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."
Am I the only one in the world that likes Ribbon? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:LaTeX (Score:4, Interesting)
Until you find yourself writing your own document classes or other custom macro sets. Then, there are an infinite number of reasons why just about anything is better than LaTeX.
The Real Problem with Libre/Open Office (Score:2, Interesting)
I've used several variants of Libre/Open Office and I've found one fundamental problem with all of them. The developers insist on copying MS Word's brain dead interface.
One time, I was trying to do a vertical layout that should have been simple. After fighting with Open Office for about an hour, I gave up assuming that the Open Office developers just hated their users. So I broke down, fired up the Windows machine and started using MS Word.
What did I discover. All the brain cell killing UI design had been copied exactly from MS Word. So I will continue to use Libre Office and I will curse Microsoft every time I find a hard to use feature.
To the Libre Office developers, I say it's okay to branch from MS Word's UI, especially on the obscure features. Most of the users that can't deal with a different UI barely do more than change fonts anyway.
Re:Am I the only one in the world that likes Ribbo (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't get the hate for Ribbon either...till I realized that it was mainly all the people who had memorized all their shortcuts and exactly which obscure menu had the function/tools they needed to use. They were the power users of old, and suddenly they were castrated, and they were back to being on the same level as MS noobs. To make matters worse, the ribbon interface actually made the MS Office suite of software easier to use for noobs and probably made these same power users feel threatened.
I was never a power user of Excel/Word/Power Point 2003, but I always found them to be exceedingly frustrating to work with. Sure, if your work requires you to master those tools, I'm sure you'd get really good after months/years of use, but to a new user, the tons of nested menus with features hidden away made MS Office use an exercise in frustration.
Then I used Office 2007, and once I realized the orb was the file menu (that, I agree was a terrible decision), I found myself using tons of new features that I could never have known about or discovered in Office 2003. The quality of my Word documents, Powerpoint presentations and Excel files greatly improved. I actually find the interface extremely useful because everything is arranged in a logical manner and it is fairly easy to find the tools you need to use without having to spend tens of minutes trying to find the feature in some hidden menu.
Not to say that Word and Office doesn't have its fair share of issues (formatting documents consistently in Word is just a nightmare. I had to write my doctoral thesis in Word because my adviser did not know to use or care about LaTeX), but as far as the new ribbon interface goes, it certainly seems a big improvement over the old Office interface.
Re:LaTeX (Score:4, Interesting)
We tried that and have a few people who still think like that, but now that journals outside of physics have moved away from LaTeX it's pretty much dead for us. None of our students know it when they come in, they're capable enough MS office users that they can do any of the formatting needed in office, so what does LaTeX get you? Marginally better equation editing, and a lot more work fighting with the document preparation than the actual writing. And then you're asked to submit documents in office format anyway for most internal or government documents because you don't seriously think the secretarial staff have any clue what to do with a latex document.
10 years ago when I was an undergrad it was still a critical part of the experience to know how to use LaTeX. Now it's like forcing people to use IE6, there are some people still clinging to it for various reasons that are hard to change, but for everyone else office tools get the job done. Of course if your office training at the highschool level is bad you probably aren't any better off either way.
They have one huge disadvantage: Landscape mode. (Score:1, Interesting)
There's one major flaw in OO or LO. That's the difficulty of changing a document to Landscape mode.
Word: Click Landscape radio button
OO: Search on google for the tutorial, edit a template, save, open the new docume... you know what, I don't know. It's a PITA and it's a killer PITA that's probably the biggest reason there isn't a bigger market share. Half the documents I write are in landscape mode.
And I use Ubuntu at home (with significant modifications), I've contributed to one of the projects, and I've done life-critical assembly programming for money.
If I think it's a PITA, 80%+ of the potential users will think it's impossible.
Org-mode! (Score:5, Interesting)
I was recently introduced to Emacs' org-mode [orgmode.org]. It is really GREAT. I never looked into it before, as I thought it was basically a to-do list manager â" But no. I am currently using it mostly as a word processor (well, for semi-complex documents, as it makes little sense if your documents have no structure at all) and for presentations. And I'm still only beginning to love it (and am sure I'm truly underutilizing it). /italics/, *boldface*, =code=, nested/itemized lists with hyphens, etc.), and with three keystrokes, you export to your favorite format. C-c C-e b shows the document as a (inter-linked) HTML page, C-c C-e d compiles it with LaTeX into a PDF, etc.
True to the WYSIWYM mode, you work with a regular plain text file. There is a good deal of markup, but quite easy to learn (i.e.
Re:Number One! (Score:5, Interesting)
Where to start, where to start...
I've been using Office since Office 95 (and Slashdot since 1998) and the ribbon is the greatest improvement to the suite. The ribbon can be hidden by pressing control-F1 if you're worried about screen space. It completely exposes the functionality of Office, where as menus hid it. In other words, the ribbon makes the Office interface more inviting and makes it easier to explore new functionality. This also means co-workers no longer ask you how to do things with Office because it's easy to figure it out themselves. Shortcut keys only have material value when commands are hidden in a menu system. You can right-click any button in Office and add it to a quick access toolbar. You can also customize the ribbon if you like.
There is one computer in our office using Office 2003, the last version before the ribbon. It's now considered a pain to use because it's stuck with the menu instead of the ribbon.
Re:Number One! (Score:5, Interesting)
I think there is an awful lot to dislike about the ribbon interface. For example in Excel in 2003 if I wanted to insert a row, I'd go "Insert -> Row". In the ribbon I have an insert tab which allows me to insert lots of things but none of them are a row. No if I want to insert a row I have to press the Insert button on the Home tab and select the option from the drop down on there. How is it any easier when I have two Insert options and there is no way to know which one I need to use to insert something without clicking through both of them of and hunting for the option.
There are similar problems with Word. For example if I want to insert an object, I use the Insert tab then select object on the drop down. But if I make the window a little narrower it becomes just an icon and it's not exactly obvious until I click on it what that might do. If I make the window narrower still, to the width of the document, it puts the object button under another drop down labelled Text. So I have to click a box marked "Text" to insert something that is NOT text? This is better how?
Then there other features like the fact the "File" menu now takes over the entire window of the program.
Now with the old system I had drop down menus which makes it much quicker to go through and find all the options then go through the ribbon, click each button and navigate through all the various drop downs off those buttons. The pull down menus also made it very easy for me to find the keyboard shortcuts for an option, so I can quickly learn to use the program more efficiently. All this is now hidden in the help system - it is not obvious what the keyboard shortcuts are and I suspect users new to the system will keep reaching between the mouse and keyboard for even simple things because the keyboard shortcuts are hidden away.
However for me the worst of all is the inconsistency. In years gone buy these things were defined in a style guide so if I used one program I could quickly get familiar with others as many of the options would be called the same and in the same menus (e.g. Edit for the clipboard functions, file to save, open, close, print and so on). Once I'd learnt one program it made it much easier to find my way around other programs. Yes the menus may be illogical in places (e.g. Find, a read only option, on and Edit menu) but at least once the user has learnt these oddities they can easily navigate around other programs. The toolbar was a useful addition to this, making common options a single click away, and the user could customise them to their hearts content. Now we're stuck with a horrible interface (in my opinion) that has very few possible customisations. Worse as Microsoft has patented it, it stops other application writes from using the same interface - thereby making Microsoft programs have different interfaces from other vendors and increasing the learning curve of non-Microsoft applications.
Sorry but I'm just NOT going to be convinced the ribbon is a good idea.
Re:Number One! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Your underlying point has merit, but your logic is also flawed.
For one thing, Slashdot, like the Office user base, is not a single person with a single mind. Different people have different preferences. In particular, most users of most software products are not so-called power users. The Ribbon interface works well for people who are not power users, and most such people do seem to prefer it once they get used to it, as Microsoft's usage data suggested they should.
However, that does not mean that the significant subset of Office users who really do intimately understand their way around a tried and tested combination of keyboard shortcuts, toolbar icons, menu commands, dialog tricks and so on will appreciate having the new UI and the underlying models forced on them as well. The Ribbon caters very much to cosmetic hacks and a quick-and-dirty approach. Don't bother defining styles, structuring your document systematically, or understanding how to present your data effectively! Just slap the format with the most "clever" borders on every table, format paint your headings so they're all the same colour that is a bit like your corporate standard, and use some random combination of bold, italic, faked small caps, underlining, colours, background colours and all-caps if you want to emphasize something. Oh, and if the spacing's not quite right, just hit enter a couple more times. Of course, MS Office has been going down this path for a long time and has never been shy about who it was aiming at, but the emphasis on the Ribbon pretty much seals its fate as any sort of productive tool for power users.
As for your 200 million sold copies statistic: the overwhelming majority of people who use MS Office do so because it came with their computer, it's their corporate standard at work, or it's the only thing they ever heard of so they pirated it. Microsoft sells about three individual licences a decade for Office applications and about a bazillion copies through mass licensing or preinstallation deals every year. The number of sales really doesn't tell us anything meaningful about what the people using Office actually think of the new ribbon.
Re:LaTeX (Score:3, Interesting)
And my wife who seems to have an incredible knack for the artistic side of photography has made me nearly die on so many occasions when she took a potentially award winning photograph--only to have it be severely out of focus or motion blurred because she isn't also a virtuoso at the tool. The two go hand in hand.
Re:LaTeX (Score:3, Interesting)
As a professional advertising photographer for over 30 years, I'd have to respectfully disagree. With the quality of lenses today, any brand would work. Notice I said 'lenses'. Bodies are even more irrelevant. What we are spending the most money on recently is software and studio lighting...especially since there's been advances in led light panels for product photos. Light. That would be the 'photos' part of 'photography', or 'light painting'.
Now posers pretending to be professionals...well you can read all their posts at dpreview.com. And yes, they're all gearheads.
Having an expensive camera system doesn't make you any more a photographer than a nice set of slippers and a tutu makes you a ballerina.
No, I think Iron Condor got it right the first time.
Some details (like facts) wrong... (Score:4, Interesting)
Advantage: Hierarchical Paragraph Styles.. "since every style is based on Normal"
Let's examine that. The first four properties of a style in Word 2010, sitting open next to me.
-Name
-Style type
-Style based on
-Style for following paragraph
So a Style can be based on any other style, or (no style) should you want to start from blank. Does that sound like a hierarchy? It does to me, and I use it as one. Set up what you want. Knock yourself out. It works, and allows you to create a hierarchy.
His piece on list styles/bullets seems slightly ill informed too, as is the tirade on headers and footers, tables of contents... Word can do what is described.
Custom properties, linked to fields, are extensively used by many organisations and what he's describing sounds more like Word than Writer to me. That one has me really confused as metadata management is really quite good in word.
In short, I know Word quite well and I think the 'advantages' that are being proposed as Writer advantages are simply down to the author's lack of knowledge.
I fully expect flamebait moderation for this, but it would be nice if someone could point out where I'm wrong!