LibreOffice 4.0 ships with new features, better looks
The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 4.0, the latest version of the free software competitor to Microsoft Office that spun off from the OpenOffice.org effort in 2010, describing it as nothing less than "the free office suite the community has been dreaming of since 2001." "LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that …
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Re: Am I the only one who likes the Ribbon interface?
Anyone who can't use the keyboard shortcuts to operate MS office doesn't deserve to be called competent in using any version of office, period.
Re: Am I the only one who likes the Ribbon interface?
some of us are paid by the hour.
keyboard shortcuts? What are they?
It's a pretty sophisticated editor
that's about all I got to say. There's no need for a paid office suite and this thing just gets better as people add to it with problems they face and overcome with solutions.
The battle vs Microsoft office is already won. It's just that we do not control the fake commercial media.
The more MS pushes people to rent their software
The more people will realise what a stupid idea that is and move to something they can actually own.
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
Just like how unpopular car leasing isnt?
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
No, like how unpopular cheese leasing is.
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
So you admit you can't come up with a good counter argument then? You eat cheese and it's gone... you use software and it's still there.
Most of the world's software is going service-based implicitly simply by going web-based after all... gmail, dropbox, Jira, github, etc - the question is only if you pay for them or not.
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
No, I can come up with plenty of counter arguments thanks. I was merely pointing out that while car leasing is successful that doesn't really bear any relevance on the discussion. If the fact cheese gets eaten negates this argument please feel free to substitute any of the other things that aren't normally leased for the cheese. There are plenty to pick from. Everything except cars really.....
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
If you want an analogy, renting Office is like renting a set of shelves and fixing them up in your house, it's a bit silly.
Dropbox, gmail, github, Jira, and so on offer one or a combination of sharing, collaboration, and online storage. You use basic services for free or pay for enhanced services and when you're finished you can take your ball and go home. Bolting these services on to Office for home users as an excuse to charge them rent that is nonsensical. Office needs sharing, collaboration and online storage as much as Photoshop or Notepad do.
Ensentially Office is finished (as in completed) and Microsoft has been unable to develop other new products or enter new markets to bring in the cash so they're leaning on the only two crutches they know (Office and Windows). After spending a couple of versions flailing around with Office's UI, file formats, and licensing conditions as justification for making customers go out and get the latest version, Microsoft finally come out and admit that it's about making their customers rent their software.
Home users can get by fine with Office 2003, 2000 or dare I say 97. If MS carry on down this path it's probable that within a couple of years you'll only be able to rent Office from Microsoft, at least in the west. Imagine if this were the only option in 2003 and imagine how much it'd have costed home users to rent Office for the last ten years, all because they wanted to do their home finances in Excel and write a couple of letters a month.
MS does need paying for its software but average users don't have to upgrade to every new version. However everything else they try has failed which is why they're reduced to renting Office instead of selling it.
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
If I lease a car and return it, every journey I made in it doesn't suddenly cease to have happened unless I lease a new car from the same company.
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
Renting MS software is like renting a condom.
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
@ribosome If you cease to subscribe to Office, all your docs still exist you just can't use Office to edit them. If you believed any different, you scare me.
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
Renting MS software is like renting a condom.
... but much less fun!
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
https://www.alliance-leicestercommercialbank.co.uk/bizguides/full/cheesemaker/parkes-lease.asp
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
Like renting a CONDO, yes.
Re: The more MS pushes people to rent their software
Renting MS software is like renting a condom.
Nah, if I rented a condom I wouldn't expect it to be so full of holes.
LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
I've not yet downloaded version 4.0 - I'm looking forward to it :-)
For me, I have come to prefer Libre Office to MS. It's not in the comfort zone of thems crazies that likes their ribbons, however Libre Office produces cleaner documents (ODF format) that are less inclined than MS docs to get screwed up and mess up bullets, indenting, formatting etc etc.
Everyone uses PDF for data exchange these days, so the days of MS proprietary formats are numbered. Libre Office keeps improving whilst MS office keeps getting worse. (Ribbons and now a Metro-isation) plus pressure to go to a subscription model to "save" money.
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
Like I did yesterday. Create some docs in Libre Office*, export to PDF and then print at work (locked down windows network) via memory stick or email.
No problems, no need for MS products here.
*On a Kubuntu box
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
I hope paper based office in general is dying. You have to congratulate them on their efforts but its a long climb up the wrong evolutionary branch of IT.
I don’t want documents with data badly encrypted inside them, I don’t want a pdf document of an order/receipt/BOM/(almost any piece of useful inter-company communication) when an XML/JSON of the same is fantastically smaller and almost infinitely more useful to me and the other end.
Good paperwork is really easy to prepare from good data but good data is almost impossible to create from pretty paperwork.
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
And what happens when you or someone else wants to edit those files?
LO might be OK for a single user, but for collaborative work where many people are editing the same .doc file, some using Word, it's a compatibilty nightmare.
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
@AC 9.24 - then use ODF format instead of PDF. They're both open standards.
If you use a closed MS format then it's a nightmare whatever you do, because different versions of word tend to format the files differently and sometimes fail to read them at all.
If you continue to use MS Office, you will make this issue worse, not better, over time.
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
If they are still editing .doc files then odds are they have not gotten past Office 2003.
Wonder if they just don't like the ribbon - in which case introduce them to LO.
Simples!
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
@Eadon
"If you use a closed MS format then it's a nightmare whatever you do.."
So why are you advocating the closed Adobe PDF format?
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
It feels a bit weird to respond in Eadon's favour, but Adobe opened up PDF in 2008.
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
>>if you use a closed MS format...
Um, unless you're still using .doc it's not closed.
Hard to see the Linux community liking the "use LO because of PDF" argument either. They hate PDF too.
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
@AC - 10.36 - I'm saying people tend to use PDF's to share docs more and more. PDF is semi-open. I advocate using ODF format, which is genuinely open.
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
Um, unless you're still using .doc it's not closed
I hope you aren't referring to MS OOXML as "open"...
Worth taking a look at Rob Weir's site to see where we are with that..
OOXML is only an ISO standard because the voting process was blatantly rigged, not because it actually properly complies with the aspects of a proper open standard. It served more to demonstrate both the fragility of the ISO voting process by academics and the absolute lack of morals and desinterest in any collateral damage of their actions by Microsoft.
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
The benefit of PDF over ODF is that unless you deliberately suppress embedding of fonts, a PDF will look the same on any PDF reader (or, indeed, printout) whereas an ODF suffers the same issues that any word processing format does -- the way it displays depends on a number of issues in your setup, not least being your fonts and the way your word processor sets margins, kerning, spacing etc.
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
@HolyFreakinGhost - thanks, and sincere apologies for putting you in a difficult situation
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
Um, unless you're still using .doc it's not closed.
The .docx format is open in the sense that it is published ... but the published definition might as well be encrypted for all the chance there is that anyone will ever understand it (including those who wrote it).
The thing's just not fit for purpose.
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
Nice FUD from 5/6 years ago, but OOXML is now proven and is open.
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying.
OOXML is now proven and is open
Proven: only to be deficient: many questions are still outstanding
Open: only if Microsoft would actually use it themselves, over which there are many, many questions.
You may want to pay more attention to publicly reported facts, and less to Microsoft marketing.
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying. RE: collaborative work
>collaborative work where many people are editing the same .doc file, some using Word, it's a compatibilty nightmare.
It's a compatibility nightmare regardless of product used - even if all are using the same version of Word and document template. They all have differing ideas about layout and formatting...
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying. Cynical Observer
>If they are still editing .doc files then odds are they have not gotten past Office 2003.
No this is a (relatively) safe interchange/collaboration format ie. you had a reasonable chance that standard (IT department) installs of all active versions of Word (Windows & Mac versions) along with third-party products like OOO can open these files and that the contributor on completion will just save and hence return the updated document in this format.
Yes the world is slowly moving on and so other, more open, formats are becoming more widely supported. However as always everything, in business is done in hurry and so it is easier to set Office to default save to 97/2000/2003 than to have to worry about it for specific projects. What grates with me is that having this as my default document save setting, Word 2007 still uses features that aren't supported and only tells me this at time of document save...
Re: LIbre Office good, MS Office is dying. Re the closed Adobe PDF format
Because it isn't closed!
Documents produced in Adobe Acrobat will support the closed version of PDF, however practically everyone else just uses the ISO compliant PDF archive standard.
The problem I've found with PDF is that not all readers are equal and that it is best to have Adobe reader installed, just to be sure what you see is what the originator intended. Which does slightly defeat it's intent.
Still some niggles
I've been using Release Candidates of LO4 for a while courtesy of Mageia and it's pretty good. Annoyingly they haven't fixed my pet peeve which dates back to the days of StarOffice; the 'recently used files' list is global across all applications rather than having a separate list for each. So if I go browsing through documents looking for something, my frequently-used spreadsheets disappear off the bottom of the list and I have to look for them manually.
Headline touts 'Better looks'
Might have been an idea to have included a screenshot. Even the LO web doesn't include a screenshot, pictures of people and some icons but nothing of the product. Suggests to me there's not a lot of confidence in the UI.
Party like it's 2007
Only 6 years later, you're supporting 2007 doc format properly?
I might try it out - the utter failure to maintain formatting/styling in .docx files is the reason all my attempts to use OO in the past ended quickly.
Re: Party like it's 2007
"Only 6 years later, you're supporting 2007 doc format properly?"
Yup, maybe Microsoft will catch up some day and support the 2007 format properly, too, but I'm not holding my breath.
I assume you've never tried to use the 2007 compatibility pack to view or edit DOCX stuff in an older version of Office. Even Microsoft don't claim this works. The converter comes with a list of all the stuff that gets broken.
Yes, life *is* easier if everyone else agrees to buy the same software package that you use and agrees to upgrade when you do. Meanwhile back in the real world, even Microsoft aren't sufficiently compatible to let a group of people jointly author a document with different versions of Office. Why should LO (or OO) be judged by a standard that MS don't meet?
Re: Party like it's 2007
@Ken Hagan
+1
You are correct. Also the DocX is this MS so-called OOXML format, which is officially defined in a "standards" specification document that is over 5000 pages long and full of gibberish such as "Format like Windows 95". How *can* anyone be compatible with this crap? MS FORCED this through ISO by stacking the ISO with its partners in a farcical corrupt move.
MS itself hasn't actually implemented the ISO version of its own OOXML standard as far as I know. Maybe Office 2013 will do a better job.
MS know no shame...
Re: Party like it's 2007
>>Why should LO (or OO) be judged by a standard that MS don't meet?
Because they are the ones trying to steal market share, not hold onto it. If you want to win MS users you need to make the transition absolutely super slick.
If LO's main goal is to win users from MS (is it?) then 100% perfect support for MS docs should be their absolute #1 priority. Otherwise it doesn't matter how good LO is, people won't switch.
Re: Party like it's 2007
Eadon,
not that I am a fan of yours, but I had to upvote you for this.
The MS assault on ISO is well documented and an appalling stain on their otherwise very dirty reputation.
Re: Party like it's 2007
@JDX - LibreOffice exists to give people an open source office suit. It is more compatible with MS formats than MS is. You try opening MS docs with different versions of MS Office, then open the same docs with LibreOffice, you will find that LibreOffice opens them more reliably and better most of the time. And that was *before* LibreOffice 4 - which has much improved docx compatibility.
MS keep changing their formats to force the LO devs to play whack-a-mole when it comes to interpreting the arcane MS formats. The problem is, MS Office also has to do the same job, and fails at it all too often. Hence "MS Office is running in "compatibility mode". WTF? Compatibility mode with MS's own doc formats???
MS OFFICE FAIL
Re: Party like it's 2007
@Philip Lewis
You are over kind :) It's good to see that others are also appalled by such MS dirty tricks. :)
Votes here don't mean very much, the pro-MS astroturfers are paid to vote down the truth-sayers.
Re: Party like it's 2007
EADON FAIL
"Compatibility Mode" is simply a mode whereby the new features are turned off and the software "acts" like the previous version in order to MAINTAIN compatibility.
Re: Party like it's 2007
@Eadon... all the Office files I work with work fine in Office. Every SINGLE time I've tested in OO, it's been useless. Note, I have tested more than once, just tried for 2min once so I could bitch about it for the next N years.
When I send contracts to people who use OO, they send back signed copies with an apology that OO messed it up a bit.
From someone who has actually used both... OO fail.
Just upgraded on my work laptop OpenSUSE 12.2
Seems fine to me, (Im no power user btw) both suites offer great functionality its just when you start trying to jump between them you see problems.
MS just makes it harder for everyone else by changing the ppt, pptx, doc, docx blah blah blah every year! So its hard to use both which i do in my Office. I sent a ppt file to a MS Office user and they just sent it straight back saying it was broken i opened it in a virtual machine and it was a mess. This isn’t Libre Offices fault in my opinion. Its MS stupid proprietary formats. ODT should be used then you can choose to use whatever suite you want without any problems!
Re: Just upgraded on my work laptop OpenSUSE 12.2
So that your crappy freeware can't create a file properly is Microsoft's fault?!
Re: Just upgraded on my work laptop OpenSUSE 12.2
Says the MS employee, why the anon? Your name ballmer?
An open standard means it should be an open standard. MS fecking with it breaks the rules of being an open standard. That is the fault of Microsoft.
Loving Libre office on my linux mint, not had any problems opening the docx files, but looking forward to the latest release when I get it.
Re: Just upgraded on my work laptop OpenSUSE 12.2
@AC Really that is all you have to contribute? Jesus these comments are grim sometimes.
@Avatar of they - Yes Docx seems to be ok, its power points that go off their nut when you change suite. Something that wont change so i guess you have deal with it, unless companies realise they can use libre office for nothing (or supported)and save a lot of money.
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