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.

Comments

Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

And it’s still full of niggér AIDS.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Chrisq]

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!

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't have to.. It will be the same POS it was before and has been.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least "this type of people" is gaining a living.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahah spoken like a true MS shill..

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

I think multi-threading for Calc is still work in progress. OpenCL acceleration should work in some cases, though.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you need Outlook

there, I've said it

Re: Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe he's referring to the lower price

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[hajile]

Try gnumeric. It's fast and allows Python scripting too.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Thelasko]

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.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Aighearach]

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!

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Aighearach]

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.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Ribbon is terrible. Especially on Wide-Format Monitors. LibreOffice side-bar is far superior of a solution.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Gr8Apes]

I was confused - was he talking about MS Office? I find it to be massively clunky and generally unusable.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Bert64]

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).

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[lsatenstein]

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.

Re:Still massively inferior to Office

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who actually needs Office gets it through work.

I can't believe the tremendous resources gone to waste on this project over the years and now with this release we are supposed to be thrilled that it has greater compatibility with the real thing despite MS having opened the file format years ago.

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?

Re:So what?

[110010001000]

What about for people like me who can't get a job and post on Slashdot all day? What are we supposed to use?

Re:So what?

[Lunix Nutcase]

Stone and chisel?

Re:So what?

[ledow]

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).

Re:So what?

[MitchDev]

Let's see, free vs. several hundred dollars....

Re:So what?

[AvitarX]

I'm most excited to maybe get a vague representation of what an old quark document may have looked like.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wordpad

Re:So what?

[raburton]

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.

Re:So what?

[mwvdlee]

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.

Re:So what?

[cayenne8]

Curious....

What's the differences between OpenPGP and GPG?

Re:So what?

[Joey Vegetables]

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.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenPGP is a protocol, while GPG is a software implementation of the OpenPGP standard.

Re:So what?

[arth1]

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...

Re:So what?

[Major_Disorder]

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.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:So what?

[thegarbz]

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?

Re:So what?

[Immerman]

>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.

Re:So what?

[gtall]

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.

Re: So what?

[raburton]

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.

Re:So what?

[ilsaloving]

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.

Re:So what?

[Joey Vegetables]

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.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:So what?

[MitchDev]

MS Office is OVERKILL for about 90% of users out there (home or office)
 

Re: So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck on that software audit, if you're caught the penalties can be devastating.

Re: So what?

[raburton]

You want to expand on that a bit? What exactly do you think is the issue?

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you afford the hookers and blow if you send all your money on MS products?

Enquiring minds want to know!

Re:So what?

[Anne Thwacks]

MS Office is OVERKILL

Maybe we should be dropping copies on Putin!

Re:So what?

[xvan]

copyright-encumbered DOCX format

What do you mean by that? wasn't that issue solved?

Re:So what?

[Knuckles]

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.

Re:So what?

[ilsaloving]

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.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who actually needs Office takes it up the ass from Microsoft

FTFY

Re: So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re: So what?

[raburton]

> 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?

Re:So what?

[mikeebbbd]

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.

Re:So what?

[arth1]

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!

Re:So what?

[Aighearach]

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.

Re: So what?

[Aighearach]

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!

Re:So what?

[Trogre]

MS not actually following the fake standards they published.

Re: So what?

[Zero__Kelvin]

That is beyond a shadow of a doubt the most ridiculous collection of bullshit claims I have read here today. Bravo.

Re:So what?

[Gr8Apes]

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.

Re:So what?

[Gr8Apes]

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?

Re: So what?

[raburton]

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.

Re:So what?

[Kopp]

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.

Re:So what?

[Kopp]

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...

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:So what?

[MitchDev]

LOL.

Re: So what?

[Major_Disorder]

...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?

Re: So what?

[Aighearach]

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.

Bollocks!

[Gravis Zero]

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?! ;)

Re:Bollocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurr hurr hurr hurr! OMG thay was so teh funnay!!!!!

Re:Bollocks!

[110010001000]

Clippy has been replaced by a state-of-the-art deep learning AI. It works grate.

Re:Bollocks!

[hey!]

People have been asking for an outline view in libreoffice writer for well over a decade. The answer is always, "We have the navigator window," which misses the point -- it's a user interface request, providing an alternate means to do a similar thing doesn't really address it. Outline view provides more of a direct manipulation experience.

Re:Bollocks!

[Joey Vegetables]

Back in the early 2000s, when it was "uncool" to be a Linux geek such as myself, my co-workers thought it'd be hilarious to get a photo of Clippy and me in Microsoft's Independence, Ohio office (near Cleveland). Hence, somewhere, hopefully buried in the bowels of a forgotten filing cabinet in the sub-basement, there exists exactly such a photo. But please tell no one. A person could lose their Linux geek card for much less!!!

Re:Bollocks!

[TheDarkMaster]

You joke, but LibreOffice still can't do right important things like proper kerning of the text (the spacing between letters is almost always done wrong), hinting to many common fonts (the text never looks "right" visually, sometimes it gets blurry or it gets too thin), and now they have resolved to make things worse, the rendering of the font used in the interface for example was clearly worse when using Windows, it seems that the application is trying to draw its own interface from scratch instead of using the features of the operating system and doing a lousy job on it.

Re:Bollocks!

[mvdwege]

You want decent typesetting, use a system designed for that, like a DTP package or a TeX variant. Don't complain about office suites doing it wrong, that is not their remit.

Re:Bollocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

A "a user interface request" that is completely unnecessary. The "feature" you are asking is there. You just don't like the way it is presented and there is no need to spend time and money to make one lazy-ass person (who refuses to learn something different) happy.

Re:Bollocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

It also still can't properly display the same file it just created, using the exact same software (i.e., w/o updates or patches). Both Open/Libre Office have the exact same problem. They both suck at properly recreating the formatting of documents ... even documents created natively.

Re:Bollocks!

[mikeebbbd]

Grate? Is it for shredding your documents before they even get to paper?

Re:Bollocks!

[mikeebbbd]

Agree with this. When building something bigger than a letter, Word lets you use an outline view that is essentially the heading levels in the final document. Then drop in blocks of text which become the body text of the final document if you want to, or switch to the normal edit view and start typing body text. Has been there in Word since at least 6 (vaguely recall something like it in Word 2 for Windows and 4 for Mac). Yes, it can be simulated using heading levels in LO, but it's clunky because you have to remember not to type any text after each heading when setting it up.

I used to write BASIC programs with an outline processor in a Model 100 ... easy to get a decent structure for it.

Re:Bollocks!

[mikeebbbd]

Besides, even with Word, WYSINWYG wrt font details. It's close, but no cigar. I see many font and other spacing glitches on-screen in Office 360; it prints OK though. LO frankly isn't notably worse than Word on-screen, and good enough when printed. Better, actually, when saved as PDF.

Main issue is the default (open source) fonts; *those* do have minor glitches when compared with the standard (non-free) fonts MS uses. But if you're running LO in Windows then you have all those standard Windows fonts anyway, and LO happily uses them if you choose them.

Re:Bollocks!

[ruemere]

There is no reason why an Office suite shouldn't be good at it. We have web browsers now that can render PDF documents, you know.

Re:Bollocks!

[mheat]

..."I used to write BASIC programs with an outline processor in a Model 100 ... easy to get a decent structure for it."...

Ha, ha, me too.

Re:Bollocks!

[TheDarkMaster]

Well... At least for me, Word 2000~2007 (for example) do the job well. Firefox also get it right, so why only LibreOffice can't do it right?

Re:Bollocks!

[mvdwege]

How does Firefox get it right? That's completely a function of whatever system fonts you have installed and what the website specifies. Are you quite sure you're not just used to Word's idiosyncracies, therefore seeing LibreOffice's treatment of text as an aberration? There is nothing wrong with that, after all. We always see deviations of what we're used to as 'wrong'.

Re:Bollocks!

[TheDarkMaster]

Okay, try this: Pick the Microsoft Office 2007, 2012, etc (I don't have the 365 and it is WAY different so I don't know if it do right), you may also try Firefox or another text editor on Windows. Use the font "Verdana" with 10pt, and then write the characters "m" and "a" side by side, or any word that has side by side the characters described ("marine" for example).

Now, still on Windows, do the same (some text containing "m" and "a" together, font "Verdana" 10pt) on LibreOffice 5.4 or 6.0: You will see to much space between the "m" and the "a", this is a kerning error. And that does not happen in Libreoffice 5.1.1 (the version I use now), in the latest versions they changed something that messed up kerning and text rendering in general (there are other bugs I've seen other than kerning but they are more subtle)

Updated splash screen? LOL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this what passes for major upgraded to open source software now? How about getting rid of the splash screens and act like a normal application? Splash screens should become a relic of 1990s software, and are highly annoying. Then again, LibreOffice is stuck in the 1990s, so perhaps it makes sense.

Re:Updated splash screen? LOL!

[ledow]

God, yeah, like no software has a splash screen nowadays.

Except...

The latest versions of Office.

And...

[nospam007]

...no ransom..erh...yearly license fees.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

A year of Office 365 doesn't even cost as much as 2 hours of may pay and I don’t even make a high-end salary at my work. Get a better job, poorfag.

Re:And...

[nospam007]

"A year of Office 365 doesn't even cost as much as 2 hours of may pay and I don’t even make a high-end salary at my work. "

Small wonder, if you work only in May.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I make more in May than you probably do in a year if you’re too poor to pay $99 a year for something.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

And why, pray tell, would I wish to feed Microsoft 99 bucks for a pile of shyte I have no use for, and which shits itself at every (in)opportunity, when I can get something which works just fine for my needs for free?

You call other people "fags", but indeed it seems to be you who are the one with Microsoft's dick stuck in your throat. Not only that, you even seem to be paying for the "privilege". Now, that's ironic.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is anybody saying they can't afford it?

Christ, you are an insufferable tool.

Re:And...

[goose-incarnated]

A year of Office 365 doesn't even cost as much as 2 hours of may pay and I don’t even make a high-end salary at my work. Get a better job, poorfag.

I can afford lots of things. Doesn't mean that I have to buy them when there are cheaper alternatives; that extra money can go to things I actually care about.

I can afford the latest iPhone, but I have a four year old BB that does what I need it to do. I can afford a new car, but I have a 13 year old ford that drives where I need to go. I can afford a new xeon workstation, but my current 7 year old i5 is working just fine.

In much the same way, I can easily afford the MS Office license, but why would I buy an MS Office license? Putting Office on my computer does not in any way improve my computer or my computing experience.

Would you pay $99 for something that you get no benefit out of?

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool story, poorfag.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

LibreOffice isn’t an alternative unless you’re a freetard whose time is worthless. Same with Duh Gimp, Abiword, etc.

110010001000 = fake name massive human fail

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...

* Is that the best your "phantasyland FAKE NAME" (for your fake lie of a so-called 'life') can manage?

When a FAKE NAME do nothing like YOU does better than I have? Then talk (you're all talk & no action)...

You can't help you're an immature little BUTTHURT no-mind, lol! I blew you away in TONS OF PLACES and easily dust your no-mind bullshit blatherings.

APK

P.S.=> The TRUE PRICE of your UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME do-nothing selves like you that I can ALWAYS CASH IN ON (lol) is that I can use FACT/TRUTH on them to SHATTER their all TOO fragile delusional egos that they actually know A DAMN THING in computing, lol... apk

Re:110010001000 = fake name massive human fail

[110010001000]

True, but what office suite is right for me?

Re:110010001000 = fake name massive human fail

[MightyMartian]

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!

Re:110010001000 = fake name massive human fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Do people still use officw suite software? Serious question.

Re:110010001000 = fake name massive human fail

[Anonymous Coward]

My company uses it extensively for corporate documents, but I'm trying to steer them into using a single-source documentation solution.

Re:110010001000 = fake name massive human fail

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:110010001000 = fake name massive human fail

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you style the documents to create deliverables? (Say, to send the documents to clients?)

Re:110010001000 = fake name massive human fail

[Anne Thwacks]

Why, Nroff of course. It is fully compatible with Runoff, Groff and Troff, so you should be fine.

Re:110010001000 = fake name massive human fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they use it to check their spelling!

Re:110010001000 = fake name massive human fail

[david_thornley]

There are things LibreOffice can do that I can't do easily in vim.

It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[110010001000]

The main reason is that open source projects like those try to maintain a common code base between platforms. They also can't leverage the hidden OS tricks that Microsoft for example can use in their products. The Chrome browser isn't open source, no matter what Google claims.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[lucasnate1]

Chromium is open source and just as fast

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[110010001000]

Yes, but Chromium != Chrome.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Hal_Porter]

I use it to read and modify .doc and .xls files on macOS and Windows. And it's ... OK. If you have an i5/i7, lots of Ram and and SSD it's actually pretty quick.

Besides it's not like MS Office is particularly lightweight these days. In fact it hasn't been for a decade or more.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if the preference for one or the other is a lot like the Coke or Pepsi debate. From what I have heard over the decades is that people that like Coke think Pepsi is too sweet, and people that like Pepsi think Coke is too sweet.

In my experience LibreOffice runs much better then Office. Office seems to take forever to load, and will stall from time to time doing simple things. Firefox is definitely the fastest browser for me. I have a lot open in it, and Firefox handles better than any other browser. I used Outlook for a very long time, when I finally switched to Thunderbird I quickly wished I would have switched years before. Thunderbird allows for some great plugins, and it's indexing and search have been so much better than Outlook.

I actually prefer all three to Microsoft's versions. However, I would still use the open source software if it was a little inferior to the closed source versions because I don't like Microsoft in general.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try AbiWord.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[raburton]

Maybe you're thinking of older versions of firefox, not the current version. Your unimaginative firefox hatred is a little out of date. Perhaps you could compare it to how firefox no longer support horrendous insecure, slow and buggy plugins any more, even though you never actually used them anyway because you already hated firefox.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if the preference for one or the other is a lot like the Coke or Pepsi debate. From what I have heard over the decades is that people that like Coke think Pepsi is too sweet, and people that like Pepsi think Coke is too sweet.

I generally drink water. For me a soft drink is a very occasional treat. Has been ever since I got tired of being overweight and successfully did something about it (drinking soft drinks all the time is a huge empty calorie source). BTW the aspartame in diet soft drinks is very bad for you (Rumsfeld had to pull a lot of strings to get FDA to approve it, including replacing staff at FDA) and get this, diet soft drinks also tend to make one gain weight.

Anyway, to me Pepsi is sweet while Coke has this funky acid/tangy aftertaste that I just don't like. It could be lime juice or something like that except that after a while it has a slight almost "metallic" quality (from a bottle or a can). I don't know what it really is, the exact formula is a closely guarded trade secret. I realize both are acidic in fact carbonated water alone is sometimes called "carbonic acid" (yet another reason it's bad for you) but Coke tastes much more so to me.

So back to topic, older MS Office runs surprisingly well under Wine so I keep a copy around. I almost never use it though. Libreoffice does the job for my own needs, which are light. Like you, I'm a long time Firefox and Thunderbird user. I don't like every decision Mozilla has made but I also saw all the moaning about it here on Slashdot and thought, "is this a minor issue and not a big deal, only to me?"

I don't like Microsoft either and I assume this is a common attitude among anyone who is familiar with the history of that company, particularly the late 80s through mid 90s.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Dutch Gun]

MS Office is actually pretty lightweight compared to most modern applications. That's because it's still one of those "old fashioned" native apps, unlike the current Electron craze. MS Word 2010 takes up all of 15MB in memory (and maybe another 30MB in shared services) when opening an empty doc, and opens in about half a second on my computer, which itself is nine years old. I'm betting the current versions aren't much worse.

Re: It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever even used Chromium? It's probably 98% equivalent to Chrome, and the 2% or so that's different (icons, title bar name, support for Flash, analytics, etc., etc.) doesn't have any serious impact on performance. In fact, stuff like Flash and analytics being present in Chrome probably makes it slightly slower compared to Chromium.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Anonymous Coward]

The current versions aren't quite that lightweight, but Outlook is the only one that even approaches 50MB when opened up.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Anonymous Coward]

I

Besides it's not like MS Office is particularly lightweight these days. In fact it hasn't been for a decade or more.

The lightest version of Microsoft Office was version 4.0. I was able to run Microsoft Word from the first installation diskette directly from the diskette without installing the application; just loaded and ran word.exe on MS-DOS 4.x. No advanced features such as spellcheck in this mode of use but it was a word processor.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Immerman]

> opens in about half a second on my computer

Be aware that, unless you intentionally disabled it, Microsoft Office preloads when Windows starts, and never exits. So those fast "load times" are basically just the time it takes to open a new window - Office has actually been running in the background the entire time. Very nice if you use Office a lot, but it means your boot time is slowed accordingly, and those resources are being consumed constantly, limiting the resources available to other applications.

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.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Hal_Porter]

I liked the '97 version. Used to run fine on my netbook. The ribbon versions disrupted my muscle memory and always seemed sluggish on slightly old hardware.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well.

Some of those complaints come from Open Source software generally not being specifically written for any OS, and not being able to leverage hidden API's etc which Microsoft software tends to do.

However, a large part of your complains basically boils down to you being fooled, ignorant and suffering from Stockholm syndrome too. KDE being bloated for instance, is utter bullshit. The problem seems mostly to be down to bad/sabotaged packaging, the fact is that it's pretty damned lean for what it does, and the thing is, the more you load it up with QT/KDE applications, the leaner it gets compared to what you'd have if you went for something else, but still wanted the same level of functionality. Having a full blown KDE running in about 500MB of RAM is far from impossible. What's Windows like these days? Last time I checked, you could consider yourself lucky if it idled at 1.1-1.3 GB of RAM without _any_ applications running, freshly booted.

The same goes for most of your complaints, they are basically all based on ignorance or simply coming from the wrong angle. Just look at the GCC/LLVM+Clang comparison. These two projects might be superficially similar, but are vastly different projects. One is a comparatively new project which plays fast and lose, produces poorly optimized code and is only really supported on a handful of platforms, while GCC is basically used to compile the universe and have a huge legacy to take into consideration. No wonder it seems kind of "slow and bloated". But don't worry, LLVM and Clang will get there too, eventually. Actually, they are probably going to be much worse off in the long run, considering their origins. Just look at the "fast" Chrome, which by now probably is the most bloated browser of them all.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Lord Kano]

I disagree about most of these but you're spot on about KDE.

Any time I set up a new linux machine, one of my first moves is to install TDE (Fork of KDE 3.5.x) because it feels more responsive to me.

LK

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just FTR;
Tap water contains "carbonic acid", which is basically only dangerous to you if you drink a whole lot of it and you're made of marble.

I'd worry more about the phosphoric acid which is used as "rust converter, dental and orthopaedic etchant, electrolyte, soldering flux, dispersing agent, industrial etchant, fertilizer feedstock, and component of home cleaning products" apart from being used as food additive, like in sodas. Now, that doesn't mean it's inherently dangerous, but I'd say it warrants a bit more caution about how much to consume.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE might not be fast, but then again if the alternative is e.g. GNOME it's actually lightning-fast. And it doesn't compare badly to Windows either.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh FUD.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately the latest release won't work reliably on Arch, Ubuntu or Debian systems. There are some workarounds, but it remains buggy.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[jeremyp]

Just opened Word 2016 on my Mac with an new blank document and it'a up to 289 Mb. Still, it's by no means the worst memory hog. SourceTree (a graphical git and mercurial client) is up to nearly 600Mb and we won't even talk about Safari.

Re: It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[nnull]

Iâ(TM)ve been using LibreOffice for my work for a while and moved my employees computers to it. Itâ(TM)s not bad, it does what it needs to do, but itâ(TM)s also not great either. It bothers me that hardware acceleration still doesnâ(TM)t work. And it bothers me their main focus is to have better support for competitors formats. It feels like their whole development is focused on supporting every file format possible. Why? Fix the rest of the features please, that have been broken since 4x.

Meanwhile, there have been great office suites releases for Android and IOS. They work great, they look great, they function great.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Bert64]

Among other things...

The UI layers tend to be portable and often highly flexible (eg firefox - XUL), but this adds weight and slows things down.

A lot of closed source seems to be bloated and sluggish too, flash for instance, many java applications (java has been sluggish for user interfaces since long before it was open sourced)
Open source developers often prefer to do things in a clean (but not necessarily optimal) way... Other people will be seeing the code, and may have to accept it into their project so if the function of the code isn't clear it may not get accepted.
There also tends to be greater use of higher level languages, which again adds overhead.

Some open source however is lightweight and fast, all depends on the goals of the authors.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Shirley Marquez]

Have you tried Firefox Quantum (version 57 or later). It's not slow any more.

Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated.

[Trogre]

I haven't check lately, but when I last tried it MS Office still launches faster under WINE than LibreOffice on the same Linux computer. Ergo it's not just Windows preloading that accounts for the difference in launch times.

Good "cheap" option

[pablo_max]

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".

Re:Good "cheap" option

[fluffernutter]

I've been caught many times because opening an excel spreadsheet with a filter attached hides rows in a non-obvious ways in LibreOffice. I'd be happy if that was properly compatible.

Re:Good "cheap" option

[Anonymous Coward]

It needs to default to .docx/xlsx for saving files. Every time I suggest someone try it, the inevitable outcome is, "It's great, but nobody can open the files I send them!"

Yes, that's configurable, but normal people give up before they figure it out.

Re:Good "cheap" option

[Immerman]

Yeah, it would be nice if during installation there was a was a great big dialog asking "By default, which format should new files be saved in: [Microsoft Office Compatible] or [Open Document Standard]"

Re:Good "cheap" option

[Anonymous Coward]

I would never under any circumstances consider the use of Microsoft Office. Ya- we're not all Microsoft fan boys here. Some of us use LibreOffice for work and it works just fine. Even with macros.

Re:Good "cheap" option

[fermion]

I am amazed at the number of people of limited funds and low requirement who still pay MS money for office. These open apps are plenty good for most people,. I just wish Google would update their office suite so it did not suck so much. That said, last time I tried Libreoffice is was a disaster. On the Mac it simply would not run fast enough to practice. Even OpenOffice now has some issues, bu I still an acceptable option. Given that Apple essentially gives away it's office suit, I have began to use it more. My worry is that the closed standard means the if Apple discontinues the suite...

Re:Good "cheap" option

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, if you're too lazy to go into the preferences and change the ODF defaults to Microsoft's yourself, you could just change the save-as type when saving files.

Re:Good "cheap" option

[Anne Thwacks]

It's great, but nobody can open the files I send them

You seem to have this backwards. Recent versions of MS Office can open odt files (although you might have to twist its arm behind its back). Various MS Office versions fail to open docx documents on a regular basis, and the most reliable fix is to open said docx with LibreOffice and then save it again as doc or odt.

The reality is, odt is an iso standard, well defined and guaranteed readable for ever. docx is completely undefined, and even MS dont know what the spec is. Don't use it for documents needed in the long term or off site - ever.

Also MS formats tend to hide your secrets from you but divulge them to unsuitable people at inappropriate moments. Do not use them if you have a bank account or friends you value.

Re:Good "cheap" option

[Immerman]

Neither of which help Joe Average, who has barely knows what a "file format" is (that's like, video or spreadsheet or whatever, right?), and whose eyes glaze over as soon as you say the word "settings". Many/most people's concept of a "word processor" begins and ends with the glorified typewriter that is Word, the idea that there's different, incompatible, formats for storing the same sort of data makes no sense to them.

That's part of the reason mp3s remain dominant for music despite several superior alternatives having been available for almost two decades. Mp3=music file, what the hell is ogg,flac, etc?

Re:Good "cheap" option

[Anonymous Coward]

DOCX is an ISO standard as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregularities?

[Futurepower(R)]

"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?

Its whatever you get used to

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Its whatever you get used to

[Chrisq]

most people in business swear by Microsoft Office. .

Let me correct that for you

most people in business swear at Microsoft Office. .

Re:Its whatever you get used to

[walterbyrd]

From what I have seen, most people are indifferent: "that's what the put on my desktop, so that's what I use."

Re:Its whatever you get used to

[Bert64]

Most people hate it, but they've worked out how to get around the bugs that it has..
They don't like change like libreoffice not because its any worse, but because it has a different set of bugs for which they need to learn new workarounds.

It's nice ..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Long time LibreOffice User

[DaMattster]

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.

SoftMaker Office 2018

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: SoftMaker Office 2018

[temcat]

In the 2018, you can even choose between the ribbon and classic menus. But I haven't tested it yet, being on 2016 currently.

SM office is IMHO the most MS compatible out there.

Printing

[techdolphin]

Does anybody know if LibreOffice 6 fixes the bug where portrait documents will only print in landscape mode?

Re:Printing

[femtoguy]

I just tried it, and it seems to have fixed it for me. No more exporting to PDF and then printing the file. Hooray.

Re:Printing

[j-beda]

Does anybody know if LibreOffice 6 fixes the bug where portrait documents will only print in landscape mode?

If this is the bug you were talking about, it seems to have been fixed in at least 5.4.4

https://bugs.documentfoundatio...

Re:Printing

[Anonymous Coward]

The last version I tried that lacked the bug was 5.3.something. It was definitely still present in 5.4.4. From a quick test, it looks like they've finally fixed it in 6.0. Hooray!

Re:Printing

[techdolphin]

I have a MAC and Version: 5.3.7.2, and it still had the bug.

Re:Printing

[j-beda]

I have a MAC and Version: 5.3.7.2, and it still had the bug.

The but was fixed in 5.4.4, so if you upgrade to 5.4.4 or later it should not be a problem.

Side-by-Sides

[DrStrangluv]

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.

Re:Side-by-Sides

[Merk42]

If you're going to compare two different versions of LibreOffice you should compare two different versions of MS Office.

Superior MS Office interoperability?

[cyber-vandal]

It was already perfect - just ask anyone around here.

Re:Superior MS Office interoperability?

[Anonymous Coward]

It and WordPad both can save a resumé in the .docx format that an employer might require. Then once one lands a job, one can afford a computer with real Windows, and even Office.

Re:Superior MS Office interoperability?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Then once one lands a job, one can afford a computer with real Windows, and even Office.

And miss all the fun in using Linux?

Hahaha, as if.

Re:Superior MS Office interoperability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not for me, I've tried 100's of Word documents here at work, they all have issues making LibreOffice unusable. Folks without office native app can use the Office365 web Word and that works fine and renders them correctly.

Thank you LibreOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Thank you LibreOffice

[Joey Vegetables]

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!

Re:Thank you LibreOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here! Thank you, guys and gals!

Ah, yes!

[Kid CUDA]

Ah, yes! Quattro Pro compatibility. Finally someone at the Document Foundation has set their priorities straight!!!

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful? Complete BS is more like it.

One time you couldn't open a file and you ditched a better office product because of your ineptness? Yeah, very insightful.

Please FOAD.

mascot contest was rigged

[chexican]

Libbie did nothing wrong

The screenshots look good.

[Lord Kano]

I see a menu bar and not an awful ribbon interface.

I'll probably download/install this shortly.

LK

Re:The screenshots look good.

[Anonymous Coward]

don't hurry.

browse these screenshots, particularly the second and third ones...

http://news.softpedia.com/news...

apache's openoffice, btw, is >>> that way >>> openoffice.org.

Re:The screenshots look good.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

There is an optional ribbon interface, but the traditional interface is staying as the default.

Re:The screenshots look good.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

OpenOffice hasn't been maintained in just about forever.

Re:The screenshots look good.

[Bert64]

A ribbon-like interface is optional, you can choose to use it or not.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

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,

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Fucking echo chamber links

[Anonymous Coward]

Please post the real fucking source next time: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.0

I'll wait for 6.0.1 or 6.0.2

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:I'll wait for 6.0.1 or 6.0.2

[Anonymous Coward]

That rule applies to all software, not just LibreOffice

Re:I'll wait for 6.0.1 or 6.0.2

[Anonymous Coward]

I just downloaded it and got version 6.0.3 (for macOS, anyway).

its all about embedded Training

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Only thing missing on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

is good development tools.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Schnapple]

Maybe there are deliberate file irregularities that Microsoft uses to try to force people to buy new versions of Microsoft Office.

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.

It asks

[sjbe]

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.

Re:It asks

[mikeebbbd]

I usually leave the preloader out of my LO installation (always do custom so I can leave out some pieces I will never use). With SSD boot & applications drive (default data is on a separate hard disk), LO starts up in 10 sec or less. Core2 Extreme and 8G RAM, Win10 1709. Not much slower, actually in a Gen1 i5 laptop with only 4G. The 32-bit version of the suite runs acceptably in a cheap 2GB Win10 tablet, and has the advantage (over Office Mobile) of working when not online.

Has anybody tried LO Online? Is it still early beta? How does it compare to Office Mobile or Office 365? What server does it run on, if you're not serving it from your own data center or cloud instance?

Good option regardless of price

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Good option regardless of price

[StormReaver]

It's a a better than solid option even if you do get MS Office.

I have been using LibreOffice at works for years, and have yet to run into a problem. I have, though, used Calc to show that Microsoft Excel does not excel at math.

Re:Good option regardless of price

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmm ... And for me, it's the ONLY package that will open ALL the orphaned document formats that I've ever used over the last 30 years retaining all the formatting and font niceties.

30 year old WriteNow document ... no problem.
25 year old ACTA document ... go for it
25 year old WordPerfect document ... right on
30 year old MultiPlan spreadsheet - opens right up

I don't know how the developers managed to do that, but I'm grateful for it on a daily basis.

Re:Good option regardless of price

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used calc and each window resize took 5 minutes to redraw a graph of about 5000 points. On the same hardware, MS Office 2003, the same spreadsheet, in the same situation took less than a second to do the same. My time worths really a bit more than the price for LibreOffice. Otherwise I respect the fact that LibreOffice exists and does a lot of things well enough for most.

Re:Good option regardless of price

[bmo]

That's because it started out as Star Office. Star Office is old as dirt, so they had all those formats from the get-go, back when they were valid.

It is literally as old as Photoshop.

--
BMO

I wish they'd resolve a couple interface issues...

[damn_registrars]

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.

Just tried it - still broken

[ilsaloving]

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.

Re:Just tried it - still broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody but a sales weenie or executive drone cares about slide transitions.

It's what they are given

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Long time StarOffice User

[Anonymous Coward]

Does LibreOffice support the file formats of its predecessor StarOffice and former competitors like Ami Pro and WordPerfect?

I hate MS Office...

[Anonymous Coward]

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....

Seeding The Earth With Salt

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Seeding The Earth With Salt

[short]

Why not? LibreOffice was originally proprietary StarOffice. MS Office will also have to become Free one day or it will die completely.

Re:Seeding The Earth With Salt

[Aighearach]

"You can't even do business without MS Office!"

"Yes I can, I just use StarOffice."

"What? It's unpossible for that to work; I never even heard of it."

-- Any day during the .com boom.

(I usually just used catdoc TBH)

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[gnunick]

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.

Still compatibility issues

[CustomSolvers2]

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.

Fix the bugs!!!!!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Abiword

[randallman]

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.

Re:Abiword

[Anonymous Coward]

The 3.01 release has some serious bugs. After installation, the screen just flickers and flashes. The 2.86 release seems OK.

Re:Abiword

[jimcooncat]

Yeah, and that was too bad it got the flickering bug. Abiword is so friendly, quick, and works like the legacy Word used to. "AbiWord 3.0.2 address several issues with recent version of Gtk+. We recommend Gtk 3.20.x or earlier. There is a known issue with Gtk 3.22. Also still some issues if running on Wayland." Like I'm going to change my Gtk version to fit their recommendation -- not. I guess I'll wait 3 years until Mint includes a proper version by default again, and put up with Libre Writer for now. In other news, Libre Calc has always been horrible, I hope they've given it some love. I've resorted to using Google Sheets, and have been happy with it except for my privacy paranoia and forgetting to download files for backups.

Re:I wish they'd resolve a couple interface issues

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

"What's the excuse for anything less than 100% compatibility 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.

Thank you, LO developers

[dskoll]

We've standardized on LibreOffice and it's great. Absolutely no compatibility issues with MS Office for us. Installing 6.0.0 now.

Re:Thank you, LO developers

[CustomSolvers2]

Absolutely no compatibility issues with MS Office for us

Seriously? I have only tried fairly simple Word documents (a few tables, enumerations, indentations, etc.) and Writer shows appreciably different versions. All the contents are there and the overall structure is respected, but there are quite a few differences: margins, indentations, first-line indentations, hidden row/col borders being visible, different size of paragraphs, etc.

Don't take me wrong, I will continue using LibreOffice. But as per my limited experienced, its compatibility with Office isn't too good even when dealing with trivial issues.

Re: Thank you, LO developers

[dskoll]

We'll, I don't actually have MS Office to compare. But I regularly exchange .docx and .xlsx files with customers and vendors on MS Office and nobody has mentioned any problems.

Re: Thank you, LO developers

[CustomSolvers2]

nobody has mentioned any problems.

Perhaps they accept that there are issues and deal with them internally or might only care about the contents which are always fine. Yesterday, I converted a simple .docx file, my own CV, into .pdf and the (aesthetic) differences of Writer 5/6 with respect to Word were notable.

Re:Thank you, LO developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Make an example document and report a bug in LibreOffice bugzilla, otherwise we won't be able to fix it.
There were cases in the past where MS decided to change the default values for the document from one version to the other, so it was necessary to check with which version the document was created and use a different set of values. Such cases might still exist as of course MS doesn't share this info..
Document rendering, at least for Writer, shouldn't be too different compared to MS Office, but it also depends what features are used. Some aren't present in LO yet.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Complicated organization: Use HTML first, copy...

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

The fix is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The fix is simple

[ilsaloving]

Only if you use the obscene ones.

But something tasteful, like a quick fade-out/in, is extremely valuable to show the audience that a transition IS taking place. Without it, would be easy for an audience member to miss the fact that the slide changed (they just happened to glance away at the wrong moment, for example).

Re:The fix is simple

[Bert64]

If they glance away during the fade transition then they will still have no idea a transition took place.
The contents of the slides however should make it *obvious* that a transition took place, even if you glanced away while it happened.

Re:The fix is simple

[ilsaloving]

Yes, you would think that. But it can happen anyway. A distraction. The audience member zones out for some reason.

Trying to assign blame on either the speaker or the audience member accomplishes nothing.

Instead, simply adding a small but very visible attention grabber can mitigate the problem.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel sorry for any kid that only gets Grapefruit in his school lunchbox.

So do I. Acrid buggers, and not very filling either.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Schnapple]

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.

Visio? Kinda ... PageMaker? Not for me

[nurbles]

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.

Re:Visio? Kinda ... PageMaker? Not for me

[Bert64]

It sounds like it opened those documents as plain text instead of recognising them as pagemaker documents?

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Wait, Quattro Pro?????

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't aware that anyone still used that (or even knew what it was).

LibreOffice better

[gabrieltss]

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!

Re:LibreOffice better

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't remember where icons are or their unchanging shortcuts after ten years of practice then the problem is with your brain not the software.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[gnunick]

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:

Before we start comparing Word and LibreOffice, remember Wordpad vs Abiword.

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.

Paying for MS Office

[Fencepost]

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.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Bert64]

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.

Unable to donate bitcoin

[Olotila]

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.

"The truth is ..." -> You don't know the truth!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

A splash screen meant "this loads too slow" ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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"
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 ... fuck that, shit! Seriously! It should never have been invented!

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.)

Re:A splash screen meant "this loads too slow" ...

[ledow]

Actually a splashscreen was quite a sensible human-interface decision. It's feedback to the user.

"Yes, we are running, we're doing something now" - in something that takes a couple of lines of code to display, and then you can leave on the screen to start up.

Before, and now still, programs could be executed and on a slugger of a machine churn for 10 minutes without ANY indication that anything was happening, in the taskbar or anywhere else. Even Chrome can still not show a taskbar icon while consuming 100% CPU in some circumstances. It's there, it's running, but nobody can tell without going into task manager.

This makes users RUN IT AGAIN. And again. Thinking that it's not loaded at all. Which adds to the load, etc.

It's a small sensible decision in a world where a program can run without ANY visual indication. How many programs are you running now? How many appear in your taskbar? The answers aren't the same.

It's got little to do with bloat, because the load times are STILL the same with or without a splashscreen. It takes literally milliseconds to execute a PNG-load from disk and blit-to-screen.

Online storage?

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Online storage?

[Fencepost]

Sorry, missed seeing the response.

I'm paying $50/year for 1TB of storage and I don't have to screw around with setting it up, buying drives, messing with a NAS, worrying about upstream bandwidth from my home, etc. I also (since I'm running Windows 10 1709) have access to Files On Demand, so I can see all of the files I have saved on my smaller-than-1TB laptop SSD without actually having them local on the device - they'll be downloaded as required if I'm online.

Other alternatives I could look at:

• Dropbox: $99/year for 1TB - or $199/year if I want "Smart Sync" which is the same basic thing as Files On Demand.
• Google Drive: $99/year for 1TB, unclear if it supports the same kind of online-only files.
• Box.com, but I could only get 100GB of storage for $10/month; for more I'd need to have 3+ accounts on their Business plan at $15/month/account.
• Sugarsync, 250GB for $10/month or 500GB for $19/month.
• SpiderOak ONE, known for security & encryption, $9/month for 400GB or $12/month for 2TB.
• OwnCloud, free except for buying a NAS or setting up and powering an always-on home server to run it (or paying for online storage and a hosted VM), along with my time dinking around with it and troubleshooting.
• Something based on some kind of S3 clients. See above about my time setting it up, dinking around with it and troubleshooting. Also, using the Cloudberrylab backup software calculator, storing and accessing 600GB in S3 would cost at least $13-14/month.

Seriously, pretty much all of the other options would cost at least twice as much per year as OneDrive just for the storage alone, and the ones that wouldn't cost that much in fees would likely cost at least $150+ in upfront hardware purchases plus time to set everything up - that's 3 years of OneDrive right there. Oh, and I'd have to pay for the electricity, been there done that with an old server at home. My power bill dropped noticeably when I decommissioned it.

So it's not that I am "paying money to get well supported cloud storage you could get from countless other providers," it's that I'm paying 1/4 to 1/2 what it would cost me to get anything even vaguely comparable from other providers - most of whom don't really have any better Linux support than Microsoft OneDrive does. On a quick look, Dropbox and Spideroak appear to have official clients, there are open source ones for a bunch of the others. OwnCloud obviously would have such support since it's designed to run on Linux servers.

THANK YOU LIBRE OFFICE! FUCK MICROSOFT

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Ribbon or other MS Office like skin?

[schweini]

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!

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[david_thornley]

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.

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[david_thornley]

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.)

Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti

[Anonymous Coward]

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)