LibreOffice 5.0 Released 236
New submitter ssam writes: The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project, bringing new features including Windows 10, Android and Ubuntu touch compatibility, superior interoperability features, an updated UI, and lots of under the hood improvements. For people still running OpenOffice it is probably time to move over.
OpenOffice vs LibreOffice (Score:5, Interesting)
So what is the story between the two? I know that LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and that some/most/all of the devs moved to LibreOffice.
Is LibreOffice now far enough ahead to say forget about OpenOffice?
Re:OpenOffice vs LibreOffice (Score:5, Funny)
Well, LibreOffice just hit version 5.0, while OpenOffice is at 4.1.1. Obviously, LibreOffice is exactly 0.8.9 amount better.
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That's why we have Windows 10. It's got twice as many improvements as Windows 9 would've had!
Re:OpenOffice vs LibreOffice (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:OpenOffice vs LibreOffice (Score:4, Informative)
I wrote about this on reddit only recently ...
Link to the discussion there [reddit.com]
Copied in full to here:
So back when Sun maintained OpenOffice.org and sold StarOffice they had a Contributor License Agreement that required handing over ownership of patches to them so they could sell the closed source supported suite and license out to IBM for Symphony.
To get around this bureaucracy and to not sign over ownership for patches most distributions used go-oo.org (aka ooo-build) that was the source code of OpenOffice.org with a bunch of patches on top to help compatibility with MS Office and some other things that Sun could or did not want in the upstream oo.org code.
When Oracle bought Sun they left oo.org languishing with no maintenance for months. This was naturally unacceptable to the various linux distros and they didn't want to be beholden to Oracle's whims (for good reason given the state of the various projects that used to be with Sun). Due to this they got together and formed The Document Foundation [documentfoundation.org] and took the go-oo.org code (which was basically what this group used and collaborated on anyway) and forked it to LibreOffice.
Fast forward some more time and Oracle decide they don't want anything to do with OpenOffice.org after all and essentially (with IBM's help ... presumably so there would be a sort of maintained base for Symphony) dumped it on the Apache Software Foundation. As per their requirements it went through an incubation process and all the code was relicensed to the Apache Public License. This was months after LibreOffice had been created and worked on and most consider it a pretty petty move rather than giving the brand to TDF to work with.
From that point on it's pretty much been IBM driving Apache OpenOffice (as they renamed oo.org to) although they appear to have stopped caring about it mid to end last year. The amount of development work on AOO is minimal compared to LO and the number of active committers is in the teens (at best) for AOO compared to the hundreds for LO.
Due to the way the licensing works out LO can merge in any fixes (there were some in the early days, not many now as can be seen in the CVE issue I mentioned) but AOO cannot merge in work from LO.
The last release of AOO was August 2014 and if you go look at the changelogs from 3.4 (the first AOO release as opposed to oo.org IIRC... mostly rebranding) up to the 4.1.1 then you'll see there's been minimal work - mostly translations. Anything developed/fixed in AOO is either merged into LO or improved/obsoleted by other work. Compare these to the release notes for each LO release from the forking point of 3.3 and it really is quite significant - the heavy work on clean up and better build systems for LO lower the barrier to entry for LO contribution by the common person too.
The proposed AOO release of 4.1.2 is going forwards at the moment - driven mostly by only a few people Apache OpenOffice Dev mail archives [apache.org].
To give an idea how bad this has got the no-interaction code execution as privileges of user bug by a special HWP file was announced publicly last April. It was fixed in LibreOffice the same month and users would have had the update notification and been protected. Anyone using Apache OpenOffice is still vulnerable and although there was a disclosure on the security part of the AOO site at the time, the workaround was to 'delete .dll/.so' ... not a release with a fix and unless anyone actively went to check up on this they would not have known the issue.
To add to this (if it's not enough already) AOO can still only read and not write docx/xlsx/pptx (OOXML) files produced by MS Office whereas LibreOffice can
Re:OpenOffice vs LibreOffice (Score:5, Informative)
Re:OpenOffice vs LibreOffice (Score:4, Informative)
You've got it the wrong way around license-wise. LibreOffice can pull anything they'd like from OpenOffice, but OpenOffice won't because they don't want LGPL/GPL code polluting their code-tree. OpenOffice spent a long time rewriting GPL/LGPL code to ensure they could keep their license pure which is one of the reasons they're so much further behind LibreOffice.
That's what I said. The "they" in the GP consistently referred to LibreOffice.
LibreOffice uses the GPL/LGPL code because they had no choice - it was the only option available to them since they were forking the source code.
OpenOffice is purely and solely licensed under Apache License version 2. They also didn't have to rewrite code for GPL/LGPL compliance - Oracle wholesale relicensed the work to Apache version 2 before they could contribute it to Apache to start with. A lot of their time was in integrating IBM's Symphony changes, and catching backup after several months of minimal to no development going on; but they've re-established that.
So LibreOffice can pull chances from OpenOffice since Apache License V2 code can be easily relicensed to GPL/LGPL, but OpenOffice cannot pull changes from LibreOffice.
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You get to use Apache 2 software with GPL/LGPL code, but you do not get to rewrite the license that Apache 2 code was released under. The fact that someone gives you permission to use something doesn't mean you get to relicense it however you want.
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So writing a macro in LibreOffice will cause it to be GPL while writing it in OpenOffice don't?
GPL (and copyright law) has a concept of derivative works. Input and output of a program is not typically considered a derivative work - like your documents in LibreOffice.
While IANAL, Macros would be similar to your normal documents as such they would not be considered a derivative work; not really any different than C source running through GCC.
Re:OpenOffice vs LibreOffice (Score:4, Informative)
Your macro isn't GPL if you don't want it to. LibreOffice is LGPL to begin with, not GPL.
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Also, unless you distribute your macro, your question doesn't apply.
You are always free to take GPL code, modify it, and run it yourself without giving the modifications to anyone. You can even make money with that modified code.
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Oh, then that solves that problem. Thanks. Still interesting to think about for applications which are GPL that offers similar functionality.
oh.. this one thing called gcc...
Re:OpenOffice vs LibreOffice (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you considered that it would've taken lots longer for oracle to give up the code, if the devs had stayed? And it might've not happened at all. Of course you haven't. Not to mention that at the point where oracle gave the code, there was lots and lots of done for libre office. Sure it'd be nice to be able to combine the effort, but licensing does not allow that. I don't have anything against open office, but i'm not going to change from libre office until open office is not only to the par with libre office, a lots better than libre office.
But seriously, your description of libre office people running at first sign of trouble is complete bullshit. You are a douche, there's no way around that fact.
Re:OpenOffice vs LibreOffice (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you considered that it would've taken lots longer for oracle to give up the code, if the devs had stayed? And it might've not happened at all. Of course you haven't.
If Oracle had managed the project at all instead of just not saying anything LibreOffice probably wouldn't exist. Most in the community jumped because Oracle wasn't saying anything - period.
Now, if Oracle had done something other than what it did, then OpenOffice would probably be in a state similar to MySQL. May be LibreOffice would exist, but not likely since there was no OpenOffice equivalent of Michael Widenius.
Not to mention that at the point where oracle gave the code, there was lots and lots of done for libre office.
The devs that continue just worked on a lot of technical debt. But they did so at the expense of any future integration with any OpenOffice related project because of the license changes and the fact that they were pretty much guaranteed that the licensing used by LibreOffice would prohibit contributions back to OpenOffice regardless of what happened.
Sure it'd be nice to be able to combine the effort, but licensing does not allow that.
IIRC, that was purposeful, and also a side-effect.
I don't have anything against open office, but i'm not going to change from libre office until open office is not only to the par with libre office, a lots better than libre office.
Fair enough. I prefer OpenOffice over LibreOffice. To each their own.
But seriously, your description of libre office people running at first sign of trouble is complete bullshit. You are a douche, there's no way around that fact.
Well, it wasn't really a "first sign of trouble". It was a lack of trust in Oracle, lack of any communications from Oracle, etc - there were numerous and valid reasons for it. That said, the LibreOffice community also has its own issues in that respect. I participated in the early community building and dropped out when it was clear what kind of community was being formed - and it wasn't what was being advertised. May be that's changed; I don't know - but I'm still not really interested in LibreOffice seeing the product they've put out, I personally find it inferior to OpenOffice.
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Fair enough. I prefer OpenOffice over LibreOffice. To each their own.
Here's the deal though. This is not actually a concern. Hard drives are big these days. You can use both. It is not a cost issue. Both are free.
From an end-user standpoint, few people care about licensing. They care about functional, stable, secure, and free. Both open and libre are cross-platform, and functional, stable, secure, and free - and have portable versions as well. You don't even have to install them. Just grab a portable version of each. Your registry doesn't get touched. All required
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Re:OpenOffice vs LibreOffice (Score:5, Informative)
Many of the developers were already fed up with Sun's poor stewardship of the OpenOffice.org project, hence the go-oo project which hosted many improvements that Sun did not integrate and was the basis of OpenOffice packages that most Linux distributions shipped. Oracle was just the final straw that catalysed a true fork (go-oo was more of a patch set that needed to follow OOo). LO used the GPL because that was pretty much the only option (and maybe the developers think it is better for LO than a permissive licence). LO made big strides, for example in code clean up and build systems even before Oracle decided dump the code on the Apache foundation. The permissive was probably to keep IBM happy, as they have previously released closed derivatives of OO.
What code exactly have LO stolen from AOO? There is nothing new in AOO to be worth taking, LO has always been a step ahead of AOO (and is about 3 steps ahead now). The only possible example is the sidebar, but that was developed by IBM, not Oracle or Apache.
Personally I think Apache should de-list AOO on the grounds that they can't even produce security updates in a timely manor.
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Re: OpenOffice vs LibreOffice (Score:2, Funny)
Sure.
What's the dialling code for 1989?
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That's because we found all the emacs supporters, went to their houses, and killed them.
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Or we went into hiding where you can't find us.
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Oracle shills. ... or trolls.... or both. lol.
So... shrolls?
Or maybe trills?
Three cheers for liberty! (Score:5, Informative)
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According to the summary, the Android version of LibreOffice is available. Does it mean I can now edit my docs, spreadsheets and ppts on my smartphone if I want to?
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If your documents are large enough that you run into file size limits on 32-bit systems, you're using the wrong tool for the job. Word was painful with 50+ Mb in one document, I shudder to think what a Gb-sized document will do.
Re: Three cheers for liberty! (Score:4)
While I have no doubt Outlook can be useful in a giant corporate environment, its IMAP implementation is a horribly slow pile of excrement.
I had a client consistently complain to me his email was always so slow, and he wanted to switch email providers. Specifically, things like loading hia mailbox in the morning would take up to 10 seconds just to sync the header info of less than 20 emails, let alone actually download the whole message. Simple things like moving emails into folders/subfolders was even slower. There were points where the application would freeze up and Windows would do its thing and notify you the application had haulted. Waiting it out it would usually sort itself out in 25+ seconds.
I looked into it and he was using Outlook 2010 and Google Apps over IMAP. I, at the time, was using Google Apps over IMAP in Mozilla Thunderbird with zero issues. Always speedy and never an issue, despite the fact I am not a fan of how Google handles IMAP.
I switched him to Mozilla Thunderbird with the Lightning Calendar Addon and the problem has been solved. It is now 2 years later and haven't heard a peep about his email.
And just for reference the office computers are all of the same built. AMD 6-core full size CPU (not APU), 8GB RAM, Win7 Pro.
Re: Three cheers for liberty! (Score:5, Funny)
I switched him to Mozilla Thunderbird with the Lightning Calendar Addon and the problem has been solved. It is now 2 years later and haven't heard a peep about his email.
Email didn't happen to be your only method of communication with him was it?
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I switched him to Mozilla Thunderbird with the Lightning Calendar Addon and the problem has been solved. It is now 2 years later and haven't heard a peep about his email.
Email didn't happen to be your only method of communication with him was it?
I get what you are getting at, and it's funny, but no.
I had physical access to the office to set it up properly. He even brought in his home laptop so I could configure it the same way for him.
Re: Three cheers for liberty! (Score:4, Informative)
Google over IMAP is ridiculously slow, whenever I've tried it. But yeah Outlook also hobbles IMAP. They want you to buy Exchange, not use free email servers.
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Just to clarify, and while I don't think it actually makes a difference, he is using a paid subscription of Google Apps. Not the free Gmail service.
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I noticed EarthLink's new IMAP's synchronization is/are slow too compared to POP3 in my SeaMonkey v2.33.1's e-mail clients. Maybe I am just spoiled?
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All-in-all, a good day for free software, and a bad day for Microsoft.
Not to rain on your parade.
But LibreOffice remains nothing more than the generic stand-alone office suite of the nineties --- and conspicuously absent is a credible, full-featured, open source alternative to Outlook.
Microsoft positions MS Office ---- very successfully ---- as simply one component of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size.
Office 365 for Healthcare [microsoft.com]
Not to rain on your parade, but LibreOffice/OpenOffice can do everything that MS Office does and more.
For instance, with scripting - MS Office is limited to VBScript; sure you can extend with custom libraries but that's really about it. LibreOffice/OpenOffice support many scripting languages (Python, JavaScript, BasicScript - derived from VBScript - just to name a few) in addition to adding custom libraries that any of those languages can load.
Document support? LibreOffice/OpenOffice supports Microso
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We're doing the same shit with these things that we were doing in the 1990s. "MS Word" is still no match for a dedicated desktop publishing program of the 1990s either, despite creeping featurism that's not what it's for. A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet and "MS Excel" is still just as shitty at graphing as "MS Works" was, but it gets the job done for non-technical stuff, and "scalc" is in the same situation. "MS
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Wait. This libre office has no outlook component? That is the only thing I use that forces me on windows office 2010.
An office suite does not need tight integration with a mail client. If you want a free replacement for Outlook, try Claws Mail or Thunderbird. (Migration will likely be difficult because Outlook has some of the worst exportation functions I have ever seen, but it will be worth it.)
Re:Three cheers for liberty! (Score:4, Informative)
Thunderbird + Lightning Extension + Davmail replaces Outlook in Exchange Server environments.
Thunderbird ships with the Lightning add-on enabled by default as of June [mozilla.org].
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I use the same setup, but you cannot schedule conference rooms with Lightning, nor examine anyone's calendar. At least in OWA you can schedule conference rooms, so I still haven't used Outlook in 10 years!
Apache Openoffice is "dormant"? (Score:5, Informative)
Having no release manager and no one contributing code for 9 months seems like more of a "Dead but hasn't stopped twitching" sort of state.
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Having no release manager and no one contributing code for 9 months seems like more of a "Dead but hasn't stopped twitching" sort of state.
Dev and user lists are still very active. I would hardly consider AOO to be "dead" by any means.
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If you consider mails on the dev list about buildbots down and how to find a release manager and a resigning project chair to be "very active" ...
Re:Apache Openoffice is "dormant"? (Score:5, Funny)
UI changes? (Score:2)
I like the old UI. It works well for those of us who are working on desktops and laptops.
Hope they have the old UI or something similar as the default when it realises you don't have a touch screen.
Oracle Happened (Score:5, Informative)
Oracle bought out Sun. When they looked at their IP portfolio, they appeared to have lost their minds, and assert their ownership over several open-source projects. Yes, I believe it was some 26 programmers who left Open-Office and started LibreOffice. Then Oracle was falling out of brainshare, and didn't seem want to appear as an orgre, but it was already out of its cave by then.
What happened: Oracle's possessiveness made LibrieOffice into the superior office suite it is today!
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It would be in poor taste to mention that, I hope the wall Oracle is pounding it's head against over this has a coat-hook somewhere on it, so I won't.
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Yes, I believe it was some 26 programmers who left Open-Office and started LibreOffice.
Not quite. There were only 3 people that actually founded LibreOffice; everyone else were more or less lemmings in the matter, and those three made decisions "for the community" when they wanted the decision to go a certain way even before the community was finished discussing the matter (f.e CLA's). That's why I dropped out of TDF/LO - it wasn't really a community.
apache foundation? (Score:2)
Why did apache foundation agree to take on responsibility for openoffice? It was kind of a poisoned chalice.
Re:apache foundation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would the GPL license be a problem for corporate environments?
Unless you change the code and distribute the changed version outside your organisation, the license really doesn't matter much.
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Why would the GPL license be a problem for corporate environments? Unless you change the code and distribute the changed version outside your organisation, the license really doesn't matter much.
Can LibreOffice support proprietary add-ins? I'm not sure whether the GPL allows this.
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As long as you don't distribute them outside the organization, GPL shouldn't care -- GPL is all about distribution.
A lot of the organizations that make addins do generally want to distribute them to companies to use them.
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A lot of corporations have a no-GPL-in-the-door policy. Yeah I know, but still a fact.
they confiscate your android phone at the door?
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A lot of corporations have a no-GPL-in-the-door policy. Yeah I know, but still a fact.
they confiscate your android phone at the door?
Those with Android phones have to climb in through the window. LOL
Most data centers don't have windows, many of them don't have Windows.
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I can attest to this. It's usually a matter of confusion by the managers or corporate attorneys. In other cases it's pure greed: they wish to proprietize the basic product of others and sell their added features, their "secret sauce", at a premium. This was the core of many, many failed dotcoms, and I've seen it at the core of development teams who provided no benefit to the company in the long run. But they did manage to defend bureaucratic turf and departmental resources from review by essentially hiding
Re:apache foundation? (Score:5, Funny)
Companies won't use any software that they can't make closed source derivatives of. That why no company uses MS Office.
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They can make it "closed source" in the sense that they do not redistribute any changes they make for use within their environment, providing they do not deliver the compiled product to external parties. The GPL only kicks in when you want to redistribute derivatives of the project - not when you want to make changes for external use.
So, you're wrong.
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not when you want to make changes for external use
s/external/internal/
sorry about that.
Data binding? (Score:2)
Is there anything out there that straightforwardly automates databinding LibreOffice controls to an XML data structure?
I'm talking primarily about controls where you can type in text and that text will automatically appear in other content controls that are bound to the same XML data node.
I've done it in Word via VBA, but it's not something that I would recommend for others to use. Is there something like this for LibreOffice that makes the process easy for the user.
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rube goldberg called, he wants his thesis project back
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Is there a better solution available in LibreOffice? Any hint, Rube?
Rounding error? (Score:2)
LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release
Version 5 = 10th major release? Were they using excel [joelonsoftware.com] to calculate their version number?
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LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release
Version 5 = 10th major release? Were they using excel [joelonsoftware.com] to calculate their version number?
It's almost as bad as going 3.11, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10.
and they *still* haven't got outline mode (Score:2)
I don't understand why either of these guys (Open OR Libre) can't get their act together and implement something with the functionality of MS Word's Outline Mode. This has probably been the singe most requested feature in Open/Libre Office for *years* (requests go back to at least 2002), and it has steadily been ignored. It's the *only* reason I continue to use Word...
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Some things that people think will be very useful are just not cared about by the people releasing software.
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Why not take your MS Office budget for a year ($1M?) and hire someone (or a few someones) to build that feature for you,
You know, even at full retail, that'd get you 10,000 copies and include a very long-lived support agreement. And - protip - if you're spending 7 figures you can get a pretty hefty discount, too.
RPM packaging awfulness still present with 5.0 (Score:2)
If your distro (e.g. CentOS 6) doesn't carry the latest LibreOffice release, then you have to download it from the official LibreOffice site. Unfortunately, a litany of RPM packaging disasters [richardlloyd.org.uk] still abound with 5.0. I've never seen any Open Source software as badly RPM-packaged as the official LibreOffice RPMs!
It's a word processor (Score:3)
We've only been doing word processors for decades now.
Why do word processors need new features at this point? Why is this not a "done" thing?
So many software projects are destroyed by the inability of developers to say "Well, that tool is finished."
When are we going to see LibreOfficeOS, I wonder. It kept the browser developers amused, maybe you guys should do that?
Re:It's a word processor (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because MS Word and L/OO Writer are not word processors anymore. They're WYSIWYG document creation tools, i.e. they attempt to combine text input, text management, and document layout into one tool.
Besides which, word processors aren't feature complete yet. Even advanced text-only word processors like Textpad and Notepad++ are constantly adding new features, and has a leg up on Word/Writer on things like search and cursor movement.
And with persistent connectivity, there's a whole new layer of features for everyone to add.
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They're WYSIWYG document creation tools
they have been since the mid 80's and still do the same job as my mac SE, so back to the op...
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They attempt to do it but still fall short of the desktop publishing stuff of the early 1990s, which is probably just as well because a lot of features to tweak can be a serious time sink. That leaves it neither fish nor fowl, a kitchen sink full of parts that has way more than you need for one task but n
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> Why do word processors need new features at this point?
Unicode for multiple languages, and the desire to embed graphics.
Meanwhile, still no decent HTML word processing ( (Score:3)
So LO has a few more features, and hopefully fixed a few bugs.
But there is still no decent writing tool for our current needs.
When I need to write something, it usually doesn't need to be printed on A4 (or Letter) paper. It is to be viewed on some digital display. And it doesn't need to be pixel-precise. Just well structured to be understandable. So the natural format would be HTML with CSS, which has become a universal format that can be displayed on anything, and can even be searched as plain text with grep and the like when needed.
But there is no word processing program that produces sane HTML/CSS. The real word processing programs which have all the features and tools to help for writing produce totally insane HTML. The HTML tools are designed for programmers or "web designers" (whatever that really is these days), not for plain writing of content. In the end, I often just send an HTML email done in Thunderbird, or I use Amaya, and mostly a plain text editor with a browser window to re-read it. But none of this is a comfortable solution. The alternative is to write in MS Word or Libre/OpenOffice, and produce a f*ing PDF.
I have been longing for a modern "Ami Pro for HTML/CSS" for the last 15 years...
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1. Create .html text file .html text file in browser
2. Open
3. Write content in text editor.
4. Save file.
5. Refresh browser window
6. Fix any broken tags
7. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If all you're doing is creating content, that's all you need to do. If you want fancy WYSWIG features, you're barking up the wrong tree to expect to do it with "real" HTML support. WYSWIG implies that you have precise control over layouts; HTML presumes you have no precise control over layouts. The goals are incompatible.
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I mean [W]hat[Y]ou[S]ee[I]s[W]hat[Y]ou[G]et.
Man I hate migraine days...
Minor complaints (Score:2)
I don't really like the sidebar thing. Minimizing it is easy, but then there's a very dark, very obvious, poorly aligned button on the right side. Preferably i'd like to remove it entirely, but getting the color toned down might be an acceptable alternative.
They still have the messed up column and row header colors. Back in 2.1 the headers were a nice solid dark grey. Then sometime between then and 3.4 they added shading. The "inner" hal
Not so minor complaint (Score:2)
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Did you miss the (large green) LibreOffice Built in help in English (US) download link that is located right below the Main Installer download?
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Thanks for pointing it out though!
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That's quite a long time, and by the way, open office was not massive pile of shit. It worked great for me 7 years ago. I've been using libre office instead of open office ever since libre office was released.
As for starting up, libre office writer seems to start about as fast as word 2010, which is a massive pile of shit. And you can use that quick start thing, that loads on windows start.
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As for starting up, libre office writer seems to start about as fast as word 2010, which is a massive pile of shit.
Massive pile of shit? Word 2010 usually starts in 2 seconds.
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But it is still a massive pile of shit.
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Or people who hate wasting a sheet of paper at the end of every document because they just can't remove that final page break if it comes after a table. Either/or.
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LibreOffice Writer seems to start in around 0.35 seconds on this PC*. I'm not certain about that, because it's really hard to measure something that fast.
*i7-4790, 8 GB RAM, SSD, Gentoo Linux
I remember starting OpenOffice 6 or 7 years ago, and it was indeed painfully slow at starting back then.
Usability seems fine to me, but I'm not a power office suite user.
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Re:Question for user community (Score:5, Informative)
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Grab LibreOffice and check it out. If startup time is a key point for you, install and enable the QuickStart feature. It'll pre-load part of LibreOffice as Windows starts up and then let it sit idle in the background, just like Microsoft Office does to improve startup time.
FYI - OpenOffice has long had that feature, even back in version 3.0.
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I know. It's been in OO since before LO existed. Just wasn't sure if the poster was aware of it.
I just wanted a fair comparison in the case of OO vs LO. That said, I believe one of them was working towards not needing it at all; but it's been a while since I saw that discussion, so it was probably LO that was doing that.
Re:Question for user community (Score:5, Funny)
I understand why you're hesitant to try it out and see for yourself, being such a costly program and all.
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You may reach a level of professional success and responsibility where you measure cost not in dollars but in total time required to get from start to finish.
Money is fungible, time is precious. This is why many "free" alternatives really aren't. I support the principals of FOSS and eagerly adopt FOSS tools wherever they pass an honest cost/benefit analysis. I think the FOSS community would have more success if they stopped thinking "free" is their main advantage. Cost is measured in time/hassle/fuss.
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Re:Question for user community (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, you silly kids! What the OSS fanatics fail to understand is that once a person leaves graduate school to get a "real job" in the "real world" that time suddenly becomes much more important to money for many, many people. Saving a few hundred bucks on software is pointless (to me) if I have to spend more than an hour dicking with it, for example.
I understand exactly what you're talking about, and I agree that cost-benefit analyses have to be made.
But there is also a problem in corporate culture where cost-benefit analyses are focused too much on the immediate future. Paying $100/year to license software may seem worth it if you're just using that software for a year and retraining may require a few hours.
But what about after 3 years? Or 5 years? Or 10 years? And what about other fringe benefits of OSS, like your ability to customize the code yourself if you want a new feature? If you're a big business and you want to complain that you lack feature X in LibreOffice, you could either pay Microsoft thousands of dollars annually (perhaps tens of thousands, in a big company), or you could use that money to pay a developer to add feature X to LibreOffice and customize it to do exactly what you want (rather than what Microsoft gives you).
And then there's end-of-life concerns, too. Do you want to pay to retrain all your employees when Microsoft decides whatever its next random mutation of UI happens? Or do you pay Microsoft extra to continue security patches after your version is no longer supported? Or do you just use that money to pay people who can patch your free OSS suite, which can be maintained by anyone since the source is available?
These are all cost-benefit analyses. But often they aren't actually decided on that basis by large corporations -- they are decided because "Microsoft Office is the standard" and people in power to make decisions don't want to have to deal with the switch or don't believe "free" could possibly be as good, or they don't consider alternatives to get the features they want in OSS that might be cheaper than paying licensing fees for many years.
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...once a person leaves graduate school to get a "real job" in the "real world"...time suddenly becomes much more important to money for many, many people. Saving a few hundred bucks on software is pointless (to me) if I have to spend more than an hour dicking with it, for example. For other people, a few hundred bucks (actually Office 365 is only $100/year) might be worth two hours of their time to dick with. Anything more than that, and it's not worth my time
Well, whatever works best for you, works best for you, of course. But my mileage has varied.
Whenever I've started a job someplace that uses a lot of proprietary, licensed software, it always takes quite a while for me to get a license. I invariably have to explicitly ask my manager or the IT department to get me a license, even though there's no possible way I would have been able do my job without it. I can only ask for the license after I find out I need a particular product, of course, and in extreme
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I find it hard to believe that you have such a busy schedule that you can't take five minutes to download and fiddle around with a piece of free software yet you have plenty of time to post regularly on slashdot.
Furthermore, if it takes you more than an hour to figure out how to complete basic tasks in a word processor that uses UI metaphors that have been around since the eighties then I suspect your lack of free time comes not from your hyper productivity but from your inefficiency.
Sorry to be a bit snide
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Everyone makes so much money on their free time.
I have a lot better things to do with my free time than futz around with office suites. I've got Google Docs that I can get to from pretty much any device and I've got MS Office on my laptop and iPhone. That seems fine for me though my use cases are admittedly pretty basic.
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If you take offense at being called an open source fanatic then you probably do not belong here. I am an open source fanatic. I also use closed source software. In fact, I am using a Windows OS right now on this laptop to type to you. I am still an open source fanatic. I love open source. I love the cost, I love the learning curve, I love being immersed in the culture. I love finding bugs and reporting them (or, better, seeing if I can figure out how it is fixed). When I do write software that I bother to r
LibreOffice works great for my company (Score:5, Informative)
Last time I tried using Open Office 6 or 7 years ago it was a massive pile of shit.
I standardized our company on OpenOffice (and later LibreOffice) about 5 years ago. It's worked great. There may be specific features in Microsoft Office that make it a non-starter for some people but I think most people will hardly notice the difference. If your company already is tied to Microsoft then switching might be painful but if you are starting from scratch I would go with LibreOffice in most cases over Microsoft Office.
Is LibreOffice a significant improvement?
OpenOffice in my experience has been progressing more slowly than LibreOffice for the last few years. I switched our company to LibreOffice as a result.
Does the word processor start up as fast as M$ Word?
Kind of a meaningless question. Both can be loaded on system startup and thus will "start up" in just a few seconds as a result. If that is your biggest concern however I think you really didn't take a very hard look at OpenOffice "6 or 7 years ago".
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http://www.infoworld.com/article/2937816/open-source-software/libreoffice-debuts-in-the-mac-app-store.html
From that article: "There are a rather large number of quite tedious technical problems to fix.” These included adding the required sandboxing, changing the behavior of LibreOffice to obey rules about read-write access to files within packages,"
You know, that's possibly not the best attitude the team could have taken. Sandboxing and obeying rules about not writing to your declared program files are actually both good things, and I hope the they make it back into the core package. Yes, they're "quite