble with Libre Office interacting with Microsoft Office have made a mistake in saving the file?
God, yeah, like no software has a splash screen nowadays.
Except...
The latest versions of Office.
Nothing against Open Office or Libre but most people in business swear by Microsoft Office. But if your a casual document creator or just want something free for those rare creations its hardly worth it to pay even for Office 365 personal. But I would bet you most users who could actually benefit from Libre over Office 365 don't even know it exists.
Do people still use officw suite software? Serious question.
It's nice that there is a semi-compatible office suite for unemployed poor people to write their resumé. They could also use WordPad as it will open and save .docx files as well.
Wow. Ignorance.
Not every workplace provides Office for home use.
Not every home user works in an office (and hence probably wouldn't have it provided)
Not every Office user is a professional (far from it).
Maybe people just want to send letters, open documents from their governments, banks, etc. without having to pay a monthly rental to Microsoft for the privilege (even if they don't use a Microsoft OS on their computer).
P.S. The Office OOXML file formats are an absolute farce. Basically, it just shovels the binary formats of old into an XML file with little to no interpretation or explanation. New documents tend to open just fine. But anything complicated, legacy, upgraded from older Word etc. has a shed-ton of undocumented (and Microsoft basically admit undocumentable) crap.
The EU took them to took where they had to provide a specification for the format and TONS of it is literally just binary shite from old Word formats shoved into a tag. It was complained about in court too. Even getting that far took DECADES.
The file format is opaque, ugly, and not easily transferable / interoperable, which is precisely why we need another office suite that can open it because what's the point of an open format that only one (paid-for) program can actually open?
What LibreOffice does do is get better every iteration.
Home users? They can live off LibreOffice for at least the last two versions.
Power users? Same, but they may need to tweak some small things.
Office users? Same, so long as their developers are aware of the use of both suites.
It's far from a waste of time.
I ran a school's IT. From a Windows laptop, With Libreoffice. If anything I could open more things than those with Word because it handled obscure and old formats that Word couldn't. It was never a problem. A school isn't exactly on the power-user end of fancy macros and DDE links etc. that don't transfer across nicely (because of undocumented / poorly documented Microsoft shite), so it could easily run off LibreOffice (like many schools now run from Google Docs entirely, which has EVEN LESS features).
P.S. I work for a huge school - we do not provide Office to staff, we do not provide Office to students, we do not use Office online. We use Google Docs, offline Office on the premises, and at home people use whatever they buy themselves. We are far from alone in this. As such, Libreoffice is more than useful for those people.
Hell, I get just as many Libreoffice documents as Apple Pages documents coming in from the parents / kids. MS Office can't even start opening the Pages ones properly and chooses "different standards" for showing the OpenXML ones. But Libreoffice will open 99% of what comes through our inboxes (millions of emails a year, and 1 million shared documents on Google Apps, to give you an idea of scale).
Let's see, free vs. several hundred dollars....
I'm most excited to maybe get a vague representation of what an old quark document may have looked like.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
As a long user of LibreOffice, I am excited to try this one out. It's been fantastic for me but I don't use it in a corporate setting so I cannot speak for that. For the home and small business user, Libre is perfect.
Wordpad
And in totally unrelated news, SoftMaker published the beta version of SoftMaker Office 2018 for Mac today, making that suite available on Windows, Linux, Mac and Android. Looks much better than Libre and has better MS compatibility, too.
LibreOffice is still a clunky piece of garbage that is difficult to use and is generally awful. Build a new office suite from scratch and throw this one in the trash where it belongs.
Let me translate
Even though I strongly resisted the ribbon interface at the time, now I've come to believe it's the One True Way and anything not the One True Way must implement it regardless of any strong copyrights and patents Microsoft has on it.
LibreOffice is perfectly fine for 99% of use cases unless you really absolutely need that ActiveX sync to Lotus Notes 5.x for mail merging.
You can get genuine office for £5 on eBay. While I like open source, when you can get the "real thing" for that sort of money it's not worth the hassle of using anything else. Obviously if you want to use it on an OS other than Windows then OSS is probably still the best option.
My company uses it extensively for corporate documents, but I'm trying to steer them into using a single-source documentation solution.
Does anybody know if LibreOffice 6 fixes the bug where portrait documents will only print in landscape mode?
I'm really curious to see some sample documents, and side-by-side renderings for how they look in MS Office, LibreOffice 5, and LibreOffice 6. Additionally, I'd like to see if the bug list for remaining known discrepancies... what features should I avoid if I want to make sure a document will render consistently across applications.
Anyone who actually needs Office gets it through work.
Some people actually need an office suite at home too, because they do more interresting things in their free time rather than sit in front of the TV.
LibreOffice Calc is much better at supporting CSV files than Excel, so it has that going for it.
(though admittedly, anything in the world is better at supporting CSV files than Excel).
p.s. the copyright-encumbered DOCX file format is still a problem for any group (commercial or otherwise) that wants to fully support it.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
What's the differences between OpenPGP and GPG?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It was already perfect - just ask anyone around here.
I really appreciate having the option to use an non-proprietary office suite that runs on Linux. It meets my needs very well. Thank you for all your hard work over the years.
Ah, yes! Quattro Pro compatibility. Finally someone at the Document Foundation has set their priorities straight!!!
When Microsoft comes out with a version of Office that is free as in speech, supports GENUINELY open file formats (no, XML-encoded binary dumps do not a "standard" make), and runs on Linux, which is my primary desktop OS at home, please let me know.
Nonaggression works!
I'm most excited to maybe get a vague representation of what an old quark document may have looked like.
That might require more skill and better equipment than you currently have. Try starting with old subatomic particle documents first.
OpenPGP is a protocol, while GPG is a software implementation of the OpenPGP standard.
Let's see, free vs. several hundred dollars....
Take the hardware into equation too. LibreOffice is not a lightweighter, and requires far newer/faster/bigger hardware than what they claim on the system-requirements web page. Especially if you can't build your own LibreOffice from source and have to take pre-packaged binaries, it's going to be severely bloated, including java. Even though Office is heavy, it's lighter than that. I actually can use Word on a PIII laptop, but LibreOffice, nope.
If the choice is between buying a minimal version of Office for $50 or replacing a working computer to run a free LibreOffice, well...
Libbie did nothing wrong
My company uses it extensively for corporate documents, but I'm trying to steer them into using a single-source documentation solution.
Markdown with integrated LaTeX support has enabled me to create document templates for a variety of uses from day-to-day memos to collaborative research projects.
I see a menu bar and not an awful ribbon interface.
I'll probably download/install this shortly.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
For starters, let's keep it simple and try comparing Wordpad and Abiword.
Wordpad loads in the blink of an eye. It handles enormous files flawlessly, and I have never seen it crash.
Abiword takes an annoying pause before it can do anything. Not only will it choke on large files, but it won't even run on many popular distros - if it runs at all.
Last night we tried for hours to install the latest version on my son's Debian based Raspberry Pi 3. It comes up with a flashing window. Not only is it useless, but it's even hard to close!
Maybe Microsoft doesn't make it easy to copy Word, but how do you explain the lack of a competitor to Wordpad. Before we start comparing Word and LibreOffice, remember Wordpad vs Abiword. This comparison illustrates what has always been wrong with the Linux desktop.
I feel sorry for any kid that only has a Linux machine for his schoolwork,
No. LibreOffice is constantly trying to copy M$ Office. M$ Office is a clunky piece of garbage that is difficult to use and is generally awful.
So until LibreOffice starts to go their own way, it too will be a clunky piece of garbage that is difficult to use and is generally awful.
I happen to believe he ditched the inferior product. Sure there are some users that may use some of the very advanced features that only Office offers, but I think that is a very small percentage of the users. LibreOffice loads faster and uses less resources. It has given fewer problems than Office, and I haven't had to waste a single second of my life dealing with Office activation problems.
Please post the real fucking source next time: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.0
You must have tried the new version and evaluated it very quickly!
I believe the person is MS Excel big fan. This type of people will never want to learn anything outside of MS Excel. How sad...
I'll just wait a few days while everyone installs 6.0 and encounter issues because all those little things will get fixed in 6.0.1 and then a few more things will get fixed a few days after that with 6.0.2.
I used to be a product tester so I don't test software for free. :-p
You can get genuine office for £5 on eBay.
Good luck with the licencing on that £5 copy of Office.
I would bet you have trouble with it.
I am currently contracted to a very large multi national company, I use LibreOffice on Linux to do my job everyday. I share documents with others, and never have any problems. In fact I have occasionally used LibreOffice to fix documents that MS Office had corrupted. It also opens a very large selection of file formats that MS Office will not open. As the project I am currently maintaining has been running a very long time, this is quite handy for some of our historic documents.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
Well, at least "this type of people" is gaining a living.
Libre Office not bad. I install it for my clients who don't want ms office. Heck, even MS Works 9.0 still does the job.
It really comes down to training and the culture -- especially government and education system...
It's all about embedded training from the get go. // free licensing of retail to education makes the culture create adherence and bonding to a tool...
Microsoft Office is not the Unix System V tools, and vi will never be Word (1.0 or higher), yet VI achieves the same result: write down your ideas and thoughts and save them, transfer, edit, print them, copy and paste, and send them via email, etc. etc..
even Nano has a place in my heart. sort of like PFE32..
so the rest is the marketing machine and training for the last 30 years...
At any given moment, I prefer notepad or pfe32 do do a lot of stuff.
If I want to get fancy, I'll spin up word. if i want to write a small book then word, even word for dos 5.0 or 5.5 is fine.. load/transfer yuck.. ok.
Back to Libre Office.. here here!! Wordstar 6.0 here I come...
is good development tools.
Only, "the real thing" is unreliable shyte, and susceptible to all kinds of malware. It's also completely unnecessary for at least 90% of the user base, close to 100% outside the corporate world.
You must have tried the new version and evaluated it very quickly!
Not necessarily. If a new version doesn't come with a ground up re-write then a lot of the old version's opinions will continue to apply.
That said the GP was obviously talking out of their arse. It's a perfectly capable suite.
I remember all the whining how file format was the only reason various open source clones sucked. What's the excuse for anything less than 100% compatibility now?
You've never designed against a moving target have you?
>Anyone who actually needs Office gets it through work.
You're correct as to MS Office specifically - but not office software in general. Word processors, spreadsheet, and even presentation software are broadly useful on occasion. I write a few documents a year that call for a word processor - it's absolutely not worth buying Office for that. I use spreadsheets far more often, but not for anything that makes me money. Students have even more use for such things, and very many of them can't afford several hundred dollars for an office suite.
And before you mention free/ultracheap student editions, etc: be sure to thank Open Office for those - before it became a credible alternative you were lucky if you could track down the guy that could get you a 40% student discount coupon. Microsoft knows full well it can't afford to have to large a portion of the population get acclimated to alternatives.
Ditto people in the developing world - you can get a halfway-decent new PC for less than the cost of a copy of MS Office, far less if used. You want people scrimping and saving to afford a PC to be forced to become criminals to get access to basic functionality? To say nothing of those people who, for one reason or another, don't use Windows as their operating system should they be denied the ability to use word processors or spreadsheets just because Microsoft managed to drive every other Office-suite developer out of business through a slew of unsavory behaviors, including outright sabotage in some cases?
> I remember all the whining how file format was the only reason various open source clones sucked. What's the excuse for anything less than 100% compatibility now?
Still file formats - Microsoft *still* hasn't fully documented their format - the documented format they've released to get OOXML approved as an "open format" is
1) incomplete - there are sections where it literally states that certain binary blobs are defined by the data exported from Office.
2) Extremely verbose, and some have argued intentionally confusing
3) Not used by any software on the planet. Files saved by Microsoft Office are very often NOT compliant with the published standard, nor can Office consistently read files that *are* correctly formatted in compliance with the specification.
As for any UI suckery - that's admittedly one place that massive software companies have an edge - it costs a lot of effort and/or money to do proper usability studies, and user interface design is perhaps outside the core strengths of most developers. Still, the software gets the job done, and isn't too painful to use once you know your way around. In some ways it's even superior to MS Office.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Maybe there are deliberate file irregularities that Microsoft uses to try to force people to buy new versions of Microsoft Office. If the CEO always wants the latest version of Office, everyone else would then be forced to have the new version, also.
I often see this "the CEO" comment. The reality is the CEO doesn't give a shit and isn't in control of anything other than who a critical business partner is. And as a huge partner you'll find that if a company is large enough to have a CEO then it is large enough to simply pay a yearly contract fee to its partners for which the only decision about which version of the office suite to roll out depends entirely on how close the old one is to end of support.
Mind you if you hit that end of life point the CEO may question why a new version rolled out since it was within contract that you get it for no license fees anyway.
One time you couldn't open a file and you ditched a better office product because of your ineptness? Yeah, very insightful.
Please FOAD.
One time is MORE THAN ENOUGH to ditch a software that can't even open its own file. A user should never need to mangle with a software in order to open the software generated result/file.
It used to be the case that Office files were essentially the object graph decorated with edge cases. If that is still the case, it cannot be a standard for anything.
hahahah spoken like a true MS shill..
Not true. the spreadsheet application in 5.X is horrible with large spreadsheets. The performance problems in sorting and processing large ranges are truly truly horrendous. I really wanted to use Libreoffice and break away from my windows machine. Can't do it with Libreoffice.
No, the reason Office document interoperability is so difficult is because Microsoft designed these formats for themselves, for their own programs, with no thought to interoperability in either direction, and with other concessions in mind like how the early versions of Word and Excel needed to run on really old computers.
Pretty much exactly ten years ago Microsoft released documents to satisfy the EU that detailed exactly how the Word and Excel file formats worked, and they were PDF files that were 400 and 450 pages long. People like yourself speculated that perhaps they had been purposely obfuscated to thwart developers but the truth of the matter is that these things were designed over the course of decades and had a whole lot of stuff in them as a result of the increased complexity of the requirements.
To some extent, Office applications have the contents of the document loaded into memory and the document file itself is basically a memory dump of the contents of the memory serialized to disk. Loading the document deserializes it into memory. People complain about this but again, when your perspective is you need to have this application you're programming write out files and then read them in later, it makes perfect sense as a plan of action. It also explains why occasionally Office breaks compatibility with itself on upgrades which is unacceptable but it happens.
In that vein, LibreOffice has had the specs for the Office documents for a decade now, so I think the "what is the excuse?" question is still pretty valid. But the issue is not that Microsoft deliberately sabotages efforts. They're not that smart and they're not that dumb.
Schnapple
As I recall Open Office actually has a similar preloader available, but it's more obvious (leaves an icon in the tray) and I'm not sure if it's enabled by default - use office suites rarely enough that I always disable such things as being excessively expensive.
Libreoffice asks you if you want it enabled during installation. You can also turn it on/off from the settings as well.
No problems whatsoever. Keys (5 in total) registered fine on the ms office website and associated with my live account. Product's themselves connected to the net, happily updating themselves and showing as activated.
It is a solid option when you do not get office through your work or want to pay the small monthly fee for the home edition.
It's a a better than solid option even if you do get MS Office. I have no idea why anyone would actually pay to use MS Office at home for non-work purposes. I use LibreOffice every day as I have standardized our company on it. Works great with no more problems than MS Office.
First, they've been following Microsoft in playing hide-and-seek with "Fill ... Right" in the spreadsheet application. It used to be in the edit menu, then it moved to the insert menu, now it's buried deeply in the data menu. I can do Ctrl-D for "Fill ... Down" but Crtl-R is already mapped to something else. My fingers want to just do Alt-E, I, R, but that doesn't work any more.
Second, I really really wish they would abandon the ribbon-like interface. It's a fucking travesty and possibly a crime against humanity. Just let me see my fucking menus the way they are supposed to be shown instead of making them go away and reappear when they think I need them.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
So I just gave it a try, and my existing complaints still stand.
My current LO test is Slide Transitions in Impress, because for as long as I can remember, the slide transitions have been very broken. Specifically, it seems to be an issue with transitions that make use of OpenGL. As of this version, they're *still* very broken. I'm testing this on a Mac BTW, but in the past I also found the problem existed on Linux as well. I haven't tried the Windows version but according to others, the Windows version allegedly doesn't have this problem.
Impress is my benchmark app because it's so easy to quickly tell whether they've fixed these major glaring issues. The fact that they *still* haven't done so, makes their support for importing keynote presentations completely laughable. As if I would ever use LO over Keynote when it's so half-assed.
Nothing against Open Office or Libre but most people in business swear by Microsoft Office.
No they don't. They just haven't bothered trying anything else and it's what their company gives them. Many of them don't even know there is another option.
I think multi-threading for Calc is still work in progress. OpenCL acceleration should work in some cases, though.
That's a lousy metric for evaluating an Office suite.
The correct metric is: Does it do what you need it to do?
If it doesn't do what you need, then they could be _paying you_ to use it and you'd still be screwed. Impress for example, is hopelessly broken and still is in v6. If I need to do a professional presentation, I'd be better off writing a document and presenting the resulting PDF than using Impress.
My understanding is that OOXML started out being exactly that, and was tweaked just enough to be approved, just barely, by ECMA/ISO. With the result that Microsoft could claim it as an "international standard," and compliant applications could potentially create Microsoft-readable files but would still have extreme difficulty reading Microsoft-created ones, because of all the items in the spec that read like "This specifies that the code should call RenderFoobarFactory()" but with no indication of what a FoobarFactory was. It may still be that bad. I stopped bothering with it years ago. LibreOffice and its cousins work well enough, and interoperate well enough, for my purposes. But anything whose longevity I care about is saved in a truly open format such as ODF.
Nonaggression works!
As far as I know this wasn't a completely clear specification of the file format. It still leaves details to interpretation, trial and error. It is not incomplete in an evil way, they just don't have a more accurate specification.
Does LibreOffice support the file formats of its predecessor StarOffice and former competitors like Ami Pro and WordPerfect?
ROFL, wow, you're really grasping for straws.
ANY computer made the last 10 years could run OO, provided that you don't try to open too large documents, but that goes for MS-Office too. LO works just fine on a RPI, with said caveat.
I've been a user sine Works in 1991 or so and went full Office in 97 and was quite happy for a time. Now I try to get everyone off Microsoft's terrible file formats. Even the "open" ones are terminally broken (I think intentionally to force you to stay with Word).
People still complain when I send them an ODF. In 2018. TOO FUCKING BAD. Live with it.
The world should have collectively risen up in anger and killed MS Office in 2000, smiting it with fire and acid.
I still miss Word Perfect for DOS. Sniff....
Or you need Outlook
there, I've said it
This then, is what I hear:
"I will eat meat when it is delivered without animal protein."
"I will drink wine when it no longer contains that icky alcohol stuff."
"I will drive on a road when I no longer have to use a car."
"I will speak and write when I no longer have to use those oppressive things called words."
Set up a requirement you know is impossible or improbable, then carp about how the world does not conform to your standards. How's that working out for you? Oh, no, don't bother replying, I can hear the snark already, about your favoured alternative. That wasn't the point.
You voluntarily ruled out using MS Office by setting a standard for Microsoft you know they will probably never meet. My guess is, you don't want them to achieve your fake standard. Microsoft is too useful a prop to your ego as a whipping boy, aren't they?
A long time ago, I spent several hours writing a document in Microsoft Office. Later I discovered that Office was not able to open the file it had generated.
thingsthatdidnthappen.txt
There is no need for Java in any even approximately normal use of LibreOffice.
Also which Office are you talking about? The latest version REQUIRES SSE2, which a P3 doesn't have, so Offfice will not run AT ALL on that laptop of yours.
You're seriously misrepresenting things in that post...
For starters, let's keep it simple and try comparing Wordpad and Abiword.
Wordpad loads in the blink of an eye. It handles enormous files flawlessly, and I have never seen it crash.
Abiword takes an annoying pause before it can do anything. Not only will it choke on large files, but it won't even run on many popular distros - if it runs at all.
Last night we tried for hours to install the latest version on my son's Debian based Raspberry Pi 3. It comes up with a flashing window. Not only is it useless, but it's even hard to close!
Maybe Microsoft doesn't make it easy to copy Word, but how do you explain the lack of a competitor to Wordpad. Before we start comparing Word and LibreOffice, remember Wordpad vs Abiword. This comparison illustrates what has always been wrong with the Linux desktop.
I feel sorry for any kid that only has a Linux machine for his schoolwork,
For starters, let's try comparing Tangerines and Grapefruit.
Most Tangerines are incredibly easy to peel. I've been able to eat half a dozen Tangerines in one sitting, and never even got juice in my eye.
Grapefruit take forever to peel. Not only does they end up choking me with that less-tasty white stuff all over the juicy parts, but most people don't like them as much - if they'll eat them at all.
Last night my kid and I tried for hours to peel half a dozen Grapefruit, and we ended up with juice everywhere and he kept squirting me right in the eye. He even swears it wasn't on purpose.
Maybe nature doesn't make it easy to turn Grapefruit into Tangerines, but how do you explain the lack of a reasonable competitor to Tangerines? Before we start comparing Pears to Apples, remember Tangerines vs Grapefruit. This comparison illustrates what has always been wrong with Fruit.
I feel sorry for any kid that only gets Grapefruit in his school lunchbox.
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
I haven't been using LibreOffice since too long time ago, but have seen quite a few problems already; mainly regarding compatibility with MS Office (at least, Writer/Word which is the one I have used the most). This new version is still messing up Word documents quite badly; other that, it is a fairly good writing application. I will continue using it as so far (checking spelling/grammar and writing documents on Linux) and relying on Windows/Office/VBA when required by assuming that these two formats are still quite incompatible.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
maybe he's referring to the lower price
Every bug report I have made to LO is reclassified as an "enhancement."
Every enhancement request I have made to LO is reclassified as "not needed" and "function already present in "
So, all those wonderful new features that I never use, will not sway me to upgrade, ever since they eliminated one of the customizations I use.
Thanks for the Abiword reminder. Haven't used it in a while, but always found it relatively lightweight and more pleasing (font rendering?) to use than OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.
MS Office is OVERKILL for about 90% of users out there (home or office)
How do you style the documents to create deliverables? (Say, to send the documents to clients?)
Your phrasing suggests you're referring to LibreOffice, but LO hasn't copied the abomination of a ribbon UI that Microsoft forced on us. I know someone was dabbling with a ribbon-like option, but last time I tried it out it was really rough.
If, on the other hand, you're referring to Microsoft when you speak of abandoning the ribbon, let me offer you an "amen!". The ribbon has slowed down my ability to find things that were obvious and easy to access in the old menu system. The menu tree may have been growing cluttered as MS kept bolting on new features, but it was still easier to find stuff then than it is now.
Not even Microsoft can manage 100% inter-version compatibility. What makes you think third parties should be able to manage better?
I'll tell you one thing, when it comes to opening documents that MS Office claims are borked and refuses to touch, LibreOffice, in my experience, generally has no trouble opening them. Where there's legitimately damage to the source document some formatting may be lost, but a document that needs reformatting beats Microsoft's "it's broken, I'm not touching that" approach to the situation.
Good luck on that software audit, if you're caught the penalties can be devastating.
We've standardized on LibreOffice and it's great. Absolutely no compatibility issues with MS Office for us. Installing 6.0.0 now.
ten years ago [joelonsoftware.com]
That article contains some nonsense. For example the internet first made it "practical" to exchange files. So floppydisks, mail or phone lines weren't a thing until 2006 (docx) ? Also the binary versions weren't fully forward compatible either. Note I don't think that it was caused by an attempt to obfuscate, or just to drive the upgrade threadmill ( viewers were free if you knew to look for them). I think the docx documentation mentioned some issues as layoutlikeword95 or similar cruft that had to be there to stay backwards compatible and made the format more complex with every new version as nothing could be dropped.
Try gnumeric. It's fast and allows Python scripting too.
You want to expand on that a bit? What exactly do you think is the issue?
Good quotes:
..."
"Sure there are some users that may use some of the very advanced features that only Office offers, but I think that is a very small percentage of the users."
That seems correct to me. I use LibreOffice to write business letters when it is necessary to use tree-killer paper.
"It [LibreOffice] has given fewer problems than [Microsoft] Office,
I agree. In my comment that started this thread, Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregularities?, I forgot to mention that I had other problems with Microsoft Office. Weird responses from the user interface, for example. Back in the old days, Clippy was annoying, of course.
If there aren't problems, software companies would not be able to sell a new version of sold software to most people. Now that software is being rented, not sold, there is a different way to force income. People spend hours learning how to use complicated software. It would be expensive to learn other software. So, software renters can increase the monthly rent.
Complicated document organization? Design in HTML, then copy and paste to LibreOffice or Microsoft Office. Design a table, for example, in the free What You See is What You Get SeaMonkey Composer. (Don't use SeaMonkey email, use Thunderbird.) Use the free Notepad++ with the Tidy2 plugin to make the HTML easy to read. When you like the HTML, merely copy and paste it to LibreOffice or Microsoft Office.
If LibreOffice offers the option of slide transitions they, of course, should work. Bugs should be fixed.
But please, don't use slide transitions in your presentations! They are not cool, they are not hip. Transitions are visual noise and detract from the story you're telling.
I feel sorry for any kid that only gets Grapefruit in his school lunchbox.
So do I. Acrid buggers, and not very filling either.
I'm sure he didn't mean that exchanging files was impossible prior to the Internet but you can't seriously compare the concept of mailing floppy disks or dialing up with AOL to the era where suddenly everyone was online all the time.
The author, Joel Spolsky, was a Program Manager on Excel back in the day, so this article is based in part on his experiences working on Excel, it's not just some blogger spitballing.
Schnapple
I grabbed a copy to see how it would handle a bunch of old Visio and PageMaker files that no one wants to re-create from scratch.
The Visio files opened fairly well, with only a few rendering glitches (like connecting external endpoints from a network symbol back to its center instead of leaving them unconnected to anything.) I didn't see anything similar to Visio's tool suite in the Libre Draw program, but it may be buried in there somewhere, so I'm not sure about actually working with these files.
The PageMaker files were another story altogether! The first document I tried actually has two pages (front/back of a product lit sheet) but Libre Office told me there were over 17,000 pages and all of them contained things like "#####.##/#####-####" instead of the text, images, lines or bullets from the document. Granted, these are OLD PageMaker files (PM4, PM6 and PM7 files) but there was no version compatibility limits given and Libre Office offered to open those extensions, so I expected it to work. I tried one of the newest files (a multi-page text-only .PMD file) and Libre Office showed that it had nine pages, which was good. Unfortunately, all nine pages were exactly the same (showing the first page's content) because it appears that Libre Office did not handle the text block's flow from one page to the next and instead, just restarted the single text block in the document again at the top of each page.
So, since I gave it a try explicitly to see if it could do the "magic" of opening Vision and PageMaker files that was advertised, it sure won't work for me. Luckily, we were able to virtualize a Windows 2000 system before it died and still run the old Visio and PageMaker when absolutely required (and they both read these same files perfectly.) I REALLY want Libre Office to work, and to do what is advertised, but it just doesn't.
Why, Nroff of course. It is fully compatible with Runoff, Groff and Troff, so you should be fine.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Yes, they use it to check their spelling!
Enquiring minds want to know!
Maybe we should be dropping copies on Putin!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
copyright-encumbered DOCX format
What do you mean by that? wasn't that issue solved?
If you've never run into a problem with Wordpad that has sent you scurrying for another product -- any other product -- then you're not qualified to comment. It is, by far, one of the worst rich text editors ever created, ever.
What's the excuse for anything less than 100% compatibility now?
Says the person who has no clue and clearly did not read one page of the ECMA Office Open XML standard.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
You'd probably be surprised to know how many executives actually do make calls like this. Perhaps not "the CEO," in most organizations, but certainly the CIO or some SVP. And you can bet your stock options that the first time the CEO has trouble opening a file because Microsoft made an arbitrary change to the file format used in the newest edition of Office in use by a partner, somebody is getting strung-up.
I wasn't aware that anyone still used that (or even knew what it was).
True. But that's not my point at all. The majority of the features are completely unnecessary for most people. But that doesn't change the fact that, despite the breathtaking number of flaws, it's one of the most polished office suites available.
Microsoft Office is the benchmark to which all other office suites are compared. Like it or not, this is it. If I have to choose between two suites, and each one has it's share of issues, an average person is most likely going to pick the one that everyone else is using. That's why Office is still, and will remain, the dominant office suite until something interesting happens.
FTFY
> You want to expand on that a bit? What exactly do you think is the issue?
Years ago there was a scandal about donations for charities. One would want to get rid of a computer and there were charities in bad need of *any* equipment.
But Microsoft said: no, you can't. Surely you can donate your computer, but the software license wasn't transferable. That was about the installed Windows.
Maybe we should check the Microsoft Office licence, but I seriously doubt they would appreciate losing sales to people selling "used" versions.
> Maybe we should check the Microsoft Office licence, but I seriously doubt they would appreciate losing sales to people selling "used" versions.
Not convinced they are used keys. Like I say they activate on the MS website and they work on a single PC only (as I discovered when I tried to move one key to another PC, wouldn't let me activate it a second time). No idea where they get them, but they aren't in short supply. You can also get a lifetime 5 user Office 365 subscriptions for little more money. Haven't bothered with those, because I resent renting software even with a lifetime subscription, but how can they be dodgy?
True, LO is a bit of a pork roast to download the installer and local help, more so if you need both bitness, But in a place with multiple computers the online part need only be done once. I've sometimes gone to a local Starbucks to use their internet connection, which is much faster at midafternoon than my home line ever is. Suck in LO and do a little surfing while enjoying an overpriced cup of coffee. Then put it on a server or even a USB stick to pass around. Custom installation allows removing a lot of things that you probably aren't going to use (MediaWiki? Logo? Quickstarter?), slimming down the final product on the user's system. It works fine for me even on a tablet with only 2GB (1GB normally free after Windows loads up). And for those afraid of Java: it's only required for a couple of functions when using the database module - not a mainstream activity.
LibreOffice is perfectly fine for 99% of use cases unless you really absolutely need that ActiveX sync to Lotus Notes 5.x for mail merging.
I'll settle for the F4 key locking cells the same way it does in Excel.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
LibreOffice has better compatibility so it's a good choice for those who need that, but as a Linux user, Gnumeric and AbiWord are much leaner, and still work with most (unfortunately not all) MS Office documents.
Anyhow, choice is great!
If you're having a hard time using basic office software, just turn it off and go outside, maybe take a walk and look for a paper copy of the course catalog for your local community college!
it reminds me of my first "Computer Applications" class in 6th grade in the 80s.
The teacher emphasized the importance of not thinking in terms of what buttons to press, but thinking it terms of the feature you're trying to use. So think "copy and then paste" not "-C -V". For remembering what button to press to get that feature in a particular application you can just use a keyboard overlay or keep a "cheat sheet" next to the computer.
I took it to heart and I've been thinking about features that way from the start. You might want to consider it, though really once you have the problems you have it is probably too late.
Curious....
What's the differences between OpenPGP and GPG?
One is software people use today, the other is a historical footnote once considered a weapon illegal to export by the US Government.
Ever since Microsoft introduced the "Ribbon" Office has become completely UNUSABLE! after almost 10 years dealing with it I STILL can't find SHIT! I use LibreOffice exclusively at home. And run it in a VM in Virtualbox at work. My company went to O365, it is a giant steaming pile of SHIT! It's slow as old people fucking at loading documents and it constantly locks the hell up!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
You don't have to be caught to need good luck, you need good luck as soon as the BSA looks in your direction. Apparently it's one of the joys of proprietary software in the enterprise environment!
> The reality is the CEO doesn't give a shit
But us lowly workers do.
As was pointed out Libreoffice has greater compatibility with older Word files than Word itself. We now and then get surprised by something that simply does not work.
For starters, I don't if it's about being hard to support, but we don't get successive Word versions. Last time, it was about problems printing with Mailmerge or even in a document I committed the crime to have numbering per section.
It's not just that olde files won't be compatible... people aren't compatible!
This page numbering confusion is an example, but as someone else said the ribbon killed our mechanical memories. Anyone who was expert at older Offices got caught in a pinch because the ribbon brought a lot of novelty without any apparent aim. We had to start looking on the Internet to know how to use Word and Excel... that is the definition of design mistake.
It was so lame that I bought the suite to my daughter, only to see it using Libreoffice -- because it didn't have a ribbon.
For the "whoosher" who modded "-1: Offtopic"; I'm sorry I didn't include tags. I'll admit my attempt at humor was a bit subtle, and bound to be lost on the hasty reader. It was in response to the idiot AC's statement:
Just read that one sentence over and over a few times, and I think you'll get my point. I wasn't actually expressing any opinion about citrus or any fruit. I love grapefruits, tangerines, pears, apples and LibreOffice.
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
MS not actually following the fake standards they published.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I pay for Office365 at home because it's a cheap ($50/year or less) way to get 1TB of well-supported cloud storage with pretty solid clients on multiple platforms, and if I really feel like it I can bump to 5TB with a little juggling. Along with that I happen to also get access to the most widely-used office suite around, which has been used to create documents and spreadsheets that I regularly need to open.
There's no official Linux client, but there appear to be multiple alternatives (https://linuxnewbieguide.org/onedrive-client-linux/) and frankly I mostly use Linux in VMs or for servers where I'm not interested in linking it to a personal account.
fencepost
just a little off
That is beyond a shadow of a doubt the most ridiculous collection of bullshit claims I have read here today. Bravo.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Ribbon is terrible. Especially on Wide-Format Monitors. LibreOffice side-bar is far superior of a solution.
I was confused - was he talking about MS Office? I find it to be massively clunky and generally unusable.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
One is software people use today, the other is a historical footnote once considered a weapon illegal to export by the US Government.
Maybe it was renamed OpenPGP later, but at the time it was known merely as PGP, and it worked well.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
when you can get the "real thing" for that sort of money it's not worth the hassle of using anything else. Obviously if you want to use it on an OS other than Windows then OSS is probably still the best option.
Well, since W10 is about the worst thing you could do to yourself, I guess the real question is: how much do you really hate yourself?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
If your data set is that big then a spreadsheet isn't a good tool for the job anyway...
I've only ever used desktop spreadsheets for relatively small and trivial tasks (as do most people, if they use such applications at all) and libreoffice is more than adequate.
For word processing however, large documents make libreoffice writer slow but they can make word totally crash or behave in strange ways (eg the spellcheck stops working for no apparent reason).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Who said anything about an enterprise environment? But even if it were, you buy a key in good faith and that Microsoft validates it, hard to see how you can be considered to be in the wrong.
Dumping out the contents of memory might work in very simple cases as a quick and dirty hack, but it's a terrible long term strategy...
Code changes (even changes to the compiler) could change memory layout, and porting to new hardware (64bit, ARM etc) can completely break stuff...
Someone posted earlier about open source applications often feeling sluggish, but this is one of the reasons why - open source apps tend to store the data in well structured formats (eg xml) which require a lot more parsing, but are much better specified and far more reliable.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Yes, compatibility is so 100% thing that even different versions of MS Word open and present files in different ways, as well as using different implementation of that "standard" that are not compatible, but still use the same file extension.
you're a lucky one. Last summer i was working on a large word file (I think from word 2013, can't remember) inside libreoffice 5.whateverwasthelastversionatthetime and it was a real pain in the a** -opening the document and closing it directly prompted for saving and corrupted the file. - after some times it finally crashed and could not open the last saves (after a few crashs with lost work, i took an habit of regularly saving to other files, even though the document was all messed up, at least edits and comments where still there) A real struggle. But to be fair, working with word was also a pain in general. In my last job it was decided we were to collectively edit a multi-file report ... massive fartjob !
And I'm not even talking about the final editing into one doc where everthing was messed up, references, citations, etc...
In Donate page, when I click bitcoin - Donate Now -button, I get "The merchant is currently not able to accept this payment. Please contact the merchant to resolve this issue." Why does organizations use third party merchant to receive bitcoin? They would only need to publish bitcoin address in the website, and I would be able to donate.
and was tweaked just enough to be approved, just barely, by ECMA/ISO.
If by tweaked, you mean had the committee stacked with enough Microsoft stooges to push it through, then yes. One case was Côte d'Ivoire, who had never had an inkling to sit on an ISO committee, suddenly had their dues paid, by Microsoft, turned up and voted "yes". Enough new members did this and never turned up again, it took a year or so before the ISO committee could function again due to not ever having a quorum.
You're just using ye good olde anticonspiracy theorist snobbery. As in: Anything that even remotely goes against sucking off the big masters that you have dissolved your person in, is instantly pushed into the "loony" corner.
And everything you blindly believe without any proof, is automatically "the truth".
You act precisely like a conspiracy theorist. Just the other way around. And you believe because of that, you and your clueless blind belief are superior to their clueless blind belief. Juust like they do.
... here's something to watch while we get our shit together.
Of course you can also gobble up half the RAM from boot to shutdown, to "preload" your software, to disguise the fact that it's bloated as shit.
I, for one, stopped using anything "office" ... fuck that, shit! Seriously! It should never have been invented!
Instead of Excel, I just use Haskell.
Instead of Word, I use a proper DTP program, or a plain text editor with HTML.
Instead of Powerpoint, I
Frankly, in the end, you mostly always end up with some small solution involving plain text files with a few simple syntax rules, and some basic scripts or programs. Because programs always tend to stop being interoperable at some point, and don't let you easily script anything. Ruining the whole point of having a computer. (= To automate your work away.)
I pay for Office365 at home because it's a cheap ($50/year or less) way to get 1TB of well-supported cloud storage with pretty solid clients on multiple platforms, and if I really feel like it I can bump to 5TB with a little juggling. Along with that I happen to also get access to the most widely-used office suite around, which has been used to create documents and spreadsheets that I regularly need to open.
So you are paying money to get well supported cloud storage you could get from countless other providers to use an office suite that is not cross platform? Rather contorted logic if you asked me but to each their own.
There's no official Linux client, but there appear to be multiple alternatives (https://linuxnewbieguide.org/onedrive-client-linux/) and frankly I mostly use Linux in VMs or for servers where I'm not interested in linking it to a personal account.
There are plenty of storage options that do work nicely with Linux and don't tie you to Microsoft. Nothing wrong with using Microsoft's options if you like them but don't pretend they are anything special when it comes to online storage.
LOL.
Microsoft not only forcibly spies on you and is untrustworthy as hell, but they force you to use a piece of crap Microsoft Account so they can ID you. (Oh if they don't like your Microsoft Account, they shut it off ending up holding your paid-for Office hostage).
I looked at the telemetry system in Office, it's impressive. Then disabled it (Hopefully)
We need more products like Libre Office. This is a very good thing in the 2010s time of anxiety provoking scumbag moves by most technology companies.
Thank you Libre Office, I'm going to try to drum up some donations for you guys.
While I personally don't like the Ribbon interface, many of my users have become used to it.
Has there been any advancement on the ability to skin LibreOffice to look more MS Office-y? This would allow me to sneak it under people's noses more easily!
...you buy a key in good faith and that Microsoft validates it, hard to see how you can be considered to be in the wrong.
Have you never met a lawyer?
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
There are things LibreOffice can do that I can't do easily in vim.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Also, it seems like some of the meds I'm on aren't compatible with grapefruit juice. Sort of like grapefruit doesn't work with all bodies.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The one multi-platform exercise I'm aware of is the Windows and Macintosh versions of MS Office, which means they've had to be readable at times on M680x0 and PowerPC systems. (A friend removed SaveA5World from MS Office once. It's done absolutely nothing since Apple moved from the original Motorola line.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
LibreOffice6 has an experimental ribbon interface. I tested a early beta for a while. LO should look at wps (wps.com) and their ribbon interface. The WPS interface is based on QT
The wps.com free Linux product is fully compatible with MS's older office product. You can read/write in MS format.
Hopefully LO will be as compatible as WPS for the same purpose.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Even with the file format documented it is still quite a lot that needs to be implemented and sometimes take care for the difference between document created with different version of MS Office (they changed the default values in the past already, which BTW wasn't documented anywhere). The problem is also that different features work differently between LO and MSO, and you need to make a compromise there (as the change itself would for example require to change ODF format)
LibreOffice is perfectly fine for 99% of use cases unless you really absolutely need that ActiveX sync to Lotus Notes 5.x for mail merging.
It lacks integration and cross-platform support (platforms being beyond simply the desktop operating systems). It's still trying to be a 90s-era desktop office suite. Modern office suites like Google's, Apple's and Microsoft's provide applications and services that work with eachother (mail, calendar, notes, spreadsheet, presentation, word processing, etc) often including desktop, mobile and web-based clients for these tasks that are synchronized and can share data between them.
You might want to double-check that EULA to see if you agreed to cooperate with audits before you claim it doesn't apply to you.
You agreed to whatever terms came with your license key!
You can have done nothing wrong, and yet simultaneously be in a whole world of hurt.