12 Ways LibreOffice Writer Tops MS Word 642
Open source office software is has gotten pretty good over the past decade or so; I got through grad school with OpenOffice (now known as LibreOfifice), and in my estimation was no worse off when it came to exchanging files with classmates than were friends with different versions of Word. Now, reader dgharmon writes "Writer has at least twelve major advantages over Word. Together, these advantages not only suggest a very different design philosophy from Word, but also demonstrate that, from the perspective of an expert user, Writer is the superior tool."
LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
Number One! (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't have that stupid Ribbon UI interface!
Journalist telling me how product he uses (Score:5, Insightful)
is better than one he does not use.
Not defending Word here, but MS PR can also write article '12 ways word tops writer'.
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
From the perspective of an expert user, {thing the user is expert with} is the superior tool.
It's free. (Score:5, Insightful)
I made a big mistake when I bought MS Office. I spent ~$150 and used it to update my resume. Have done very little else with it.
For us casual users the free version of Open/Libre Office can save a lot of money. PLUS writer doesn't come with the stupid ribbon interface. (Where's the find menu option? Where's spellcheck? I don't want to play Where's Waldo? with my software.)
Formatting features are not the killer app anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
For the record, I haven't taken the recent version LibreOffice for a spin. But from what I remember of OpenOffice, these features were not that functional. I thought OpenOffice was a decent piece of software, but it's still based on prior definitions of what a documenting software has been, rather than what it could be.
Re:LaTeX (Score:3, Insightful)
No, REAL experts use $FAVORITE_TOOL_OF_POSTER, clearly. Someday when you're all grown up you'll see the clear advantages of $FAVORITE_TOOL_OF_POSTER.
Re:Number One! (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't have that stupid Ribbon UI interface!
Is Ribbon really that stupid? I kind of like that part of Office.
What I hate is text formatting and the way that Outlook will randomly change my font color between words. That is a UI that's broken as hell but most people don't even seem to care...
Re:Am I the only one in the world that likes Ribbo (Score:5, Insightful)
About half of those ways were just . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
. . . "Guys, we have a styles system! And it's better than Word's!"
From the title of the article, I was expecting 12 distinct and separate features, not 6 features and a treatise on how awesome Styles are in LibreOffice.
I am counting hyphens as another point in styles, because the hyphens point is essentially "You can specify this with styles too!"
Re:In defense ofAlso correcma Word headers/footers (Score:2, Insightful)
Sigh :(
Re:Number One! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, everyone hates the ribbon interface! That's why Office 2010 has sold over 200 million copies. You'd think if it was so universally reviled and killed productivity (as slashdot claims with no proof), people would have stopped buying Office at 2007. Fact is the ribbon was designed from user feedback, and while slashdot trolls can cite himself and his 5 immediate co-workers as people who do not like the ribbon, Microsoft can point to thousands of data points and usage metrics to explain why the Ribbon is in fact a better UI.
Re:Am I the only one in the world that likes Ribbo (Score:5, Insightful)
At any rate, if you really need to, you can customize the ribbon layout in Office 2010 in pretty much any way you choose.
Re:In defense of Word headers/footers (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a very quick and easy way to lock down a complex background layout that replicates on every page and isn't easily changed or screwed-up by a clueless user.
Re:Formatting features are not the killer app anym (Score:3, Insightful)
Revision control is only a collaboration tool to those who haven't used real collaboration tools.
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
but now that journals outside of physics have moved away from LaTeX it's pretty much dead for us.
As the parent said, most computer science related journals and conferences still use LaTeX, especially IEEE conferences.
The biggest benefit of LaTeX I've found is that if your paper gets rejected, you can turn around and download the style from another conference or journal and with very few modifications have a new submission ready. Otherwise, the development time in my experience is very similar, and I'd consider myself highly proficient in both LaTeX and Word. That said, I usually write in LaTeX because version control is more straightforward.
Re:Number One! (Score:4, Insightful)
No because someone else in the org upgraded and will now hand out only 2010 files... It spreads like a virus.
Or companies have an agreement with MS to buy the latest version so they can get a discount on something else.
2 inches of wasted space for functions I only use once and awhile. It is a toolbar within a toolbar, with the menu burred so you can not get at all the cool things it does...
Re:Number One! (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a few reasons to dislike the ribbon. If you're on a small screen, it uses a lot more real estate than the menus. They don't have the shortcut keys next to all of the options, which means that you don't learn the shortcuts for commonly used things as easily as you do with the menu. Finally, unlike the old toolbars, the ribbon does not allow you to put commonly used but unrelated things on the screen at the same time.
There are several reasons to like the ribbon. It does better on Fitts' Law metrics than a traditional menu, due to significantly larger targets. This is especially true on large screens. The larger display for each menu also means that you don't need as many submenus or even pop-up panels.
The real problem with it is that it has a different set of advantages and disadvantages to the old menu plus toolbar. For any given workflow and screen size, it may be better or worse, but you can't toggle back to the old UI if it's worse.
Re:Number One! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a bad comparison.
I like the ribbon, but those numbers ar ebusiness that just buy whatever the version is, and computers that come with it; regardless if anyone uses it.
If I buy a new computer for my home, it's likely to come with a version of word. A home version, or a trail version. Those get counted as sales even though I will never use it in the home. I prefer google docs.
If MS didn't have the ribbon, they would have 'sold' just as many.
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
"More work fighting with the document preparation than the actual writing"
My experience is exactly the opposite: With LaTeX you write your document and let LaTeX handle the formatting. Word is much more oriented towards ad hoc formatting. It's true that beginning LaTeX users usually don't understand this, but it's because they're trying to use LaTeX the same way they used Word.
Re:Number One! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure Microsoft can point to millions of users in lots of statistics and hundreds of focus groups about people liking clippy.
LaTeX is the answer to only one question today (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, about 99.997% of documents written today are not academic papers or theses written to comply with the house style of a few hundred journals and a few hundred major institutions.
Even if they were, LaTeX's typesetting power now looks like the first car with an internal combustion engine: a revolutionary advance in technology at the time, that is now so antiquated and incompatible with modern standards that it has little value outside of its niche except as a historical curiosity.
Your argument about LaTeX controlling the logical design is well-taken, but unfortunately it never really did that, because in practice it conflated content and presentation to such an extent that you couldn't really separate them in anything beyond trivial cases.
The TeX family remains the preeminent tool for exactly one task today: typesetting maths. And that's only because no-one else has yet created another set of tools and fonts for doing so that doesn't suck.
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
When professional photographers come together, they talk about light. Composition. Art. The tool is uninteresting - a mere means to an end. And any one of a large number of them will do.
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
Professional photographers talk about equipment all the damn time. They have preferences for one brand or another. After all if their equipment is inadequate for the job or fails, then that's money they lost.
The only real difference is that a professional is less focused on how new their equipment is. If that body had good weather seals when it was new and an exterior made of a tough alloy, then it's probably going to stand up to tomorrows job even if it isn't the latest model. If the lens is sharp and has big aperture, then it's still good.
Re:In defense of Word headers/footers (Score:4, Insightful)
But boy you hit the nail on the head on this technique, by all means it's hackish at best, and goes to show some of the quirkiness that one has to learn to use the Microsoft Office suite like a pro. I'd dare say that combine the quirks one must learn and the constant tossing of every feature in every single spot drowning you out, MS Office is the PHP of productivity software.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
Not exactly :
Amateur photographers talk about gear.
Pro photographers talk about money.
Masters talk about light.