LibreOffice 5.2 Officially Released (softpedia.com) 103
prisoninmate writes from a report via Softpedia: LibreOffice 5.2 is finally here, after it has been in development for the past four months, during which the development team behind one of the best free office suites have managed to implement dozens of new features and improvements to most of the application's components. Key features include more UI refinements to make it flexible for anyone, standards-based document classification, forecasting functions in Calc, the spreadsheet editor, as well as lots of Writer and Impress enhancements. A series of videos are provided to see what landed in the LibreOffice 5.2 office suite, which is now available for download for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Re: Star Office (Score:2)
I remember going with OpenOffice for the first time because it loaded very quickly compared to ms office. I switched back because the opposite later became true. Has libreoffice fixed the slow load times?
I'd actually prefer a really nice web driven office suite that runs locally however. Something to the effect of having a daemon running on my NAS along with sickrage, couchpotato, and rtorrent.
Re: Star Office (Score:5, Interesting)
Has libreoffice fixed the slow load times?
I think it has, I use Libreoffice on Linux Mint on an oldish Dell laptop. It loads pretty well on that.
My son has been using it as his Office Suite for homework on a reasonably good Toshiba laptop and when I ask him if he likes using it he just shrugs and says "It works just as well as anything else". I guess the real problem will be compatibility with MS Office. Microsoft will do their best to make that as hard as they can I would think.
Re: Star Office (Score:4, Informative)
"It works just as well as anything else".
That just about sums it up. How much more can you cram into a digital typewriter that 99% of the population needs?
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You don't actually use word processors, I'm guessing. LibreOffice can't even do the most basic formatting correctly, it's so brain dead. It's a fine free option for people who just need to write a letter a few times a year. For anything more, it's painful. I hate Windows but give Office its due, even a decade-old version of Office is far better than LO.
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Bull. How about you list those basics it doesn't do?
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Re: Star Office (Score:5, Insightful)
A decade old version of Office is better than a recent version of Office.
LO has been getting progressively better. Office has been getting progressively worse.
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You don't actually use word processors, I'm guessing.
Actually I have used various office suites for several decades, an old Atari 800 word processor, Claris Works on the Mac, and versions of Microsoft Office since the Windows 3.1 days, and several open source projects. I have written years of reports, brochures, and resumes in varying versions of Word. I have created countless Power Point slide shows, and as a Biology major, crunched many numbers and charts in Excel. I have edited and maintained MS Access front end interfaces connected to SQL Databases. Oh,
Office Compatibility (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess the real problem will be compatibility with MS Office. Microsoft will do their best to make that as hard as they can I would think.
The problem is that Microsoft can't actually do that much:
- Their "Office XML" is supposed to be a standard too (like Open Document) and they are supposed to follow their own standard (although for a very long time their own office suite wasn't actually compliant with their own standard that they've published. And still this standard is an horrible mess leaving much potential holes for abuse).
But in my experience (user of this suite for ~15 years - since StarOffice started to become opensource) compatibility has progressed a lot.
In the past few years: .docx (Word XML) files (and even older .doc plain Word) tend to open flawlessly in LibreOffice Writer. .doc version) page-setting weirdness that is printer-driver dependent (Yes. Actually. Try changing the printer you're targeting in "print setup..." in older versions of Word, the page layout will subtly change). .xlsx (Excel XML) files (and even older .xls plain Excel) have never failed me in LibreOffice Calc.
(Save the very rare slight mis-alignement of one embed object OLE/COM).
Most actual differences come from:
- missing font libraries. (But most modern Linux distribution feature scripts to download most common fonts)
- (with older
- (Sadly, still happening. Luckily, not a lot) the original layout is an absolute clusterfuck (like indentations and centering done with "space bar")
As I said, they are very rare.
Including all the formulas that they contains. (only complex scripts written in VBA have given me problems).
And with this, nearly everything I encounter at work seems to be okay, so I can be productive under Linux for the past few years.
On the other hand, presentation (.pptx and .ppt) seem to be a hit-and-miss with LibreOffice Impress.
Simple presentations seem to work.
Specially when done correctly (elements are correctly connected together)
But lots of document have weird layouts (all the text is in the same box, and relies on empty row to make room for pictures. Arrows and boxes were just put as-is and then align approximately by keyboard, etc.)
and these convert badly.
Luckily for me, lots of people export them to PDF.
Re: Office Compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at the official release notes [documentfoundation.org] impress/presentation is always an afterthought. (Why the hell does slashdot link to a random softpedia article?) This is true for every release. I wish we could get some development/love on impress. I use it for all of my class lectures.
The auto size text to box was broken so long that after 3 years , I had enough and spent a week learning the code so I could fix it. Which ended up adding only a single line of code.
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Excel spreadsheets are where it normally breaks for me. As an engineer I find I need to open a lot of spreadsheets, often with VBA macros, supplied by manufacturers and hobbyists to calculate tricky parameters. Even without any VBA it seems that Excel handles calculations slightly differently to LO, and sometimes the errors compound enough to give a non-working result.
This stuff really needs to be sorted out. Define some standards for handling calculations and some test cases, and mandate something open lik
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Yes, it does load quickly now, especially if you enable the quickstarter option found in
Tools > Options > Memory and tick the "Enable Systray Quickstarter" box
It loads instantly on my SSD
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With modern SS drives, nearly anything loads instantly!
I remember counting program load times in minutes, now it's like an Olympic finish.
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Re: Star Office (Score:4, Informative)
Has libreoffice fixed the slow load times?
Just tested: 1 second for LibreOffice Writer cold (ie first time opened since turning on laptop). Hardware: Macbook Retine Pro 13"; Software: Ubuntu Gnome with LibreOffice 5.1.4.2 installed directly from repositories. Subsequent starts of LibreOffice are effectively instantaneous.
Based on experience with my rather more powerful work laptop, that's considerably faster than MS Office.
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Owncloud does that for a few file formats. It means having to run a webserver locally if you want to have a web driven office suite when you are offline though.
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There's this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_office_suites#Online_office_suites [wikipedia.org]
however I'm keeping an eye on these:
https://open365.io [open365.io]
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ [collaboraoffice.com]
Yes and No (Score:3)
I still find LO Writer to be utterly bug-ridden. It screws up styles and page formatting with dismal regularity, sometimes in unrecoverable ways. Its OK if you're writing small documents, letters, etc. If you want to write anything large or with anything more than the most basic sort of formats, you're better off looking at a DTP program, Writer is NOT your tool.
Calc is OK, but its VERY easy to crash. The data range functionality is buggy as all heck. Often its literally just impossible to declare some rang
Re:Yes and No (Score:5, Interesting)
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I agree. Until last year I did a lot of document editing for a charity. Documents I worked on had multiple levels of outlining. I had bought Office 2007 some years ago so I could check compatibility. After version 4 of LibreOffice appeared I stopped using Office. I run LO on openSuse on an old Dell Optiplex. No problems. People have sent me older Office docs which had their formatting screwed by newer versions of Office and I have been able to fix them. Recently I discovered I can not only open and edit Ope
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As for your compatibility comment. LO certainly does read MS files better than MS programs read them.
Re:Yes and No (Score:4, Insightful)
MS Office regularly crashes on me. The document recovery feature in MS Office is also absolutely horrible. It offers the user multiple copies but it is never clear which copy has the most recent updates.
I have had LibreOffice crash on me as well, but the document recovery feature in LibreOffice is so smooth I never worry. It recovers easily and flawlessly even after the loss of power.
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Yeah, well, Ironically this is another sweet thing, the document recovery features of LO no longer work properly. It just spits out a whole lot of angry messages when it tries to recover claiming that there is some sort of 'lack of permission', but I'm a 30 year Unix/Linux veteran, there's no FSCKing lack of permission, corrupt files, nothing. Its just somehow squirreled some crap away in someplace that is telling it to try to reload files that don't exist, or something. Frankly I'm rapidly losing interest
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See, I don't have a problem with the MS Word compatibility. I agree, its quite solid (there may be glitches of course, Word and Writer both have masses of features and probably some don't translate perfectly). Its LO itself, internally, that has the issues. I have one larger project in particular where its gotten to a point that in essence the document is moribund. I can edit it, but no amount of editing will any longer result in a net decrease in the amount of formatting issues. I've resigned myself to jus
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What, you want to watch over my shoulder and I can show you how it garbles up styles? I mean this isn't some kind of random FUD, this is I CAN FUCKING SHOW YOU LETTER BY FRIGGING LETTER. Now, MOST people probably don't try to actually layout pages, they just type and whatever it looks like they're happy with, and if they can drop in a page number, a bullet list, and a few headings here and there they don't probably even notice when they're fucked up.
I have a 200-something page project that uses a master doc
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Oh, and PDF output, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Yes, it works if the document is simple. If its not very simply laid out, forget it, LO makes an utter hash of larger documents that have frames or tables in them. It gets close, but close is not good enough when it leaves off whole chunks of text, overflows text outside of tables, cuts things off, etc. Again, its a matter of degree. If you print out your 3 page resume with a page header, a couple headings, a bullet list, and one or two customized styles, its
Re:Does anyone even use SO any more? (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, MS's "standards" are not standards, and poorly documented. One would have match Office kludge-for-kludge to make it truly compatible with Office.
MS has negative financial incentive to make it easier to migrate away from Office. Bad formats make them rich.
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When one has the majority of the market share, and MS Word is a dictionary word, the "standards" Microsoft chooses to follow "ARE" the standards.
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That's a standard for exchanging documents in XML format, not documentation on the existing Office file formats. I just opened a .docx document in an editor, and it's not XML (unless it's somehow compressed or encrypted XML). One would have to do a Save-As in Office to get an XML version.
The "test" here is for a non-MS product be able to open and read an Office file as-is and render it the same way it would in MS-Office.
Further, the mere existence of a written standard says nothing about the quality or accu
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Of course it's not XML - it's a ZIP file full of XML, JPG, PNG and what-have-you files.
The "PK" at the very beginning of the file should have been a huge hint...
Wow so harsh, and so vague (Score:1)
You insult without giving even the slightest detail, it almost looks like you did not even bother to test, even if you did try it you spend more than half a paragraph being nasty but give no detailed reason why. Yes you do not like the look but what makes it less usable (or is it just different and so slower for you as a experienced word user)? What failed when loading and how? What failed when saving and how? The type of failure and how it happens is important if you want to throw around such insults as it
I don't get this (Score:3)
I've had zero problems with MSOffice compatibility. Admittedly, there may just not be a huge amount that I am asking of the program, but I generate simple documents and send them out as .docx all the time, and I don't get any complaints. Nor do I see that they're misformatted. Likewise I load MSOffice files, both Word and Excel, on a pretty regular basis. I've had zero word problems recently, and the only problems I had with Excel files were some very oddball macros that just didn't make it over correctly.
I
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I recently tried to use LO 5.1 professionally editing MS Office docs. Unfortunately, these documents had many imported diagrams.
ANY document that contained MS Office drawings failed importing miserably. I ended up needed to export each editable drawing in the Word document and convert it to a PNG image and import it. It was the only way I found to keep from screwing up the diagrams in the Word documents.
So unless LO 5.2 fixed working with Office drawings, forget compatibility.
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That's quite possible. I haven't had to do that. Like I said elsewhere on this topic, I have LOTS of fun problems with LO Writer, but at a BASIC level of doing simple small stuff that is probably 99% of what people do, its reasonably good. I just wish it would go beyond that because the alternatives are pretty expensive.
Tables getting better! (Score:1)
Until 5.0, Tables were the most missed spreadsheet feature in Calc. Now they are really catching up.
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Version 5.0 finally "turns the tables" on the competition!
Tables? (Score:2)
I'm not sure what feature you mean. Pardon my ignorance.
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Tables are not pivot tables, which LO has had for ages. Tables are a crucial spreadsheet feature, providing structured references to rectangular arrays of data. Elementwise operations become trivial with tables. A collection of tables can be used similarly to a relational database.
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You CAN do that in Google Sheets, which has some quite advanced features (though it also is somewhat more clunky to do some fairly routine things).
I'm not sure what Excel has though vs what Calc has. In calc you can use VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP (and there are a couple other flavors too) and you can use those with rectangular data ranges. The result is PRETTY flexible in many respects, BUT you definitely lack things like subqueries, or even the ability to do searches on more than one column value or complex sorti
Not like the old days (Score:2)
On my Dell XPS 13 Ultra book, used primarily for research, Face Book, Amazon, and web games, I installed LibreOffice in the off chance I may need to create, edit, or view a document. I opened it up a grand total of once... to make sure it worked after install.
For me, I no longer use a computer to create documents, and PDF's have become the gold standard for read-only digital documents and editable forms. My college days of typed reports are gone, and the cloud makes traditional file keeping less relevant.
In
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"In my experience it seems the "Office Suite" is becoming less and less relevant."
Without being rude to you, it just sounds like you do less and less work on the computer... :)
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Yes, that is true. I did mean to convey that in my post. ;)
But it seems that unless you are working a job where specific documents are required, these days a student or worker could just as easily write an essay in Gmail and let auto-correct fix spelling mistakes, without the need to use a full-scale Office Suite.
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You're right, very few users will be hacking up 100k-word software specifications (my own primary use for a word processor) but for general non-business use there are lots of reasons to need a word processor of some kind:
- Make a CV
- Write a job application
- Write a formal letter to the council complaining about street repairs
- Play around with ideas for a party/wedding invitation (not everyone understands vector arts, let alone use Illustrator or Inkscape)
- Start wri
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Computers are tools (and toys for some of us), and as such our way of using them changes with the stage of life we are in and the goals we are currently pursuing. At one time, I used Word processors more, now it's the Internet browser. I'd say we both use those tools, just in different ways and levels of degree. I agree with your assessment of what computers should help us do in life. At this stage, I'm willing to settle for any mainstream office suite that is compatible with my old files, and the applicati
No, but don't expect much (Score:3, Informative)
Base is the least "loved" part of the suite, programmers seem to end up using an independent SQL database, and most users end up on a spreadsheet, for better or for worse. This is more the case nowadays as home versions of MS Office lack Access. This is not to say they are not trying but at the moment the most of the Base work is going on swapping out the old Java based database engine for a better one (http://firebirdsql.org/) this is not quite finished yet, although at the current rate I would expect it
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I use Apache OpenOffice [openoffice.org], not "LibreOffice". It may not have some fringe features due to licensing differences (LibreOffice can swipe any Apache code, but not the same is not necessarily true the other way around), but nothing I am missing.
Apache uses its own license, like pretty much every thing else they do, which did cause some delay in getting the initial Apache version out as they cleaned-up and rewrote code as needed; but it is the true successor to Star/OpenOffice, not put out by a bunch of whiny cryb
Re:Off Base (Score:5, Informative)
What are you on about? Two months? Closer to two years! LO started in 2010. OpenOffice was, as far as anyone could tell, a dead project at that time. The LO folks spent a full year cleaning up the code before making their initial release in early 2011. It was half a year later that Oracle finally (after a year and a half!) announced they'd be relicensing the old OOo code and donating to Apache. What was LO supposed to do? Stop everything and wait to see if this promised code drop (of code they'd already spent a year cleaning up, and another six months improving and adding features to) actually happened, and start over from scratch? That would be dumb!
Now, for a while there, things might have gone in all sorts of different ways. I installed both, and was happy to go with whichever one turned out the best. But AOO completely failed to attract developers. They had some strong support from IBM for a while, but IBM seems to have abandoned them at this point. They're down to a tiny handful of developers, and they currently have a major security bug (CVE 2016-1513), and they can't even figure out how to get updates to their users, even though they have a patch!
I've got no skin in the game. I like Apache too. Have several friends who are members of the Foundation. But it's clear to me at this point that LO has won, and AOO is a dead project walking. AOO has about a dozen people who have contributed in the last year. LO has hundreds. LO has more changesets accepted per day than AOO has in months! LO has backing from several major companies, most notably RedHat and Collabora. AOO lost their only corporate sponsor, IBM, over a year ago.
You use what you want to. AOO is gone from my system, and I don't miss it at all. Being supported by Apache doesn't mean much if you haven't got any developers, and can't even figure out how to get a security fix out to your users!
LibreOffice is a winner!! (Score:5, Insightful)
I bought 5 laptops that each came with a free year of Office 360.
I sold the Office 360 activations for $30 each and installed LibreOffice.
After using LibreOffice for about a year, I can't understand why anyone would buy Office 360.
You can try the portable version without even doing an install - run it from a flash stick even.
The portable version will be somewhat slow, but allows you to evaluate everything except speed.
If you plan to buy or renew an Office 360 subscription, download LibreOffice first.
It's free, easy and you might like it better.
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How about significantly better UI usability? It looks more aesthetically pleasing? It produces better, and more professional looking documents out of the box? It integrates more seamlessly with document management systems? It integrates better with actual ERP style information systems? It has more collaborative editing features?
The list goes on, but the thing is: Office has not been handled by Microsoft for the last 10+ years as an application. It's a platform. LO has been handled as stand-alone application
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The main issue I have found is that it doesn't open some of the spreadsheets made in MS Office that I have to handle. It seems to have issues with the formulas and of course it can't run VBA macros. For example, my company produces a time accounting spreadsheet that uses a VBA macro to take the month and produce a day/product grid that you can then fill in.
To get full compatibility we need an open standard for macros. LibreOffice uses some dialect of BASIC. Maybe Javascript would be an option as it could ru
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LO realizes that this groupware stuff should not be part of an office suite.
There are plenty of others in the open source world. Thunderbird, Evolution, Kmail/Kontact, etc. Take your pick.
No, thanks (Score:3)
I already migrated half of the technical documentation I maintain to LaTeX. What a buggy piece of software LO is.
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TeX and LaTeX are brilliant, but I think it is somewhat unfair to compare LO to them, as the problems they solve are rather different. The TeX family are for top-end typesetting, particularly in science and technology publications, and it performs that task exceptionally well, whereas LO et al. are for use in an office. TeX is aimed at expert users, office applications are aimed at the average, user and have to take into account that many or most have little, real understanding of computers. And of course,
LibreOffice gets better with every update (Score:5, Interesting)
Several years ago, I was a heavy MS Office user that used Outlook for email, wrote 20-60 page reports in Word, produced a couple of Excel spreadsheets daily with scientific and financial data, and created many presentations in PowerPoint. A large part of every working day was spent in MS Office.
A few issues had me looking for an alternative;
1) My Word documents would often become corrupted, growing from a couple of megabyte to tens of megabytes for no reason. Most of the time copy and pasting the whole document into a new document fixed this.
2) MS Office applications would crash regularly, particularly Word, destroying my productivity and making for a miserable working day.
3) When the stupid ribbon interface appeared in MS Office, is took longer to do making basic tasks that were efficiently achieved with traditional menus.
4) I wanted a cross platform office suite so that working Linux was easier.
OpenOffice, then LibreOffice, became that alternative and Office application crashes were a thing of the past. In early versions, MS Office documents were not always accurately rendered by my alternative so I would have to open some documents in MS Office. There were missing features that had me using MS Office for certain tasks, particularly with spreadsheets that Excel did better. Collaborating with colleagues that used MS Office exclusively could be a bit of a pain.
Today, I have no issues opening MS Office documents or saving in an MS Office format for colleagues to use. The issue of missing features is almost entirely gone and it is only my stubbornness for doing things a certain way that ever means that Excel is used. Many people have seen me using LibreOffice and have been converted from MS Office, although subscription models and other MS policies has helped with this. LibreOffice is the only office suite I really use, with MS Office on hanging around as a backup.
LibreOffice just gets better with every release, while MS Office tries to screw their customers more with every release...
That's EVILsoft's business. (Score:2)
Microsoft has been delivering so much evil that Microsoft top managers have proudly decided to change the company's name to EVILsoft.
I know people will think that is a joke, but... maybe it's true.
Still Same Old Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Still Same Old Problem (Score:1)
You might want to actually go to the site and read Meeks' post. Bug fixes are huge in this release. It's pretty bullet proof lately. If you disagree, file a bug, because chances are, no one else has filed it.
If I already have MS Office, (Score:2)
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My vote for best Office version is 2003. Maximum functionality before the damn ribbon entered the picture and killed productivity for moderately proficient users.
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