LibreOffice 6.0 Released: Features Superior Microsoft Office Interoperability, OpenPGP Support (softpedia.com) 251
prisoninmate writes: LibreOffice 6.0 comes two and a half years after the LibreOffice 5.x series, and it's the biggest release of the open-source and cross-platform office suite so far. It introduces a revamped design with new table styles, improved Notebookbars, new gradients, new Elementary icons, menu and toolbar improvements, and updated motif/splash screen.
LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project. Many great improvements were made to the OOXML and ODF filters, as well as in the EMF+, Adobe Freehand, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Pagemaker, FictionBook, Apple Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as well as Quattro Pro import functionality, and to the XHTML export. LibreOffice Online received numerous improvements as well in this major release of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project. Many great improvements were made to the OOXML and ODF filters, as well as in the EMF+, Adobe Freehand, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Pagemaker, FictionBook, Apple Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as well as Quattro Pro import functionality, and to the XHTML export. LibreOffice Online received numerous improvements as well in this major release of LibreOffice.
Good "cheap" option (Score:4, Interesting)
It is a solid option when you do not get office through your work or want to pay the small monthly fee for the home edition.
I would actually consider to use it if it was compatible with all my VBA macros for excel. No work around for these since they are shared with others who use office.
Still, for free.. It is "fine".
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Good option regardless of price (Score:5, Informative)
It is a solid option when you do not get office through your work or want to pay the small monthly fee for the home edition.
It's a a better than solid option even if you do get MS Office. I have no idea why anyone would actually pay to use MS Office at home for non-work purposes. I use LibreOffice every day as I have standardized our company on it. Works great with no more problems than MS Office.
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It's a a better than solid option even if you do get MS Office.
I have been using LibreOffice at works for years, and have yet to run into a problem. I have, though, used Calc to show that Microsoft Excel does not excel at math.
Paying for MS Office (Score:2)
There's no official Linux client, but there appear to be multiple alternatives (https://linuxnewbiegu
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Yeah, it would be nice if during installation there was a was a great big dialog asking "By default, which format should new files be saved in: [Microsoft Office Compatible] or [Open Document Standard]"
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Neither of which help Joe Average, who has barely knows what a "file format" is (that's like, video or spreadsheet or whatever, right?), and whose eyes glaze over as soon as you say the word "settings". Many/most people's concept of a "word processor" begins and ends with the glorified typewriter that is Word, the idea that there's different, incompatible, formats for storing the same sort of data makes no sense to them.
That's part of the reason mp3s remain dominant for music despite several superior alter
Re:Good "cheap" option (Score:5, Informative)
You seem to have this backwards. Recent versions of MS Office can open odt files (although you might have to twist its arm behind its back). Various MS Office versions fail to open docx documents on a regular basis, and the most reliable fix is to open said docx with LibreOffice and then save it again as doc or odt.
The reality is, odt is an iso standard, well defined and guaranteed readable for ever. docx is completely undefined, and even MS dont know what the spec is. Don't use it for documents needed in the long term or off site - ever.
Also MS formats tend to hide your secrets from you but divulge them to unsuitable people at inappropriate moments. Do not use them if you have a bank account or friends you value.
Long time LibreOffice User (Score:3)
Printing (Score:3)
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I just tried it, and it seems to have fixed it for me. No more exporting to PDF and then printing the file. Hooray.
Re:Printing (Score:4, Informative)
Does anybody know if LibreOffice 6 fixes the bug where portrait documents will only print in landscape mode?
If this is the bug you were talking about, it seems to have been fixed in at least 5.4.4
https://bugs.documentfoundatio... [documentfoundation.org]
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I have a MAC and Version: 5.3.7.2, and it still had the bug.
The but was fixed in 5.4.4, so if you upgrade to 5.4.4 or later it should not be a problem.
Side-by-Sides (Score:4)
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Superior MS Office interoperability? (Score:2)
It was already perfect - just ask anyone around here.
The screenshots look good. (Score:3)
I see a menu bar and not an awful ribbon interface.
I'll probably download/install this shortly.
LK
I'll wait for 6.0.1 or 6.0.2 (Score:2)
I'll just wait a few days while everyone installs 6.0 and encounter issues because all those little things will get fixed in 6.0.1 and then a few more things will get fixed a few days after that with 6.0.2.
I used to be a product tester so I don't test software for free. :-p
I wish they'd resolve a couple interface issues... (Score:2)
Second, I really really wish they would abandon the ribbon-like interface. It's a fucking travesty and possibly a crime again
Just tried it - still broken (Score:2)
So I just gave it a try, and my existing complaints still stand.
My current LO test is Slide Transitions in Impress, because for as long as I can remember, the slide transitions have been very broken. Specifically, it seems to be an issue with transitions that make use of OpenGL. As of this version, they're *still* very broken. I'm testing this on a Mac BTW, but in the past I also found the problem existed on Linux as well. I haven't tried the Windows version but according to others, the Windows version
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Only if you use the obscene ones.
But something tasteful, like a quick fade-out/in, is extremely valuable to show the audience that a transition IS taking place. Without it, would be easy for an audience member to miss the fact that the slide changed (they just happened to glance away at the wrong moment, for example).
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Abiword (Score:2)
Thanks for the Abiword reminder. Haven't used it in a while, but always found it relatively lightweight and more pleasing (font rendering?) to use than OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.
Thank you, LO developers (Score:2)
We've standardized on LibreOffice and it's great. Absolutely no compatibility issues with MS Office for us. Installing 6.0.0 now.
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Visio? Kinda ... PageMaker? Not for me (Score:2)
I grabbed a copy to see how it would handle a bunch of old Visio and PageMaker files that no one wants to re-create from scratch.
The Visio files opened fairly well, with only a few rendering glitches (like connecting external endpoints from a network symbol back to its center instead of leaving them unconnected to anything.) I didn't see anything similar to Visio's tool suite in the Libre Draw program, but it may be buried in there somewhere, so I'm not sure about actually working with these files.
The Pag
LibreOffice better (Score:3)
Ever since Microsoft introduced the "Ribbon" Office has become completely UNUSABLE! after almost 10 years dealing with it I STILL can't find SHIT! I use LibreOffice exclusively at home. And run it in a VM in Virtualbox at work. My company went to O365, it is a giant steaming pile of SHIT! It's slow as old people fucking at loading documents and it constantly locks the hell up!
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"A year of Office 365 doesn't even cost as much as 2 hours of may pay and I don’t even make a high-end salary at my work. "
Small wonder, if you work only in May.
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A year of Office 365 doesn't even cost as much as 2 hours of may pay and I don’t even make a high-end salary at my work. Get a better job, poorfag.
I can afford lots of things. Doesn't mean that I have to buy them when there are cheaper alternatives; that extra money can go to things I actually care about.
I can afford the latest iPhone, but I have a four year old BB that does what I need it to do. I can afford a new car, but I have a 13 year old ford that drives where I need to go. I can afford a new xeon workstation, but my current 7 year old i5 is working just fine.
In much the same way, I can easily afford the MS Office license, but why would I buy a
Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregularities? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe there are deliberate file irregularities that Microsoft uses to try to force people to buy new versions of Microsoft Office. If the CEO always wants the latest version of Office, everyone else would then be forced to have the new version, also.
Software companies have found that people who have no interest in technical details are easily abused. Now some software companies are renting their software, and no longer selling it.
A long time ago, I spent several hours writing a document in Microsoft Office. Later I discovered that Office was not able to open the file it had generated.
I was able to open the document in Libre Office. Since then, I use only Libre Office.
Is it possible that most people who have trouble with Libre Office interacting with Microsoft Office have made a mistake in saving the file?
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Maybe there are deliberate file irregularities that Microsoft uses to try to force people to buy new versions of Microsoft Office. If the CEO always wants the latest version of Office, everyone else would then be forced to have the new version, also.
I often see this "the CEO" comment. The reality is the CEO doesn't give a shit and isn't in control of anything other than who a critical business partner is. And as a huge partner you'll find that if a company is large enough to have a CEO then it is large enough to simply pay a yearly contract fee to its partners for which the only decision about which version of the office suite to roll out depends entirely on how close the old one is to end of support.
Mind you if you hit that end of life point the CEO m
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> The reality is the CEO doesn't give a shit
But us lowly workers do.
As was pointed out Libreoffice has greater compatibility with older Word files than Word itself. We now and then get surprised by something that simply does not work.
For starters, I don't if it's about being hard to support, but we don't get successive Word versions. Last time, it was about problems printing with Mailmerge or even in a document I committed the crime to have numbering per section.
It's not just that olde files won't be com
Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the reason Office document interoperability is so difficult is because Microsoft designed these formats for themselves, for their own programs, with no thought to interoperability in either direction, and with other concessions in mind like how the early versions of Word and Excel needed to run on really old computers.
Pretty much exactly ten years ago [joelonsoftware.com] Microsoft released documents to satisfy the EU that detailed exactly how the Word and Excel file formats worked, and they were PDF files that were 400 and 450 pages long. People like yourself speculated that perhaps they had been purposely obfuscated to thwart developers but the truth of the matter is that these things were designed over the course of decades and had a whole lot of stuff in them as a result of the increased complexity of the requirements.
To some extent, Office applications have the contents of the document loaded into memory and the document file itself is basically a memory dump of the contents of the memory serialized to disk. Loading the document deserializes it into memory. People complain about this but again, when your perspective is you need to have this application you're programming write out files and then read them in later, it makes perfect sense as a plan of action. It also explains why occasionally Office breaks compatibility with itself on upgrades which is unacceptable but it happens.
In that vein, LibreOffice has had the specs for the Office documents for a decade now, so I think the "what is the excuse?" question is still pretty valid. But the issue is not that Microsoft deliberately sabotages efforts. They're not that smart and they're not that dumb.
Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti (Score:4, Insightful)
Dumping out the contents of memory might work in very simple cases as a quick and dirty hack, but it's a terrible long term strategy...
Code changes (even changes to the compiler) could change memory layout, and porting to new hardware (64bit, ARM etc) can completely break stuff...
Someone posted earlier about open source applications often feeling sluggish, but this is one of the reasons why - open source apps tend to store the data in well structured formats (eg xml) which require a lot more parsing, but are much better specified and far more reliable.
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The author, Joel Spolsky, was a Program Manager [joelonsoftware.com] on Excel back in the day, so this article is based in part on his experiences working on Excel, it's not just some blogger spitballing.
Re:Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregulariti (Score:4, Insightful)
For starters, let's keep it simple and try comparing Wordpad and Abiword.
Wordpad loads in the blink of an eye. It handles enormous files flawlessly, and I have never seen it crash.
Abiword takes an annoying pause before it can do anything. Not only will it choke on large files, but it won't even run on many popular distros - if it runs at all.
Last night we tried for hours to install the latest version on my son's Debian based Raspberry Pi 3. It comes up with a flashing window. Not only is it useless, but it's even hard to close!
Maybe Microsoft doesn't make it easy to copy Word, but how do you explain the lack of a competitor to Wordpad. Before we start comparing Word and LibreOffice, remember Wordpad vs Abiword. This comparison illustrates what has always been wrong with the Linux desktop.
I feel sorry for any kid that only has a Linux machine for his schoolwork,
For starters, let's try comparing Tangerines and Grapefruit.
Most Tangerines are incredibly easy to peel. I've been able to eat half a dozen Tangerines in one sitting, and never even got juice in my eye.
Grapefruit take forever to peel. Not only does they end up choking me with that less-tasty white stuff all over the juicy parts, but most people don't like them as much - if they'll eat them at all.
Last night my kid and I tried for hours to peel half a dozen Grapefruit, and we ended up with juice everywhere and he kept squirting me right in the eye. He even swears it wasn't on purpose.
Maybe nature doesn't make it easy to turn Grapefruit into Tangerines, but how do you explain the lack of a reasonable competitor to Tangerines? Before we start comparing Pears to Apples, remember Tangerines vs Grapefruit. This comparison illustrates what has always been wrong with Fruit.
I feel sorry for any kid that only gets Grapefruit in his school lunchbox.
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For the "whoosher" who modded "-1: Offtopic"; I'm sorry I didn't include tags. I'll admit my attempt at humor was a bit subtle, and bound to be lost on the hasty reader. It was in response to the idiot AC's statement:
Just read that one sentence over and over a few times, and I think you'll get my point. I wasn't actually expressing any opinion about citrus or any fruit. I love grapefruits, tangerines, pears, apples and LibreOffice.
Complicated organization: Use HTML first, copy... (Score:3)
"Sure there are some users that may use some of the very advanced features that only Office offers, but I think that is a very small percentage of the users."
That seems correct to me. I use LibreOffice to write business letters when it is necessary to use tree-killer paper.
"It [LibreOffice] has given fewer problems than [Microsoft] Office,
I agree. In my comment that started this thread, Does Microsoft use deliberate file irregularities? [slashdot.org], I forgot to mention that I had other pr
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. Ignorance.
Not every workplace provides Office for home use.
Not every home user works in an office (and hence probably wouldn't have it provided)
Not every Office user is a professional (far from it).
Maybe people just want to send letters, open documents from their governments, banks, etc. without having to pay a monthly rental to Microsoft for the privilege (even if they don't use a Microsoft OS on their computer).
P.S. The Office OOXML file formats are an absolute farce. Basically, it just shovels the binary formats of old into an XML file with little to no interpretation or explanation. New documents tend to open just fine. But anything complicated, legacy, upgraded from older Word etc. has a shed-ton of undocumented (and Microsoft basically admit undocumentable) crap.
The EU took them to took where they had to provide a specification for the format and TONS of it is literally just binary shite from old Word formats shoved into a tag. It was complained about in court too. Even getting that far took DECADES.
The file format is opaque, ugly, and not easily transferable / interoperable, which is precisely why we need another office suite that can open it because what's the point of an open format that only one (paid-for) program can actually open?
What LibreOffice does do is get better every iteration.
Home users? They can live off LibreOffice for at least the last two versions.
Power users? Same, but they may need to tweak some small things.
Office users? Same, so long as their developers are aware of the use of both suites.
It's far from a waste of time.
I ran a school's IT. From a Windows laptop, With Libreoffice. If anything I could open more things than those with Word because it handled obscure and old formats that Word couldn't. It was never a problem. A school isn't exactly on the power-user end of fancy macros and DDE links etc. that don't transfer across nicely (because of undocumented / poorly documented Microsoft shite), so it could easily run off LibreOffice (like many schools now run from Google Docs entirely, which has EVEN LESS features).
P.S. I work for a huge school - we do not provide Office to staff, we do not provide Office to students, we do not use Office online. We use Google Docs, offline Office on the premises, and at home people use whatever they buy themselves. We are far from alone in this. As such, Libreoffice is more than useful for those people.
Hell, I get just as many Libreoffice documents as Apple Pages documents coming in from the parents / kids. MS Office can't even start opening the Pages ones properly and chooses "different standards" for showing the OpenXML ones. But Libreoffice will open 99% of what comes through our inboxes (millions of emails a year, and 1 million shared documents on Google Apps, to give you an idea of scale).
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Let's see, free vs. several hundred dollars....
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That's a lousy metric for evaluating an Office suite.
The correct metric is: Does it do what you need it to do?
If it doesn't do what you need, then they could be _paying you_ to use it and you'd still be screwed. Impress for example, is hopelessly broken and still is in v6. If I need to do a professional presentation, I'd be better off writing a document and presenting the resulting PDF than using Impress.
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MS Office is OVERKILL for about 90% of users out there (home or office)
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Maybe we should be dropping copies on Putin!
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True. But that's not my point at all. The majority of the features are completely unnecessary for most people. But that doesn't change the fact that, despite the breathtaking number of flaws, it's one of the most polished office suites available.
Microsoft Office is the benchmark to which all other office suites are compared. Like it or not, this is it. If I have to choose between two suites, and each one has it's share of issues, an average person is most likely going to pick the one that everyone else
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There is no need for Java in any even approximately normal use of LibreOffice.
Also which Office are you talking about? The latest version REQUIRES SSE2, which a P3 doesn't have, so Offfice will not run AT ALL on that laptop of yours.
You're seriously misrepresenting things in that post...
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LibreOffice has better compatibility so it's a good choice for those who need that, but as a Linux user, Gnumeric and AbiWord are much leaner, and still work with most (unfortunately not all) MS Office documents.
Anyhow, choice is great!
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Anyone who actually needs Office gets it through work.
Some people actually need an office suite at home too, because they do more interresting things in their free time rather than sit in front of the TV.
LibreOffice Calc is much better at supporting CSV files than Excel, so it has that going for it.
(though admittedly, anything in the world is better at supporting CSV files than Excel).
p.s. the copyright-encumbered DOCX file format is still a problem for any group (commercial or otherwise) that wants to fully support it.
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copyright-encumbered DOCX format
What do you mean by that? wasn't that issue solved?
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It used to be the case that Office files were essentially the object graph decorated with edge cases. If that is still the case, it cannot be a standard for anything.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
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"You can't even do business without MS Office!"
"Yes I can, I just use StarOffice."
"What? It's unpossible for that to work; I never even heard of it."
-- Any day during the .com boom.
(I usually just used catdoc TBH)
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I remember all the whining how file format was the only reason various open source clones sucked. What's the excuse for anything less than 100% compatibility now?
You've never designed against a moving target have you?
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>Anyone who actually needs Office gets it through work.
You're correct as to MS Office specifically - but not office software in general. Word processors, spreadsheet, and even presentation software are broadly useful on occasion. I write a few documents a year that call for a word processor - it's absolutely not worth buying Office for that. I use spreadsheets far more often, but not for anything that makes me money. Students have even more use for such things, and very many of them can't afford s
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MS not actually following the fake standards they published.
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You can get genuine office for £5 on eBay. While I like open source, when you can get the "real thing" for that sort of money it's not worth the hassle of using anything else. Obviously if you want to use it on an OS other than Windows then OSS is probably still the best option.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
You can get genuine office for £5 on eBay.
Good luck with the licencing on that £5 copy of Office.
I would bet you have trouble with it.
I am currently contracted to a very large multi national company, I use LibreOffice on Linux to do my job everyday. I share documents with others, and never have any problems. In fact I have occasionally used LibreOffice to fix documents that MS Office had corrupted. It also opens a very large selection of file formats that MS Office will not open. As the project I am currently maintaining has been running a very long time, this is quite handy for some of our historic documents.
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You want to expand on that a bit? What exactly do you think is the issue?
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> Maybe we should check the Microsoft Office licence, but I seriously doubt they would appreciate losing sales to people selling "used" versions.
Not convinced they are used keys. Like I say they activate on the MS website and they work on a single PC only (as I discovered when I tried to move one key to another PC, wouldn't let me activate it a second time). No idea where they get them, but they aren't in short supply. You can also get a lifetime 5 user Office 365 subscriptions for little more money. Hav
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You don't have to be caught to need good luck, you need good luck as soon as the BSA looks in your direction. Apparently it's one of the joys of proprietary software in the enterprise environment!
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Before you look, be sure to fix your hosts file. God knows what kind of skewed result you'll get otherwise. Why just yesterday, I was getting something out of the fridge, and it had gone bad! "Oh!" I cried. "Why didn't I put the chinese food in the hosts file, and it would have blocked those evil bacteria!"
It's a true story!
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My company uses it extensively for corporate documents, but I'm trying to steer them into using a single-source documentation solution.
Markdown with integrated LaTeX support has enabled me to create document templates for a variety of uses from day-to-day memos to collaborative research projects.
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What's the differences between OpenPGP and GPG?
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
OpenPGP is a protocol, while GPG is a software implementation of the OpenPGP standard.
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Curious....
What's the differences between OpenPGP and GPG?
One is software people use today, the other is a historical footnote once considered a weapon illegal to export by the US Government.
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I use it to read and modify .doc and .xls files on macOS and Windows. And it's ... OK. If you have an i5/i7, lots of Ram and and SSD it's actually pretty quick.
Besides it's not like MS Office is particularly lightweight these days. In fact it hasn't been for a decade or more.
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MS Office is actually pretty lightweight compared to most modern applications. That's because it's still one of those "old fashioned" native apps, unlike the current Electron craze. MS Word 2010 takes up all of 15MB in memory (and maybe another 30MB in shared services) when opening an empty doc, and opens in about half a second on my computer, which itself is nine years old. I'm betting the current versions aren't much worse.
Re:It reminds me of Firefox: slow and bloated. (Score:5, Informative)
> opens in about half a second on my computer
Be aware that, unless you intentionally disabled it, Microsoft Office preloads when Windows starts, and never exits. So those fast "load times" are basically just the time it takes to open a new window - Office has actually been running in the background the entire time. Very nice if you use Office a lot, but it means your boot time is slowed accordingly, and those resources are being consumed constantly, limiting the resources available to other applications.
As I recall Open Office actually has a similar preloader available, but it's more obvious (leaves an icon in the tray) and I'm not sure if it's enabled by default - use office suites rarely enough that I always disable such things as being excessively expensive.
It asks (Score:4, Informative)
As I recall Open Office actually has a similar preloader available, but it's more obvious (leaves an icon in the tray) and I'm not sure if it's enabled by default - use office suites rarely enough that I always disable such things as being excessively expensive.
Libreoffice asks you if you want it enabled during installation. You can also turn it on/off from the settings as well.
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Just opened Word 2016 on my Mac with an new blank document and it'a up to 289 Mb. Still, it's by no means the worst memory hog. SourceTree (a graphical git and mercurial client) is up to nearly 600Mb and we won't even talk about Safari.
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I liked the '97 version. Used to run fine on my netbook. The ribbon versions disrupted my muscle memory and always seemed sluggish on slightly old hardware.
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Maybe you're thinking of older versions of firefox, not the current version. Your unimaginative firefox hatred is a little out of date. Perhaps you could compare it to how firefox no longer support horrendous insecure, slow and buggy plugins any more, even though you never actually used them anyway because you already hated firefox.
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I disagree about most of these but you're spot on about KDE.
Any time I set up a new linux machine, one of my first moves is to install TDE (Fork of KDE 3.5.x) because it feels more responsive to me.
LK
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Chromium is open source and just as fast
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Re:Still massively inferior to Office (Score:5, Insightful)
LibreOffice is still a clunky piece of garbage that is difficult to use and is generally awful. Build a new office suite from scratch and throw this one in the trash where it belongs.
You must have tried the new version and evaluated it very quickly!
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You must have tried the new version and evaluated it very quickly!
Not necessarily. If a new version doesn't come with a ground up re-write then a lot of the old version's opinions will continue to apply.
That said the GP was obviously talking out of their arse. It's a perfectly capable suite.
Re:Still massively inferior to Office (Score:5, Insightful)
LibreOffice is still a clunky piece of garbage that is difficult to use and is generally awful. Build a new office suite from scratch and throw this one in the trash where it belongs.
Let me translate
Even though I strongly resisted the ribbon interface at the time, now I've come to believe it's the One True Way and anything not the One True Way must implement it regardless of any strong copyrights and patents Microsoft has on it.
LibreOffice is perfectly fine for 99% of use cases unless you really absolutely need that ActiveX sync to Lotus Notes 5.x for mail merging.
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LibreOffice is perfectly fine for 99% of use cases unless you really absolutely need that ActiveX sync to Lotus Notes 5.x for mail merging.
I'll settle for the F4 key locking cells the same way it does in Excel.
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it reminds me of my first "Computer Applications" class in 6th grade in the 80s.
The teacher emphasized the importance of not thinking in terms of what buttons to press, but thinking it terms of the feature you're trying to use. So think "copy and then paste" not "-C -V". For remembering what button to press to get that feature in a particular application you can just use a keyboard overlay or keep a "cheat sheet" next to the computer.
I took it to heart and I've been thinking about features that way from the
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LibreOffice6 has an experimental ribbon interface. I tested a early beta for a while. LO should look at wps (wps.com) and their ribbon interface. The WPS interface is based on QT
The wps.com free Linux product is fully compatible with MS's older office product. You can read/write in MS format.
Hopefully LO will be as compatible as WPS for the same purpose.
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If your data set is that big then a spreadsheet isn't a good tool for the job anyway...
I've only ever used desktop spreadsheets for relatively small and trivial tasks (as do most people, if they use such applications at all) and libreoffice is more than adequate.
For word processing however, large documents make libreoffice writer slow but they can make word totally crash or behave in strange ways (eg the spellcheck stops working for no apparent reason).
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If you're having a hard time using basic office software, just turn it off and go outside, maybe take a walk and look for a paper copy of the course catalog for your local community college!
Re:Updated splash screen? LOL! (Score:4, Funny)
God, yeah, like no software has a splash screen nowadays.
Except...
The latest versions of Office.
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People have been asking for an outline view in libreoffice writer for well over a decade. The answer is always, "We have the navigator window," which misses the point -- it's a user interface request, providing an alternate means to do a similar thing doesn't really address it. Outline view provides more of a direct manipulation experience.
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You want decent typesetting, use a system designed for that, like a DTP package or a TeX variant. Don't complain about office suites doing it wrong, that is not their remit.
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There is no reason why an Office suite shouldn't be good at it. We have web browsers now that can render PDF documents, you know.
Re:Its whatever you get used to (Score:5, Insightful)
most people in business swear by Microsoft Office. .
Let me correct that for you
most people in business swear at Microsoft Office. .
Re:Its whatever you get used to (Score:4, Insightful)
From what I have seen, most people are indifferent: "that's what the put on my desktop, so that's what I use."
It's what they are given (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing against Open Office or Libre but most people in business swear by Microsoft Office.
No they don't. They just haven't bothered trying anything else and it's what their company gives them. Many of them don't even know there is another option.
Re:Thank you LibreOffice (Score:5, Insightful)
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