Slashdot Mirror
LibreOffice 6.0 Released: Features Superior Microsoft Office Interoperability, OpenPGP Support (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate writes: LibreOffice 6.0 comes two and a half years after the LibreOffice 5.x series, and it's the biggest release of the open-source and cross-platform office suite so far. It introduces a revamped design with new table styles, improved Notebookbars, new gradients, new Elementary icons, menu and toolbar improvements, and updated motif/splash screen.
LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project. Many great improvements were made to the OOXML and ODF filters, as well as in the EMF+, Adobe Freehand, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Pagemaker, FictionBook, Apple Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as well as Quattro Pro import functionality, and to the XHTML export. LibreOffice Online received numerous improvements as well in this major release of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project. Many great improvements were made to the OOXML and ODF filters, as well as in the EMF+, Adobe Freehand, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Pagemaker, FictionBook, Apple Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as well as Quattro Pro import functionality, and to the XHTML export. LibreOffice Online received numerous improvements as well in this major release of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice is still a clunky piece of garbage that is difficult to use and is generally awful. Build a new office suite from scratch and throw this one in the trash where it belongs.
You must have tried the new version and evaluated it very quickly!
"What's the excuse for anything less than 100% compatibility now?"
Maybe there are deliberate file irregularities that Microsoft uses to try to force people to buy new versions of Microsoft Office. If the CEO always wants the latest version of Office, everyone else would then be forced to have the new version, also.
Software companies have found that people who have no interest in technical details are easily abused. Now some software companies are renting their software, and no longer selling it.
A long time ago, I spent several hours writing a document in Microsoft Office. Later I discovered that Office was not able to open the file it had generated.
I was able to open the document in Libre Office. Since then, I use only Libre Office.
Is it possible that most people who have trouble with Libre Office interacting with Microsoft Office have made a mistake in saving the file?
most people in business swear by Microsoft Office. .
Let me correct that for you
most people in business swear at Microsoft Office. .
Wow. Ignorance.
Not every workplace provides Office for home use.
Not every home user works in an office (and hence probably wouldn't have it provided)
Not every Office user is a professional (far from it).
Maybe people just want to send letters, open documents from their governments, banks, etc. without having to pay a monthly rental to Microsoft for the privilege (even if they don't use a Microsoft OS on their computer).
P.S. The Office OOXML file formats are an absolute farce. Basically, it just shovels the binary formats of old into an XML file with little to no interpretation or explanation. New documents tend to open just fine. But anything complicated, legacy, upgraded from older Word etc. has a shed-ton of undocumented (and Microsoft basically admit undocumentable) crap.
The EU took them to took where they had to provide a specification for the format and TONS of it is literally just binary shite from old Word formats shoved into a tag. It was complained about in court too. Even getting that far took DECADES.
The file format is opaque, ugly, and not easily transferable / interoperable, which is precisely why we need another office suite that can open it because what's the point of an open format that only one (paid-for) program can actually open?
What LibreOffice does do is get better every iteration.
Home users? They can live off LibreOffice for at least the last two versions.
Power users? Same, but they may need to tweak some small things.
Office users? Same, so long as their developers are aware of the use of both suites.
It's far from a waste of time.
I ran a school's IT. From a Windows laptop, With Libreoffice. If anything I could open more things than those with Word because it handled obscure and old formats that Word couldn't. It was never a problem. A school isn't exactly on the power-user end of fancy macros and DDE links etc. that don't transfer across nicely (because of undocumented / poorly documented Microsoft shite), so it could easily run off LibreOffice (like many schools now run from Google Docs entirely, which has EVEN LESS features).
P.S. I work for a huge school - we do not provide Office to staff, we do not provide Office to students, we do not use Office online. We use Google Docs, offline Office on the premises, and at home people use whatever they buy themselves. We are far from alone in this. As such, Libreoffice is more than useful for those people.
Hell, I get just as many Libreoffice documents as Apple Pages documents coming in from the parents / kids. MS Office can't even start opening the Pages ones properly and chooses "different standards" for showing the OpenXML ones. But Libreoffice will open 99% of what comes through our inboxes (millions of emails a year, and 1 million shared documents on Google Apps, to give you an idea of scale).
LibreOffice is still a clunky piece of garbage that is difficult to use and is generally awful. Build a new office suite from scratch and throw this one in the trash where it belongs.
Let me translate
Even though I strongly resisted the ribbon interface at the time, now I've come to believe it's the One True Way and anything not the One True Way must implement it regardless of any strong copyrights and patents Microsoft has on it.
LibreOffice is perfectly fine for 99% of use cases unless you really absolutely need that ActiveX sync to Lotus Notes 5.x for mail merging.
When Microsoft comes out with a version of Office that is free as in speech, supports GENUINELY open file formats (no, XML-encoded binary dumps do not a "standard" make), and runs on Linux, which is my primary desktop OS at home, please let me know.
Nonaggression works!
Same here! While I have to use proprietary tools at work, I really appreciate not having to depend on them at home, nor having to further decimate my family's limited budget to pay for them, continuously, over and over and over again. Thank you LibreOffice team, and all other Free Software providers, for a job extremely well done!
Nonaggression works!
OpenPGP is a protocol, while GPG is a software implementation of the OpenPGP standard.
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.
> 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
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.
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!
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.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII