Compared and Contrasted: OpenOffice V. LibreOffice 294
GMGruman writes "Oracle's imposition of fees for some OpenOffice capabilities caused some of the venerable open source office suite's creators to head out on their own and create LibreOffice as a truly free OSS tool. InfoWorld's Neil McAllister reviews the two OSS productivity tools side by side to figure out where they differ, and whether you can jettison Oracle's OpenOffice safely for the fully free LibreOffice."
Printable version (Score:2, Informative)
Here's the print version [infoworld.com] (all one one page instead of four). There's still ads, but it's better.
Also, frist psto?
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I was (snarkily) referring to the feature of the Safari web browser that consolidates multipage articles into a single article automagically. I don't even use Safari all that often, just found it handy in this case. Do you really need a link to download Safari?
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No, but we didn't know that Safari had that feature.. I didn't even use Safari when I had a Mac, and I'm sure as hell not installing it on Linux (especially not if it relies on WINE)..
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No, but we didn't know that Safari had that feature.
I actually think this is a big problem for software development. I often find myself talking to developers who only really use one OS and often only very specific tools on that OS. As such, there is a lack of general knowledge about what cool features have been invented by others and it sometimes takes many years for something really cool to make its way from one app on one platform to other mainstream apps on other platforms.
Nowadays there are plug-ins for Firefox and probably other browsers to do the same
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Oh, I'm a "multi OS" user too, I just didn't like Safari from the outset. I did of course try it out, I think it was just slow and incompatible with stuff at that point (maybe 3-4 years ago), compared to Firefox at least.
I'm sure I saw /. posters mentioning plugins to do this before too - not even recently, this was years ago. Perhaps it was a greasemonkey script. I prefer not to install too much guff though, I just use an adblocker. Perhaps browsers are sandboxed better these days so that plugins don't cau
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Firefox's Autopager [mozilla.org] does the same thing, I guess. Haven't tried Safari since leaving Windows.
Re:Printable version (Score:4, Informative)
Safari comes with a Reader mode built-in [apple.com], and there's the Readability [mozilla.org] add-on for Firefox and a similar one for Chrome [google.com]. For general browser-agnostic solutions, often with mobile variants, there is the web version of Readability [readability.com], or the Instapaper [instapaper.com] service.
To the best of my knowledge, all of those will slurp in multiple pages of an article when producing the clean/readable version of the article.
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All about features, not stability (Score:5, Informative)
(Read the print version of the article on one page. [infoworld.com] It's one of those "short article spread across many ad-heavy pages" crap sites.)
The article just compares the feature lists. It's not clear if either is better from a bug standpoint. A big problem with OpenOffice is that it tends to crash too much. (Especially, for some reason, when exiting.) Also, OpenOffice had some features written in Java, but they were optional. Did LibreOffice get rid of the Oracle Java parts, replace them with something, or what?
It's encouraging that LibreOffice is around. I've been using OpenOffice since 1.0, and haven't used a version of Microsoft Word later than Word 97. OpenOffice in its later incarnations isn't bad, although it still, after ten years, has an amateurish feel to it.
Re:All about features, not stability (Score:4, Informative)
The article just compares the feature lists.
This isn't true at all. While their testing was very limited they notes several bugs where the specs claimed a feature would work, but did not actually function or was inaccessible.
Also, OpenOffice had some features written in Java, but they were optional. Did LibreOffice get rid of the Oracle Java parts, replace them with something, or what?
If you had RTFA you'd note the discussion of needing to download the JRE if you used LibreOffice in order to get some features to work. So, no, there is still a dependency. You'd also note the JRE comes bundled with OpenOffice, but is an out of date version.
OpenOffice in its later incarnations isn't bad, although it still, after ten years, has an amateurish feel to it.
Agreed. It really needs some good paid developers from Canonical or Redhat or someone to do proper usability assessment and testing, and then rework the UI and other relevant parts of the code.
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Downloading a JRE doesn't seem that big of a deal. Most people have that installed already.
The review specifically stated:
I found no difference between the two offerings either in performance or stability. Neither crashed on me, even when handling documents designed to put productivity apps through the wringer.
That is my assessment as well. I've never seen any crashes on either version.
I agree that the UI puts things in odd places, and some things are done in un-obvious ways.
But basically I disagree with the author's "amateurish" assessment. That is pure Microsoft speak there, which translates into "Not all the things learned from years of swearing at Word translate to either of these packa
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Well, since 2007 anyway.
Re:All about features, not stability (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that the UI puts things in odd places, and some things are done in un-obvious ways. But basically I disagree with the author's "amateurish" assessment. That is pure Microsoft speak there, which translates into "Not all the things learned from years of swearing at Word translate to either of these packages".
Comical, but fair. User interface design is so often done poorly in the computing world that calling terrible usability amateurish is not really fair. Individual mileage may vary. I'm, perhaps, overly harsh because I use OS X as my default desktop, only resorting to Ubuntu or Windows when I need specific software for that platform or that only runs well on that platform, or when testing on multiple platforms. As such, most of the software I use inherits a lot of good usability defaults from the dev tools and native UI widgets. OpenOffice has always ignored OS X native UI, however, concentrating instead on consistency across platforms and ignoring both the UI issues this causes and the functionality offered by OS X to native programs, which OO and LibreOffice cannot use (system services for example). This makes it seem like a usability disaster on OS X, when in truth it is just another poor to average usability program, badly ported to an OS it was clearly not designed for.
As for OO versus MS Office, I had a fun interaction at work where a co-worker was demanding MS Office because they did not like the supplied OO. When they obtained it, it was the new version with a completely different interface than they were used to and they ended up switching back in short order. Personally, I've used both about the same amount and curse at both equally. Word probably takes the cake for hellish UI design choices, but Calc is pretty close.
Re:All about features, not stability (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:All about features, not stability (Score:5, Interesting)
conveniently ignored the part about command-o being two relatively small keypresses versus one really big one?
you could flip that and say that the single (granted small, out of the way key) keypress F2 for renaming in windows is probably quite a good solution.
i find renaming to be an annoying task in OSX. the double-click speed mixed with my own impatience means it's pot luck as to whether i rename the next file or open it.
removal of all eject and restart buttons is a big problem. as is the steadfast, bloody-minded and consistent refusal to get out of the '80s and put at least a second button on their mouse. instead they have 1 big button that covers the entire surface of the thing, and after a week of use the thing's so fucked it can't tell if you pressed the left or right side unless you place your fingers in ergonomically painful positions.
the nipple-mouse does not cut it - the trackball thing is so flimsy that on the mac i use most frequently i can't even scroll up (but i can scroll down and side-by-side). don't even fucking get me started on the clicking and dragging by clutching the sides with my thumb-and-weakest-finger causing shooting pain up the sides of my arm. macs are used for design! who would have guessed people would click-and-drag quite often?
a lack of "process priority" in their equivalent of windows' task manager is a big pain - having to use terminal and sudo renice to perform a task i do several times an hour on a PC.
how about having no menu button on the goddamned "pro cinema HD" displays. try doing colour critical work where 2 identical monitors have the same brightness setting (the only setting you have control on the actual screen), running the exact same colour profile, can look completely different, with no remedy in software to correct for it without massive and egregious loss of precision. nothing worse than having a client look between 2 different monitors, and 1 different broadcast monitor and ask you which one they're meant to be looking at.
okay, i'm ranting now. but Mac sucks at UI no matter how much the fanboys squeal that they're actually not stupid, they're advaaanced.
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I suppose one could just as easily ask, who launches icons from the windowing GUI using the keyboard, but not using Spotlight? Who does it so often that a key combination rather than a keypress slows them down?
Interesting you should say that.
It's only my anecdotal observation, but whenever I compare the Windows to Mac users I know, I always get the impression that the Mac users are very keyboard-shy compared to the Windows ones, and less efficient.
The Windows users will use a very fluid mix of mouse and keyboard gestures, but the Mac users tend to use mouse-only gestures, and generally take a much longer time to get anything done. In fact it's painful for me to sit behind a Mac user and watch them deliberately le
Re:All about features, not stability (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what you are talking about Linux requiring the movement of the mouse in specific patterns.
As for symbols, Windows has a picture of what it will do. One big window for full screen where you can see only one window. Two smaller windows for the mode that lets you see more than one windows. Clearly, there was at least an attempt to have icons that had some kind of association with what would happen. I personally think they did a perfectly fine job with them. OSX on the other hand used a symbol, that means exactly the opposite of what the button does half the time. Plus means add or more. There is never a case where a plus symbol should be used to shrink a screen. It is worse than arbitrary. It is wrong. A squiggly line, a # symbol, an picture of an apple, would all be fine if meaningless. A plus symbol is not meaningless, it is wrong. Then the color choice gets added to that. Apple is using Green, Yellow, and Red. When these colors are put together in a row, it is a reference to a stop light. The fact that red, the universal symbol for stop is used to close the window (some times the app, but that is a whole other UI screwup). Using Green along side of it in a Green Yellow Red combination assigns 'Go' to the color. That means the green plus has the symbol 'Go More' or 'Go Bigger'. That is simply not what the button does. The OSX symbol isn't "not easily interpretable". A green plus assigned to a window is very clearly marked. It is just that the button doesn't do what it is marked to do. Sure, you can learn that it is labeled badly, just as we can learn that hamburgers are not made with ham. It doesn't make it correct.
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>Downloading a JRE doesn't seem that big of a deal. Most people have that installed already.
Its a huge deal. Most people don't have it installed. There's very little reason for more end users to have java.
On top if it, if you read about the main vectors for malware, you'll see java vulnerabilities top the list. Having to install java and increasing your attack surface by a ridiculous degree isn't worth it for any office product. Imagine if MS forced people to install silverlight, slashdot would be havin
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If you had RTFA you'd note the discussion of needing to download the JRE if you used LibreOffice in order to get some features to work. So, no, there is still a dependency. You'd also note the JRE comes bundled with OpenOffice, but is an out of date version.
Can it not run with OpenJDK? IIRC that's what I installed to get it running on my Ubuntu laptop...
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Can it not run with OpenJDK? IIRC that's what I installed to get it running on my Ubuntu laptop...
I don't know as I haven't tried. Google says there are some fairly serious bugs doing so, but it may depend upon your OS.
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What improvements were hated? About the biggest complaint I saw was them moving the min/max/close buttons to the opposite side of the task bar. I seriously don't even notice, and that's despite having to remote desktop into Windows a lot of the time.
Of course, I basically always close windows in Linux with ctrl-w or ctrl-q anyway, so they could get rid of all the buttons and I wouldn't give a toss.
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The main thing I've seen is that it seems to open a lot faster. That's just anecdotal; I haven't used a stopwatch and I only have a limited set of machines. But I'm used to downloaded Excel spreadsheets taking tens-of-seconds to open, especially the first time. (I don't like fast-starters because they make the already interminable Windows startup even slower.)
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Which one opens faster?
Anybody reading this, can you spare me from having to read the fucking article and just tell me if LibreOffice is better than OpenOffice? I'm in the middle of Dead Space 2 and I don't have time to mess about with reading articles.
Thank you.
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I found LibreOffice to open faster than the previous version of OpenOffice. But like I said, anecdotal.
Summary of the article: On a feature basis, they're practically identical. Lots of small changes that matter if you care about that particular bug/tiny feature but no dramatic reason to switch.
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Re:All about features, not stability (Score:4, Informative)
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The article says that LO does support Java, but you need to download it separately (licensing issues?). Certain features (database for one) require Java, but for basic Word/Excel clone stuff, you probably don't need it.
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Oracle-induced format problems (Score:2)
I have a few different versions of OO 3 and recent proof that more than paranoia keeps me from updating all to Oracle's.
Why? My much-changed resume is a native Oracle OOo 3.2 file created in Ubuntu is having a problem I never saw while it was Sun's property. I just spent the last quarter hour seeking help for cross-platform corruption but found no relevant bug reports or solutions. It's the third time that the native format and the exported DOC file can't be opened in Windows' OOo and MS's Viewer --PDFs are
Tl, dr (Score:2, Informative)
To summarize the summary of the summary: They're the same.
Outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
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There are lots. Zimbra in particular and many more [wikipedia.org].
Re:Outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
He said "competitor" not half-assed attempts at cloning Outlook but with reduced functionality that somehow end up being buggier than Outlook is.
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I'm sure that, technically, Eddie the Eagle was a competitor too.
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No I've used Thunderbird and mail.app. I was thinking the thick client not the web client.
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Mozilla Thunderbird or Mozilla seaMonkey or Mozilla Classilla (mac) or Mozilla Spicebird are all alternatives to MS Outlook for email and usenet access.
Re:Outlook (Score:4, Informative)
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replacing all the functionality of Exchange/Outlook is not easy.
Nor even remotely necessary.
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While I agree with you. Try asking your boss if he/she can work without outlook/exchange. Or you could just try taking it away form the "suits" and see how fast you hit the unemployment lines.
Just to get back on topic. Here is a shout out for my favorite exchange replacement Kerio connect. http://www.kerio.com/connect/download [kerio.com]
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Well, what I was getting at is there is a lot of functionality in Exchange/Outlook that is not needed, seldom used, designed for specific markets. Like every other Microsoft product, everything thrown at it sticks, and crappy functionality leads to code bloat.
Kerio and several others try to cut to the core needs. Instead of replacing everything they provide the essentials.
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Re:Outlook (Score:5, Informative)
It is if you want to replace Outlook.
My company makes sells a service which can be used from within Outlook via an COM addon. A couple things I can tell you about Outlook users.
They aren't using it for email only. Those people quickly go switch to something that doesn't suck at reading email.
Sales people LIVE in Outlook. Contacts, notes, scheduling, reminders, workflow, document management, CRM and sales process are just the first and obvious things that come to mind. Every one of our customers that uses Outlook in a corporate environment has multiple plugins installed before we even get to them. These plugins make Outlook a client for some other system in their company and typically roll it all into one client reasonable well for the more well established plugins.
To put it bluntly, as much as Outlook sucks for Email, it is in a class all by itself when it comes to being a PIM for someone in a large company.
Nor even remotely necessary.
What you utterly fail to understand is while you think Outlook is an email client, you have absolutely no clue how people actually use it in the real world. You're just spouting off random crap because you think you understand what Outlook is used for, when in reality you don't. Its not a email client, its a PIM with a large feature set that you actually DO need to mimic if you expect people to use something else.
There isn't a Outlook/Exchange replacement, I've been looking for years. If it wasn't needed or people didn't want the features of Outlook, people would use something else in large companies ... but look around, it doesn't happen unless.
I haven't even touched on server side features.
With all that said, I freaking hate Outlook and Exchange, they are big over complicated piles of crap that need to be replaced by an open alternative, but thats not going to happen until the OSS world stops trying to change the way people use software like Outlook into their model and instead tries to make software that fits what those users want. That won't happen until someone can make money off it as its a very big project to take on.
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Something I'm not sure I can say about SQL Server.
Fricking
Re:Outlook (Score:5, Interesting)
*facepalm*
Zimbra, as has been mentioned before, is among the closest I've seen, but the list you wrote are NOT outlook substitutes.
I know a LOT of Outlook users, and NONE of them have ever listed Usenet as a necessary feature. If you're going to list Thunderbird as a viable alternative, you'll then by definition have to also list Windows Live Mail, since techncially it does do e-mail. ignoring user familiarity and data lock-in, here's what you're missing:
-Exchange support - yes, Exchange does POP3 and imap, but device sync, user policy and dozens of other backend features make it a staple in many server rooms. Again, there are FOSS alternatives, but "just because" isn't a good enough reason to ditch a perfectly working exchange server for a product many sysadmins don't know how to use (and "well they should" is a load of crap if their organization isn't using a non-exchange product already, and most of us have better things to do in our day like work on the actual Exchange server). There's also Blackberry server, OWA, and a swath of other things in the exchange ecosystem that the alternatives simply can't compete with yet.
-Calendar features - Sunbird is great, and has decent Thunderbird collaboration, but it's nowhere near as fluid. Meeting requests, room scheduling, and 'presence' features are just a few things off the top of my head that my office would crucify me for if I switched them to something else.
-Instant search of large mailboxes - can any of the applications you list do near-instant, as-you-type searches of inboxes that are 20GBytes or larger? heck, how do they handle mail of that volume? It's not as ridiculous as you might think, I've got several users with PST files that large.
Outlook has its issues (the fact that PST repair utilities exist is telling of one of them), but at the end of the day, I've yet to see an e-mail program of the FOSS variety that can compare to Outlook. Zimbra is pretty close, but it still comes up short - ask anyone in my office.
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Your argument is reminiscent of those who argue LibreOffice and Ubuntu Linux can not be used as replacements for MS products either.
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Outlook gets used as a "all in one" app by many corporations. This does not tend to happen with Excel or Word. As long as you can export a Word or Excel compatible document from whatever alternative you have, you can use that in the corporate world. But email/calendar/contacts equivalents to Outlook don't interoperate very well, especially when someone in IT has decided to add some integration features, use custom Outlook forms, and so on.
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-Instant search of large mailboxes - can any of the applications you list do near-instant, as-you-type searches of inboxes that are 20GBytes or larger? heck, how do they handle mail of that volume? It's not as ridiculous as you might think, I've got several users with PST files that large
Yes I do that every single day with Thunderbird on a crappy laptop and it works just fine. I have 9 years of hourly automated test run reports in a single folder. They are all indexed so I can search them all in a snap.
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Please learn to space your text properly. Reading your comments is terribly annoying with all that extra whitespace.
Other than that, I agree with you :)
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And Google Desktop seems to search better, though it is uglier.
Outlook has presense/resource scheduling down, and it's integration with Lync is going to be a killer app for a lot of businesses.
those businesses that integrate with Outlook via plugins and apps (of the VBA style) - those are the people you'll never be able to migrate and the FOSS world just doesn't have competitors for.
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Okay so if you want to get technical it's not part of the RTM installer for Outlook, but adding Windows Desktop Search allows for indexing of the inbox. Search on an inbox without this is, as you point out, a glacial affair, but once indexed, WDS makes searching in Outlook a MUCH more useful tool.
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Re:Outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a bit of a pragmatist. Richard Stallman-like loyalty to FOSS be damned if my users can't do what they need to do for the company to be productive. Your NFS analogy falls flat because users can still store files and have share-level and file-level permissions added via NTFS. It doesn't support ZFS either, but if I wanted to, I could easily build a FreeNAS and have Windows talk to it with the users being none the wiser.
*YOUR* bubble involves the notion that users are going to notice what file system is on the computers they run. Given that half the staff has an iPhone or Android phone and the other half wants one of the above, neither of which come with file system management utilities out of the box, it's a safe bet that they won't care in the slightest. They *will*, however, care if I took away their ability to deal with large mailboxes and exchange meeting requests, or radically altered the process. While our internet service here is firewalled with a Linux appliance and our fax system soon will be, replacing our entire server infrastructure with Linux machines will do nothing but cost us money. How? our financial management software, for one, is Windows only. "Free as in speech" doesn't mean squat to a finance department that can NO LONGER DO THEIR JOBS because their financial management software no longer functions. Even if you were able to find me collaborative bookkeeping software that was able to handle tens of thousands of financial entries per fiscal quarter with the kind of support I get from that vendor (when I call, it's one of four people who all know me by my first name, know the internal politics, know the systems, and know my limits of abilities, etc.), there's still the hours of migrating the data from one system to the other. A full blown linux stack is useless for us because there's a dozen other windows-only applications that run our business that don't have Linux counterparts designed to scale to the magnitude that we need it to.
Even if you said, "okay, just switch your mail server then", I again ask the question - why? for a warm fuzzy feeling that I'm not giving my money to Microsoft - the Microsoft that's already got my money for the present Exchange server? So that the mail store can run on ZFS and be somewhat more fault tolerant? Would whatever the product I'd switch to be able to seamlessly import the hundreds of gigabytes of mail that already exists and would cost me my job if it wasn't able to be migrated? So I get better support than having every question I've ever had exactly one Google search away?
Exchange isn't the only option, but - stay with me now - I've yet to see a compelling reason to switch AWAY from it. Sure, it makes sense if you're starting from scratch. Heck, I'm working with another client to replace their present Squirrelmail abomination with a Zimbra stack, so I'm not opposed to it in a broad sense. But I'm still waiting to hear the list of specific (and neither "more secure" nor "free [in any sense of the word]" fit that criteria) functionality that would make a switch away from Exchange worth the migration.
As for 'instant search', as I said to another reply, it does require the freely downloadable Windows Desktop Search plugin. The semantics of what exactly is being searched is irrelevant to exactly all of my end users as long as the e-mail they're thinking of is found at the end of the day.
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Re:Outlook (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody's integrated an Outlook substitute into OpenOffice because Outlook is very different from the other office applications (which are all centered around creating documents of various types). Outlook is focused on connectivity, mainly email, address books, and calendars and the open source world has had a full stack for these capabilities for a long time. The recommended way to replace Outlook is with open protocols (IMAP, LDAP, CalDAV), but if you need Microsoft Exchange support, that's available too. One can use Evolution as a substitute for Outlook.
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One can use Evolution as a substitute for Outlook.
Maybe I'm alone here, but I won't use Evolution until it supports recurring tasks. And since that particular bug [gnome.org] has gone unclosed for over eleven years, I'm not holding my breath. Well, not anymore.
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This tends to require that the entire company make a conscious effort to allow alternatives to Outlook. Ie, you need IT buy in, and no one is more pro-Microsoft and anti-user-choice than IT. It requires buy in from everyone so that they don't go and create some automation script that requires others to use an Outlook form. It means that when you hire new IT people you need to make sure that they're ok working in a company that is not 100% Microsoft.
Sure, everything can start off wholesome. But over time
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Evolution?
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Neither has an equivalent to Outlook.
Outlook is terrible. Don't believe me? Try getting a list of your next appointments INCLUDING RECURRING for the next 2 weeks. The only view that does it within Outlook is the clunky calendar itself. The list views do not. The only way to get around this that I know of is to export the data to Excel. And don't get me started on stability (though how much of that is plugins isn't clear to me since I don't run Outlook at home).
Outlook has to be one of the most over-rated pieces of software on the planet.
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Agreed. As an open source software advocate and user, I'm always wondering when someone with the skills required will write a proper replacement for Outlook's non-Email capabilities. That is to say, I don't value Outlook as an E-mail platform at all. Its the bundled crap they threw in after the failure of Schedule+ that's become nearly necessary in business circles.
PS Evolution is terrible in comparison.
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That you spend your entire day in an overgrown Email program speaks to your skill set more than anything else.
Oh, emacs is far more than just an email program. It's an editor too, you know. Er, we were talking about emacs, weren't we?
Summary so you don't need to RTFA (Score:3)
They are the same.
- except LibreOffice doesn't come with Java for the database
- and LO has some new stuff like SVG and MSworks/WordPerfect file support
I wonder how GO-oo and LibreOffice compare?
Re:Summary so you don't need to RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder how GO-oo and LibreOffice compare?
Go-OO does not exist as a standalone project anymore. The only reason why it was there in the first place is the difficulty to get the patches accepted into mainstream by Sun/Oracle. This problem doesn't exist with LibreOffice, and, indeed, one of the first things they did after forking was to merge Go-OO in.
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LibreOffice has everything that Go-OO has.
OpenOffice is also fully free (Score:3)
OpenOffice and LibreOffice are both fully free. The difference between OpenOffice and LibreOffice is who's in charge, and whose contributions are getting accepted.
Not looking back (Score:5, Informative)
At work we (and some of our customers) switched to OOO about 3 years ago, and for the types of documents (including some rather large manuals) it works just fine, and imported all of our old documents, from multiple different versions of MSOffice and Word.
When the devs jumped ship, we jumped with them to LibreOffice, retaining just a few seats of OOO in our customers shop, because they already paid for support contracts. But reports are that they have not been happy with what little help they got. The phone techs knew less than our people.
There are some missing functions that MS-Office users wish were available, and maddeningly well hidden features as well as stuff that just does not work. But these were not mainstream functionality that we needed in our shop.
LibreOffice is currently every bit as good as OOO, and in some ways better. Going forward, all the wet-ware is in their corner, and Oracle will probably take a year bringing replacements up to speed before any serious bugs can be addressed, let alone new features. (Although nothing will stop them from feeding off of the efforts of LibreOffice).
LibreOffice probably needs to think about a revenue stream for the future. I'm fine with that. Let those who absolutely have to have support contracts in place (for what ever reason) foot the bill.
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LibreOffice probably needs to think about a revenue stream for the future.
They have a funding drive going on right now. [documentfoundation.org]
They have a lot of people on their side, but the real issue will be paying down the technical debt in the codebase. It really needs an overhaul.
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They've added some of the debt to their Easy Hacks [documentfoundation.org] page ; I had a crack at some of the more mundane tasks like removing defunct macros with shell scripts.
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Ho Hum article. (Score:4, Interesting)
No doubt we shall shortly see posts from the Microsoft shills bagging OOo and variants, but the simple truth is that for 99.9% of purposes, the FOSS offerings are perfectly adequate.
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Open Office(and I assume LibreOffice) have offered a Mac native version for some time. For instance:
http://download.openoffice.org/contribute.html?download=mirrorbrain&files/stable/3.3.0/OOo_3.3.0_MacOS_x86_install_en-US.dmg [openoffice.org]
So as far as I know, NeoOffice is a bit obsolete at this point, if its only goal is to provide a Mac-native version of OOo.
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Does OO.o (or LO) have support for the Track Changes feature yet? I not only use that multiple times per week at my sfotware development job (for reviewing specifications and test plans), I couldn't even have made it through one of my college English classes without it as the professor used this feature to send feedback to students. They didn't require that you have a copy of MS Office - you could use the computer labs, which included it - but they expected that you could access a reasonably complete set of
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Track changes, as in who made what alterations to the document (additions, removals, etc.) shown visually? Writer has had that feature for a few years at least.
As to footnotes, I've never had an issue with those in OOo, but MS Word destroyed entire documents (as in start from scratch because it no longer loads) when editing foot notes, and repeatedly replaced inserted images with big red X's, and other "fun" things to drive me to the brink. OOo has not been flawless, but it's treated me a lot better over th
Isn't LibreOffice, for now, Go-oo? (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I know, Libre Office is based mostly (entirely?) on Novell's Go-oo. So this review compares OpenOffice with the much extended and improved Go-oo, which has better multilanguage support, a larger clip-art collection and better MS Office filters. Yes, this kind of article should have been written a long time ago, way before Libre Office appeared, because Go-oo deserved more exposure.
Better late than never.
Good and bad (Score:3)
I recently switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice on Debian. LibreOffice is mostly better, and the SVG import is a killer feature for me.
However, the one really bad thing about LibreOffice is that "Help" is essentially non-functional. It opens up a LibreOffice help web site that is incomplete and difficult to search. OO's built-in "Help" feature was much better. I don't know why LibreOffice took it out (licensing restrictions, perhaps?)
unfortunately, LibreOffi isn't ready for primetime (Score:2)
with Windows as only a secondary platform (Score:4, Funny)
FTA "It seems most of the new development for LibreOffice is being done on Linux, with Windows as only a secondary platform."
And how's that feel?
LaTeX (Score:4, Informative)
I've never really seen much of a need for an "office suite". LaTeX is much better at producing documents, spreadsheets may be of use for some minor calculations occasionally but for the things many companies use it for, a database would be better suited for the job. For presentations I recently discovered the powerdot package for LaTeX, it really works great and it's very easy to produce presentations that actually look good unlike the ones I've tried making in OO Impress...
Re:so who won? (Score:5, Funny)
Depends
Re:so who won? (Score:4, Informative)
Well 6 words: Not different enough yet to matter.
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Libre.
(Because Oracle is showing their evil ways, so go Libre and try to deal with the downsides, which appear to be minimal.)
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someone give me a one-word answer. Which is better: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?
Open Office.org now belongs to Oracle. That should settle it for many FOSS fans.
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"Mixed"? Who did you hear say anything good about it?
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More than one word, but the article pretty much, I think, nails it: If you *have* to have support becasue of IT rules or something, OO.o is the only choice. Feature-wise they're all but I identical; but since most of the developers went to Libre, the smart money is on it improving more and faster as time goes on.
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Most of the developers went to Libre? Are you sure about that? The last I heard most of the development was still carried out in Germany by (former) StarOffice developers on Oracle's payroll. Has that changed?
Re:so who won? (Score:5, Informative)
LibreOffice
--tl;dr friendly section ends here--
LibreOffice has everything that OO.org has, plus the Go-OO patches, minus an evil megacorporation at the reigns.
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someone give me a one-word answer. Which is better: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?
The one with the OneNote clone.
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Most of those support contract requirements are done from a CYA point of view.
The few I've seen, the end users didn't know there was a support contract, and in at least one case there was no record of it ever being exercised. Even their IT staff didn't know who to call, but just got on the web and found all the answers.
Those contract are almost never helpful.
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Java is not needed. Java is used for some of the extensions, such as the save to a website running mediawiki page extension, and the mail merge extension.
The last I check the bug tracker libre office is planning on replacing the database connector with one that does not require java, so mail merge will not require java.
Re:What fees! (Score:5, Informative)
No, forking LO from OO.o was primarily a matter of getting development to move forward again at a better than glacial pace: The OO.o license requires submitted code to become Sun's (and now Oracle's) property. This kept many from donating their code, depositing it at Go-OO, instead. These changes are now moving into LO, which is starting to show faster improvement than OO.o.
If you think that is stupid, then ... well, ... you're entitled to your opinion. :)
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Well I disagree, but reasonable people can.
As far as submitted code becoming the property of Oracle (nee Sun ) that is something I have not read in their license yet. I kind of doubt they could actually do that since it had been open source ( I think it was GPL ) and at any rate if you made a contribution you could easily mark your code as (c) yourself and licensed under GPL to Oracle, which would force them to either use it or lose it and if the contribution was that important I think they would use , but
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For relatively simple documents conversion support is quite decent, for complex ones, it's can be a real crap shoot from what I've seen and heard. But this is much more a data conversion than a capabilities issue. In fact