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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.
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!
"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?
most people in business swear by Microsoft Office. .
Let me correct that for you
most people in business swear at Microsoft Office. .
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).
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.
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!
Same here! While I have to use proprietary tools at work, I really appreciate not having to depend on them at home, nor having to further decimate my family's limited budget to pay for them, continuously, over and over and over again. Thank you LibreOffice team, and all other Free Software providers, for a job extremely well done!
Nonaggression works!
From what I have seen, most people are indifferent: "that's what the put on my desktop, so that's what I use."
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
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.
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
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.
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