LibreOffice 4.2 Busts Out GPU Mantle Support and Corporate IT Integration 192
Billly Gates points to this basic summary of the features of the recently released LibreOffice 2.4, writing: "In catching up with MS Office, the new LibreOffice 4.2 now has full Windows 7/8 integration including Aero peek, thumbnails, jumplists, and recent documents all from the taskbar. In addition, one weak area for LibreOffice has been enterprise network support and the lack of active directory tools: LibreOffice now has GPO and active directory support for system administrators to deploy and manage LibreOffice over corporate networks. LibreOffice also includes an expert configuration Window to assist power users and system administrators when deploying to hundreds of workstation at a time." Read on for some more details about the release, including some information about support for AMD's Mantle CPU acceleration support.
Also of particular interest is AMD/ATI is expecting to finally release Mantle in the next coming hours for games like Battlefield 4. Surprisingly LibreOffice also supports mantle as well according to the release notes. However you will need the 14.1 driver which is being compiled and uploaded at the time of this writing to utilize this feature. Mantle will accelerate lower-end CPUs by up to 300% in some tasks while having modest improvements for those with more recent powerful CPUs. Real niceties for those like myself on AMD phenom IIs with the later 7000 series cards.The only issue (some on Slashdot may say benefit ) is the lack of a ribbon UI. However, for recent articles about governments considering OpenOffice this release addresses shortcomings with the new active directory and GPO support."
2.4? (Score:3)
Re:2.4? (Score:5, Funny)
It was made in reverse polish notation.
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Re:2.4? (Score:4, Informative)
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I prefer the pig latin: ooshwhay
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Also, I cannot find a citation for the Mantle support and find it odd that an office app would support something like that anyway. Also, it's not a CPU acceleration feature like the summary claims, although it frees up CPU time as being architecture-specific it is a much slimmer API than DX/GL.
It is the second link from MaximumPC.
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Correct me if Im wrong, but Mantle is an API like DirectX and has almost nothing to do with LibreOffice. That quote you mentioned doesnt mention mantle either, it mentions HSA which AFAICT is not the same thing.
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It is the second link from MaximumPC.
That doesn't say anything about Mantle, in fact the source code contains no references to Mantle and the Mantle SDK hasn't even been publicly released. Summary is wrong, the link says nothing about Mantle in LibreOffice.
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Slashdot editing at its finest. Again.
And for the rest of us? (Score:2)
Re:And for the rest of us? (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be unwanted bloat for the home user, but it's absolutely essential features in the corporate world. All it really needs is a decent component selection in the installer though to have it both ways.
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Unclear if I can get a copy without all this unwanted bloat.
Yes, use vi for your documents. There's also a spreadsheet called sc, haven't tried it though.
Re:And for the rest of us? (Score:4, Informative)
>> Unclear if I can get a copy without all this unwanted bloat.
>
> Yes, use vi for your documents. There's also a spreadsheet called sc, haven't tried it though.
If it is a simple document, why not?
You also don't need the proprietary network effects and malware vectors associated with more 'feature rich" alternatives.
OneNote (Score:3)
Re:OneNote (Score:5, Insightful)
Be honest... it will be something else holding you back once they have that.
It's a nice, moving, unattainable goalpost that people like to set up
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So instead of one application suite you get two. So what? What do you want man? Is it a CMS? Get Alfresco or whatever.
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Windows was never meant for servers, phones or tablets either... An android desktop is likely to be just as lacklustre but that doesn't mean it won't be successful.
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It works for other OSes too:
Linux was never meant for servers, phones or tablets either... An android desktop is likely to be just as lacklustre but that doesn't mean it won't be successful.
Note: Quoted part does not represent my opinion of Linux.
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Linux was originally developed as a free operating system for Intel x86-based personal computers. [wikipedia.org]
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LOL... first you fully commit yourself to a Microsoft-only product, then you talk about "keeping me on Windows".
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OneNote seems to me to be one of the strangest pieces of software I've seen since MS-DOS used backslashes for directory separators. Evidence: in OneNote, if a line width won't fit on the printed page, does it wrap like every other piece of software in the known universe? No! OneNote reduces the font size, until it's unreadable even by people who don't need reading glasses. Whose idea was that?
I think it was your idea. I've never seen OneNote do that. The only software I'm aware of that does that is Microsoft Publisher, when you type into a fixed sized text box.
StarOffice 5.2 (Score:2)
If it'd still reliably run on 64-bit systems, my suggestion would be to try and get a copy of StarOffice 5.2, the ancestor. No version of OpenOffice[.org] or LibreOffice has met my demands as well yet. Unfortunately, it doesn't. So what I'm doing today is running StarOffice 5.2 on 32-bit systems, like my netbook, and OpenOffice 3.3 on 64-bit systems, which is the latest of the StarOffice descendants still capable of saving documents in StarOffice 5 compatible format. (StarOffice 5 binary formats are still f
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No version of OpenOffice[.org] or LibreOffice has met my demands as well yet.
What are those demands?
Re:StarOffice 5.2 (Score:4, Funny)
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Universal Disgust (Score:3, Interesting)
The only issue (some on Slashdot may say benefit ) is the lack of a ribbon UI.
The majority of Office power users I know (mostly lawyers) were disgusted by the replacement of the menu-driven UI with the infamous ribbon. It's not just left-brained Slashdotters that prefer an easily navigable interface.
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I am in the minority here I guess.
I did not like the menus in office 2003 as things became nested and it kept taking up time and felt like Windows 8 closed door syndrome to use an advanced function.
It took a week to adjust and probably a month to get really proficient. Hit the alt key if you like shortcuts? See the numbers and letters? You can use the ribbon without a mouse for any function!
I also like the ribbon because I can visually see the changes before selecting. It is really handy when cutting and pa
Re:Universal Disgust (Score:5, Insightful)
So, click the button that hides the ribbon and gets it out of the way?
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Totally agree. Lack of "ribbon" UI (or at least not forcing it on the user) is a feature, not something I would miss.
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Sidebar is kind of a dumb name. It should be something snazzy that really captures the essence of the feature. Like palette or ribbon. Ribbon, yeah. Because it is the same things as the Office Ribbon, just vertical with collapsing panels that hide things even better than original versions of the Office Ribbon did.
Re:Universal Disgust (Score:4, Insightful)
Sidebars are a much better idea on a widescreen anyway ; the ribbon just takes up valuable vertical space that's at a premium since people stopped making LCD panels for computer users.
GPU acceleration for other platforms (Score:5, Interesting)
I submitted the story.
While ATI has listed LibreOffice for one of the few programs that use Mantle [maximumpc.com] I can not find any other information on this?
This begs to differ if LibreOffice uses GPU directwrite or OpenGL and does it work on platforms than Windows. Of course this is not critical unless you do multimedia heavy presentations I am somewhat curious. I wonder if anyone who develops it can care to comment?
Also I use LibreOffice in conjunction with MS Office. I can't afford publisher and it is nice to use it to repair office documents that MS Office says are corrupt. This is a highly recommended upgrade even if you use MS Office full time.
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I think Mantle is only used by games. Libreoffice is probably using OpenCL. Maybe the poster got confused because the update includes both things.
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I think Mantle is only used by games. Libreoffice is probably using OpenCL. Maybe the poster got confused because the update includes both things.
I'm still trying to understand exactly what kind of obscene spreadhseet abuse would actually require GPU accelerated math.
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Perhaps it'll help with conditional aggregates which are painfully slow in Libreoffice with only a few thousand records.
For example, sum the $D column when the $E column matches year '2013'. Basically anything involving squiggly brackets around a SUM equation:
{=SUM(($E$1:$E$65518=$A6) * ($D$1:$D$65518))}
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https://www.libreoffice.org/do... [libreoffice.org]
A new engine for Calc - massive parallel calculations of formula cells using GPU via OpenCL are now possible thanks to our new formular interpreter.
Indeed it's openCL.
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While ATI has listed LibreOffice for one of the few programs that use Mantle [maximumpc.com] I can not find any other information on this?
They didn't list it as using Mantle. The title of the article is "Mantle update, frame pacing fixes, and more arriving soon". The article first discusses Mantle, then goes on to discuss frame pacing then at the end is the only mention of LibreOffice in the article:
Finally, the Catalyst 14.1 driver is also the first HSA-enabled driver, which allows Kaveri APUs to intelligently cooperate with a GPU to share the workload. The only supporting applications listed by AMD at this time are LibreOffice v4.2.0.1+ an
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More to the point: if he did, did he take any notice of the suggestions!
Yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ah yes, it's just that easy isn't it?
You have to (a) be a programmer and be sufficiently skilled in understanding the LO architecture, and (b) create said feature and hope it's accepted and brought into the mainline. With that kind of work it's much easier to just use MS Office and get on with your life. Which is what most people do.
The guy was just complaining about a particular feature that he finds critical enough to prevent moving from MS Office to LO. Apparently simply expressing this issue brings out
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Github Integration anyone? (Score:2)
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OwnCloud has versioning and WebDAV I believe.
Wikipedia entry on Mantle (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
Mantle is a low-level API specification developed by AMD as an alternative to Direct3D and OpenGL, primarily for use on the PC platform.
Emphasis mine. I can't be the only one seeing this as a bad strategy (versus pushing this into Openxx).
No ribbon is a bonus (Score:2)
Great update for compatibility (Score:2)
And finally the taskbar/aero peek stuff finally behaves properly on Windows !
Pet peeve taken care of ! I also feel a certain improvement in speed and responsiveness in general Nice nice nice.
Does the check for updates work? (Score:2)
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logic fails you
if a business used LibreOffice, the board would be using LibreOffice Impress to view LibreOffice Impress documents and giving presentations with the PC hooked to the big screen running LibreOffice Impress.
Maybe some loaner using PowerPoint would have their slide looking like garbage in such a company....
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logic fails you
Zealotry blinds you. An overwhelming majority of businesses currently use Microsoft Office products and therefore have their current collection of documents stored in Microsoft Office formats. Until LibreOffice can create, open, edit, save, or convert those formats with reliable accuracy, its adoption will be hindered significantly. Even assuming that a business had gone 100% LibreOffice, there's no guarantee any other business or individual they interact with would also be using LibreOffice, necessitati
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funny, we use LibreOffice where I work, with over 400 employees...maybe your blindness is caused by wanking too much?
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Actually a *lot* of businesses have been changing to web services like Google Apps. Not even small ones or bleeding edge ones. I mean things like insurance companies.
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Re:How compatible is it? (Score:4, Informative)
It is pretty uncalled for to claim zealotry when you are uncompromisingly demanding an absolute 100% accuracy with MS-Office documents before LibreOffice could be used.
There are plenty of businesses where pixel perfect accuracy is not required when sending documents outside the company. If people really need to read my documents with absolute accuracy, then I can PDF it. If I want to test a slideshow then I can use the Powerpoint viewer [microsoft.com] (it even works under Linux using Wine).
Even without changing the version of Word, a document's pagination can vary wildly depending on the printer driver being used. You don't even change your software for Word to go wrong.
Excel can be a problem if you use complex macros, but 99% of the ones that I see are just being used a glorified table editors with basic calculations. I constantly move between different computers, using Excel, Calc and even the shareware spreadsheet Spread32 [byedesign.co.uk] (when I want to view something quickly) and it all works better than I had expected. The bigger problem that I have is when a package doesn't implement a feature that you are used to. For example, if I want to search for something spanning the sheets of a workbook I will always use Excel because LibreOffice disables the "Find All" button when you choose the option to span worksheets.
But even you there may end up being some problems, you should not dismiss the use of LibreOffice within any business environment just because you might have some formatting problem.
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Nobody can, at least until Microsoft opens up their entire API library. Until then, when someone gets close enough to endanger Microsoft's cash cow, they will change just enough stuff to keep them at arm's length. Repeat ad nauseam.
Re:How compatible is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody can
Not even Microsoft, which is pretty funny. Transferring files between versions of MS Office or between Windows and Mac versions often results in garbage layouts/formatting. It's really quite sad on Microsoft's part. I worked years as an audio-visual tech to know that this is very true. When a client wanted do to a PowerPoint presentation with a laptop provided by us, we always had to ensure the versions matched.
Re:How compatible is it? (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody can, at least until Microsoft opens up their entire API library. Until then, when someone gets close enough to endanger Microsoft's cash cow, they will change just enough stuff to keep them at arm's length. Repeat ad nauseam.
All of the MS Office file formats, both legacy binary and OOXML, are publicly documented. The binary documentation, I think, was released at the insistence of the European Union regulators.
Now, it is true that the formats are really badly designed and inelegant, and that there are a lot of MS Office "guts" spilling out of the specs. They are not easy to implement. But with enough time and effort, it should be doable. And MS is not introducing new breaking changes – to the contrary, they are finally introducing compliance with OOXML 'strict', which fully complies with the ISO standard. (MS Office 2010 can read 'strict' OOXML documents, and MS Office 2013 can both read and write them.)
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The real answer. The code is the spec. Not even Microsoft can guarantee 100% backwards compatiblity. They only offer compatibility. The file format version for an Office product can only be read perfectly by the same version that created it, even down to the patch level sometimes. Every newer version offers compatiblity because the code in the new version isn't exactly 100% identical to the code in the original version.
If Office is made available on Linux Windows will get steamrolled.
The non-Microsoft o
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The scripting language is called Python. It can even be run from inside OO.
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"All of the MS Office file formats, both legacy binary and OOXML, are publicly documented".
Great. Where's the explanation of "AutospaceLikeWord95"?
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Right here. [microsoft.com]
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Really? Pretty sure you're trolling.. because this is not really an explanation:
This algorithm typically results in the following:
An increase in the inter-character spacing added between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain full-width characters
No inter-character spacing between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain half-width characters
*Typically* results?
*Increase* in character spacing? how much increase?
*Certain* ful
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Welcome to the world of document specifications. None of them really describe what you need to implement. Remember when people criticised Microsoft's ODF support because they implemented what the spec said rather than what OpenOffice actually used? (Fortunately the spec has been updated since then)
In the case of this tag, it is only going to be found in 18 year old documents that have been converted into XML format. I bet the number of times that it because the subject of complaint here on /. is way more th
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The explanation is not something you can implement since it does not define a clear spec. It is vague and omits info.
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I think that it has enough description that you could take a stab at it, but if you don't want to worry about exactly how much extra spacing to use then don't implement the feature. This is not a core feature of the spec; it is a very rare bit of backwards compatibility for software that dates back two decades. I guarantee that nobody who complains about this tag possesses a document containing this feature.
If not knowing exactly how much white space to implement is going to be a major problem for you, then
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Competition was high with what? Tell me another prominent word processing program for Windows 95. I dare you.
Everything else came out one year afterward and it sucked. I remember. Corel's Wordperfect back then was trying to move its application suite to Java of all things.
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No. I remember that time. WordPerfect, like most other 3rd parties, took forever to port to Windows 95. IIRC part of the problem was that Microsoft was developing Office and Windows simultaneously taking advantage of APIs they had not publicly disclosed until much later so they had a much greater head start than any of the competition. Using Windows 3.1 applications in Windows 95 was pathetic. No one wanted to use them. They could not even support Windows 95 long filenames properly. I remember that quite we
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Microsoft's attempt to make ODF useless was due to using ambiguity in the spec as an excuse to make something that did not work at all. If I remember right, some ODF applications would set a spreadsheet cell from the text "1" in quotes to the integer 1, while others would set it to a string containing the digit '1'. Microsoft then made some incredibly convoluted "logic" to twist this into a reasoning to not produce *either* of these possibilities, but produce a third that was not readable by anybody! They p
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Really? Pretty sure you're trolling.. because this is not really an explanation:
This algorithm typically results in the following:
An increase in the inter-character spacing added between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain full-width characters
No inter-character spacing between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain half-width characters
*Typically* results?
*Increase* in character spacing? how much increase?
*Certain* full/half width characters? Which ones?
if you read entire link, you'd see the part where it says,
"Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as ideographic, even though those characters are full-width forms of non-ideographic text: U+FF10–U+FF19, U+FF21–U+FF3A, and U+FF41–U+FF5A. [Note: This results in the unnecessary addition of space. end note]
Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as non-ideographic, even though those characters are ideographic: U+FF66–U+FF9F. [Note: This results
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Sadly, the version of OOXML in 2007 (and I think 2010) is not the same as the released spec.
Even MS Offic isn't 100% compatible with itself (Score:3, Informative)
Can MicroSoft guarantee compatibility then? (Score:3)
Re:How compatible is it? (Score:5, Informative)
Even Microsoft Office does not guarantee 100% compatibility with older documents. And I've personally witnessed simple things breaking between MS Office on a Mac or on Windows.
When I dug through some very old Office 98 docs of mine a few years back, Office 2007 broke rather badly, but OpenOffice was able to read them. I'm sure it wasn't pixel-perfect, but it was readable and more-or-less as intended, unlike Office proper.
As far as trading between various offices, I've noticed more problems with Office For Mac than with LibreOffice. Granted, most people in my office are using either Google Docs, iWork or LibreOffice, but we get a fair number of outside docs that were made in MS Office.
For most uses of Word (glorified RTFs), everything is compatible. I've even had no issues going from AbiWord to MS Word. If you get crazy with auto-summaries or embedded docs, it might get problematic, but do you really use those? Presentations are much the same, although I've not worked with them nearly as much (because I do real work).
For spreadsheets, its a bit more hit-or-miss. If all you're doing is glorified CSVs, once again everything works, but the crazier your formulae get the more likely it will only work in one program.
Re:How compatible is it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Call me a cynic, but I've been around for a very very long time and I've seen a lot of poor sportsmanship in the Microsoft camp.
The funny thing is now we're intentionally using older versions of MS Office simply because everyone hasn't learned the 2007 version yet, so what's the use of overloading everyone by going to the newest version every 2-3 years? The couple of users who will benefit can have the upgrade. The rest can have an upgrade every x versions.
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Unfor
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We manage to deal with the incompatibilities between different versions of Office, so I think we could handle LO/OO if my company chose to do so.
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Okay if you wanna pull that trick then Microsoft Office fails also the list (not exhaustive) of things that can futz with getting a MSO file to work correctly
1 Different Fonts on the system
2 any difference in the default(or current) printer
3 version patch level and hotfix presence for MSO
4 Language version of MSO
5 Phase of Moon at both sites
6 presence of any addons (includes version numbers)
7 Applied Hotfixes/ Updates to Windows
in fact some folks have found that opening some MSO files works better in OO or
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Big one that breaks PowerPoint is different screen resolutions, especially if the aspect ratio is different.
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Even MS Office can not guarantee 100% compatibility with other versions of MS Office Documents. This is especially important to know if you are more then 2 generations behind (Office 2010) is the break point. I've had issues with docs from Office 2003 being screwed up by 2010 and those are local to my system. So if I have problems with formats from 2 generations before (office 2007 doesn't give me problems) then how in hell can you ensure that your latest Office 365 hasn't been updated to actually corrupt a
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Yes, better than Word version X to Word version Y (Score:2)
Yes, LibreOffice is Word compatible. Specifically, it scores better than Word 2011 on compatibility with three of the four .doc formats. See the Microsoft article "What happens when I save a Word 2007 document in the OpenDocument Text format?"
I experienced this myself when my mother couldn't open any of her old documents on her Win7 computer with MS Word. I opened them in LibreOffice for her and converted them to the latest version the .docx format.
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Neither does MS Office. It is not 100% backwards compatible with itself.
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I remember there being a plug-in (from Microsoft) to add Open Office support to Microsoft Office. I remember having it installed on my old laptop (Office 2007), and know I've used it with 2010. I can't answer what it does with spreadsheets or presentations, but normal text documents do just fine. (I don't see ODT in the SaveAs on my Mac running Office 2011)
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Open Office/LibreOffice are both so obsessed with competing against MS that they, just like Microsoft, have no interest at all in people who actually write narratives for a living. As a desktop publishing package, LibreOffice is constantly improving. As a tool for corporate administrative assistants, it may very well be wonderful. As a useful tool for someone who actually writes stories, it is becoming increasingly more of a pain in the rump that it is worth. It is a painful truth that Word 2000 (shudder)
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Re:It still doesn't get the job done (Score:4, Interesting)
Guess the world shouldn't have thrown Word Perfect under the bus?
Or, how about Word Star? There was a time when its editing keystrokes were widely adopted, like in Borland's integrated development environments.
Or, why not use LaTeX? Admittedly, it's a bit of a learning curve, but you can just bang out text, and worry about formatting later, even change it around relatively easily.
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Re:It still doesn't get the job done (Score:4, Insightful)
It took me 10 minutes of thinking and experimenting to figure out what you were talking about. Why would you have a phrase spanning a manual page break? Why are you doing formatting during authorship? Maybe your process needs to change to reflect the tools. Not the creative one, but the technical procedure you use to save, recall, and share your writing. And Word and Writer are both jack of all trades, master of none programs anyway. There's an article I can't find about how adding presentation features to the editor is a mistake. Not that your text shouldn't look pretty while you type it, but that you should never type extra spaces to make it look _just_right_. Or page breaks.
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i am curious, wouldn't http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ [gnu.org] emacs do everything you need? you said mouse less editing, and there are a lot of functions that can be added to emacs, through it's lisp programs. and easily modified nature.
i write in my spare time, but only for my own needs and i use the mouse. i have used emacs for some of it, but i like the bloated office suites a little better and since my time isn't rationed and i don't find and replace much at all.
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The talent and inspiration modules?
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I also use LaTeX for writing text documents. However, I still use LibreOffice a lot... mostly for the calc (spreadsheet) component and occasionally the presentation tool. LibreOffice is a very competent office suite and certainly a no-brainer for replacing MS Office.
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The WYSIWYG stuff is almost desktop publishing but not quite - so not full control but it has the appearance of having it. It ends up with all those situations where you have to waste time trying to "trick" the document into doing what you want because you can't directly tell it what to do.