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LibreOffice 6.0 Released: Features Superior Microsoft Office Interoperability, OpenPGP Support (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate writes: LibreOffice 6.0 comes two and a half years after the LibreOffice 5.x series, and it's the biggest release of the open-source and cross-platform office suite so far. It introduces a revamped design with new table styles, improved Notebookbars, new gradients, new Elementary icons, menu and toolbar improvements, and updated motif/splash screen.
LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project. Many great improvements were made to the OOXML and ODF filters, as well as in the EMF+, Adobe Freehand, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Pagemaker, FictionBook, Apple Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as well as Quattro Pro import functionality, and to the XHTML export. LibreOffice Online received numerous improvements as well in this major release of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project. Many great improvements were made to the OOXML and ODF filters, as well as in the EMF+, Adobe Freehand, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Pagemaker, FictionBook, Apple Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as well as Quattro Pro import functionality, and to the XHTML export. LibreOffice Online received numerous improvements as well in this major release of LibreOffice.
True, but what office suite is right for me?
LibreOffice is still a clunky piece of garbage that is difficult to use and is generally awful. Build a new office suite from scratch and throw this one in the trash where it belongs.
You must have tried the new version and evaluated it very quickly!
It is a solid option when you do not get office through your work or want to pay the small monthly fee for the home edition.
I would actually consider to use it if it was compatible with all my VBA macros for excel. No work around for these since they are shared with others who use office.
Still, for free.. It is "fine".
"What's the excuse for anything less than 100% compatibility now?"
Maybe there are deliberate file irregularities that Microsoft uses to try to force people to buy new versions of Microsoft Office. If the CEO always wants the latest version of Office, everyone else would then be forced to have the new version, also.
Software companies have found that people who have no interest in technical details are easily abused. Now some software companies are renting their software, and no longer selling it.
A long time ago, I spent several hours writing a document in Microsoft Office. Later I discovered that Office was not able to open the file it had generated.
I was able to open the document in Libre Office. Since then, I use only Libre Office.
Is it possible that most people who have trouble with Libre Office interacting with Microsoft Office have made a mistake in saving the file?
God, yeah, like no software has a splash screen nowadays.
Except...
The latest versions of Office.
most people in business swear by Microsoft Office. .
Let me correct that for you
most people in business swear at Microsoft Office. .
Wow. Ignorance.
Not every workplace provides Office for home use.
Not every home user works in an office (and hence probably wouldn't have it provided)
Not every Office user is a professional (far from it).
Maybe people just want to send letters, open documents from their governments, banks, etc. without having to pay a monthly rental to Microsoft for the privilege (even if they don't use a Microsoft OS on their computer).
P.S. The Office OOXML file formats are an absolute farce. Basically, it just shovels the binary formats of old into an XML file with little to no interpretation or explanation. New documents tend to open just fine. But anything complicated, legacy, upgraded from older Word etc. has a shed-ton of undocumented (and Microsoft basically admit undocumentable) crap.
The EU took them to took where they had to provide a specification for the format and TONS of it is literally just binary shite from old Word formats shoved into a tag. It was complained about in court too. Even getting that far took DECADES.
The file format is opaque, ugly, and not easily transferable / interoperable, which is precisely why we need another office suite that can open it because what's the point of an open format that only one (paid-for) program can actually open?
What LibreOffice does do is get better every iteration.
Home users? They can live off LibreOffice for at least the last two versions.
Power users? Same, but they may need to tweak some small things.
Office users? Same, so long as their developers are aware of the use of both suites.
It's far from a waste of time.
I ran a school's IT. From a Windows laptop, With Libreoffice. If anything I could open more things than those with Word because it handled obscure and old formats that Word couldn't. It was never a problem. A school isn't exactly on the power-user end of fancy macros and DDE links etc. that don't transfer across nicely (because of undocumented / poorly documented Microsoft shite), so it could easily run off LibreOffice (like many schools now run from Google Docs entirely, which has EVEN LESS features).
P.S. I work for a huge school - we do not provide Office to staff, we do not provide Office to students, we do not use Office online. We use Google Docs, offline Office on the premises, and at home people use whatever they buy themselves. We are far from alone in this. As such, Libreoffice is more than useful for those people.
Hell, I get just as many Libreoffice documents as Apple Pages documents coming in from the parents / kids. MS Office can't even start opening the Pages ones properly and chooses "different standards" for showing the OpenXML ones. But Libreoffice will open 99% of what comes through our inboxes (millions of emails a year, and 1 million shared documents on Google Apps, to give you an idea of scale).
Let's see, free vs. several hundred dollars....
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.
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.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
Does anybody know if LibreOffice 6 fixes the bug where portrait documents will only print in landscape mode?
I'm really curious to see some sample documents, and side-by-side renderings for how they look in MS Office, LibreOffice 5, and LibreOffice 6. Additionally, I'd like to see if the bug list for remaining known discrepancies... what features should I avoid if I want to make sure a document will render consistently across applications.
Anyone who actually needs Office gets it through work.
Some people actually need an office suite at home too, because they do more interresting things in their free time rather than sit in front of the TV.
LibreOffice Calc is much better at supporting CSV files than Excel, so it has that going for it.
(though admittedly, anything in the world is better at supporting CSV files than Excel).
p.s. the copyright-encumbered DOCX file format is still a problem for any group (commercial or otherwise) that wants to fully support it.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
When Microsoft comes out with a version of Office that is free as in speech, supports GENUINELY open file formats (no, XML-encoded binary dumps do not a "standard" make), and runs on Linux, which is my primary desktop OS at home, please let me know.
Nonaggression works!
Same here! While I have to use proprietary tools at work, I really appreciate not having to depend on them at home, nor having to further decimate my family's limited budget to pay for them, continuously, over and over and over again. Thank you LibreOffice team, and all other Free Software providers, for a job extremely well done!
Nonaggression works!
OpenPGP is a protocol, while GPG is a software implementation of the OpenPGP standard.
From what I have seen, most people are indifferent: "that's what the put on my desktop, so that's what I use."
My company uses it extensively for corporate documents, but I'm trying to steer them into using a single-source documentation solution.
Markdown with integrated LaTeX support has enabled me to create document templates for a variety of uses from day-to-day memos to collaborative research projects.
I see a menu bar and not an awful ribbon interface.
I'll probably download/install this shortly.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I'll just wait a few days while everyone installs 6.0 and encounter issues because all those little things will get fixed in 6.0.1 and then a few more things will get fixed a few days after that with 6.0.2.
I used to be a product tester so I don't test software for free. :-p
You can get genuine office for £5 on eBay.
Good luck with the licencing on that £5 copy of Office.
I would bet you have trouble with it.
I am currently contracted to a very large multi national company, I use LibreOffice on Linux to do my job everyday. I share documents with others, and never have any problems. In fact I have occasionally used LibreOffice to fix documents that MS Office had corrupted. It also opens a very large selection of file formats that MS Office will not open. As the project I am currently maintaining has been running a very long time, this is quite handy for some of our historic documents.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
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?
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.
> 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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No, the reason Office document interoperability is so difficult is because Microsoft designed these formats for themselves, for their own programs, with no thought to interoperability in either direction, and with other concessions in mind like how the early versions of Word and Excel needed to run on really old computers.
Pretty much exactly ten years ago Microsoft released documents to satisfy the EU that detailed exactly how the Word and Excel file formats worked, and they were PDF files that were 400 and 450 pages long. People like yourself speculated that perhaps they had been purposely obfuscated to thwart developers but the truth of the matter is that these things were designed over the course of decades and had a whole lot of stuff in them as a result of the increased complexity of the requirements.
To some extent, Office applications have the contents of the document loaded into memory and the document file itself is basically a memory dump of the contents of the memory serialized to disk. Loading the document deserializes it into memory. People complain about this but again, when your perspective is you need to have this application you're programming write out files and then read them in later, it makes perfect sense as a plan of action. It also explains why occasionally Office breaks compatibility with itself on upgrades which is unacceptable but it happens.
In that vein, LibreOffice has had the specs for the Office documents for a decade now, so I think the "what is the excuse?" question is still pretty valid. But the issue is not that Microsoft deliberately sabotages efforts. They're not that smart and they're not that dumb.
Schnapple
As I recall Open Office actually has a similar preloader available, but it's more obvious (leaves an icon in the tray) and I'm not sure if it's enabled by default - use office suites rarely enough that I always disable such things as being excessively expensive.
Libreoffice asks you if you want it enabled during installation. You can also turn it on/off from the settings as well.
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.
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.
My understanding is that OOXML started out being exactly that, and was tweaked just enough to be approved, just barely, by ECMA/ISO. With the result that Microsoft could claim it as an "international standard," and compliant applications could potentially create Microsoft-readable files but would still have extreme difficulty reading Microsoft-created ones, because of all the items in the spec that read like "This specifies that the code should call RenderFoobarFactory()" but with no indication of what a FoobarFactory was. It may still be that bad. I stopped bothering with it years ago. LibreOffice and its cousins work well enough, and interoperate well enough, for my purposes. But anything whose longevity I care about is saved in a truly open format such as ODF.
Nonaggression works!
There is no need for Java in any even approximately normal use of LibreOffice.
Also which Office are you talking about? The latest version REQUIRES SSE2, which a P3 doesn't have, so Offfice will not run AT ALL on that laptop of yours.
You're seriously misrepresenting things in that post...
For starters, let's keep it simple and try comparing Wordpad and Abiword.
Wordpad loads in the blink of an eye. It handles enormous files flawlessly, and I have never seen it crash.
Abiword takes an annoying pause before it can do anything. Not only will it choke on large files, but it won't even run on many popular distros - if it runs at all.
Last night we tried for hours to install the latest version on my son's Debian based Raspberry Pi 3. It comes up with a flashing window. Not only is it useless, but it's even hard to close!
Maybe Microsoft doesn't make it easy to copy Word, but how do you explain the lack of a competitor to Wordpad. Before we start comparing Word and LibreOffice, remember Wordpad vs Abiword. This comparison illustrates what has always been wrong with the Linux desktop.
I feel sorry for any kid that only has a Linux machine for his schoolwork,
For starters, let's try comparing Tangerines and Grapefruit.
Most Tangerines are incredibly easy to peel. I've been able to eat half a dozen Tangerines in one sitting, and never even got juice in my eye.
Grapefruit take forever to peel. Not only does they end up choking me with that less-tasty white stuff all over the juicy parts, but most people don't like them as much - if they'll eat them at all.
Last night my kid and I tried for hours to peel half a dozen Grapefruit, and we ended up with juice everywhere and he kept squirting me right in the eye. He even swears it wasn't on purpose.
Maybe nature doesn't make it easy to turn Grapefruit into Tangerines, but how do you explain the lack of a reasonable competitor to Tangerines? Before we start comparing Pears to Apples, remember Tangerines vs Grapefruit. This comparison illustrates what has always been wrong with Fruit.
I feel sorry for any kid that only gets Grapefruit in his school lunchbox.
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
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.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Try gnumeric. It's fast and allows Python scripting too.
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.
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?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
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.
Ever since Microsoft introduced the "Ribbon" Office has become completely UNUSABLE! after almost 10 years dealing with it I STILL can't find SHIT! I use LibreOffice exclusively at home. And run it in a VM in Virtualbox at work. My company went to O365, it is a giant steaming pile of SHIT! It's slow as old people fucking at loading documents and it constantly locks the hell up!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
> 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.
If your data set is that big then a spreadsheet isn't a good tool for the job anyway...
I've only ever used desktop spreadsheets for relatively small and trivial tasks (as do most people, if they use such applications at all) and libreoffice is more than adequate.
For word processing however, large documents make libreoffice writer slow but they can make word totally crash or behave in strange ways (eg the spellcheck stops working for no apparent reason).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Dumping out the contents of memory might work in very simple cases as a quick and dirty hack, but it's a terrible long term strategy...
Code changes (even changes to the compiler) could change memory layout, and porting to new hardware (64bit, ARM etc) can completely break stuff...
Someone posted earlier about open source applications often feeling sluggish, but this is one of the reasons why - open source apps tend to store the data in well structured formats (eg xml) which require a lot more parsing, but are much better specified and far more reliable.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
LibreOffice6 has an experimental ribbon interface. I tested a early beta for a while. LO should look at wps (wps.com) and their ribbon interface. The WPS interface is based on QT
The wps.com free Linux product is fully compatible with MS's older office product. You can read/write in MS format.
Hopefully LO will be as compatible as WPS for the same purpose.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada