LibreOffice 3.5 Released 205
First time accepted submitter wrldwzrd89 writes "The Document Foundation, the team behind the free and open-source office suite called LibreOffice, has released their latest and greatest version. As is typical with major releases of LibreOffice, there are significant new features making their debut in this version. The component with the biggest upgrade is Calc, which now has support for up to 10,000 sheets per workbook among its new features. Also noteworthy among the new features is support for importing Microsoft Visio files in Impress and Draw. The full feature list is available in a PDF hosted on Dropbox; LibreOffice itself can be downloaded here."
DropBox? (Score:4, Insightful)
While, in the same time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:docx support? (Score:3, Insightful)
even MS sucks at supporting its own formats between versions, so don't hold your breath hoping that LO people will reverse engineer all the obscure corner cases and quirks where things break.
Re:Here we go again (Score:5, Insightful)
Great, a major LO upgrade. That means I download it, install it, and see how many minutes it takes me before I hit a large enough Office compatibility snag that makes me delete it and swear off giving it another shot.
Instead of swearing it off, get in touch with me and we will file bugs. Sure, it might take a year or three until they are fixed, but most of them _do_ get fixed in LibreOffice. I would say that the last year in LO has closed more of my bugs than the past five years of OpenOffice.org, including one very critical bug that has been open for almost _ten_years_:
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=5556 [apache.org]
Fixed in LO six months after filing:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37978 [freedesktop.org]
You can contact me here, please have a file that demonstrates the issue handy or clear reproduction instructions:
http://dotancohen.com/eng/message.php [dotancohen.com]
Thanks.
Re:10000 sheets per workbook? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:New features (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, they're obviously moving much faster than openoffice did. The product looks very clean, opens fast, and is mostly enjoyable to use.
There's still a number of key combinations that Calc is missing (most noticeably ctrl-D to copy cell above), and the background color tool is still horribly designed (only contains colors too dark for use as a background, and it does not remember the last chosen color). It's simple stuff like this that keeps people on Excel.
Re:Here we go again (Score:5, Insightful)
Office documents are fundamentally fragile.
In a text processing program the tiniest change to character spacing rules or line breaking rules or margin rules or image placement rules can radically change the way a document is rendered. So the only way to keep complete compatibility is to NEVER change any existing behaviour of the rendering engine. In a calculation program the tiniest change in formula imlementation can change the calculated results.
The problem with word processors and spreadsheets is they blur the line between input and output. The user is continuously looking at the output so the user thinks of the file as storing the output but what is really being stored is the input. So they load the file into a program with a slightly different engine and get surprised when the results of thier poorly formed (remember the user doesn't see the input so they don't see how horriblly unstructured it is) turn into a mess.
Frankly I find it damn impressive that OOo/Lo do as good a job of dealing with MS office documents as they do.
Re:New features (Score:5, Insightful)
Open bugs with that feedback.
Re:10000 sheets per workbook? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it's time for me to repeat my rant about people using spreadsheets to do work which properly belongs in a database.
It's really impossible to properly audit or verify a spreadsheet. They are so easy to corrupt with improper references and random data entry. Spreadsheets are only widespread because most office drones don't have a clue about proper data management. I shudder whenever I see someone using a spreadsheet to make important business decisions because I know there are errors in every non-trivial spreadsheet.
Re:10000 sheets per workbook? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we see this use so prevalently because it’s quick and cheap. Most business-calculation type stuff revolves around taking tables of numbers, doing calculations, and producing other tables of numbers / graphs. Excel gives you most of that right out of the box. Throw in a little VBA and you can do in an hour what would take a month to do properly.
Even I’ll admit to using spreadsheets from time to time for things that really deserved a proper app.