LibreOffice 5.1 Officially Released 190
prisoninmate writes: After being in development for the last three months or so, LibreOffice 5.1 comes today to a desktop environment near you with some of the most attractive features you've ever seen in an open-source office suite software product, no matter the operating system used. The release highlights of LibreOffice 5.1 include a redesigned user interface for improved ease of use, better interoperability with OOXML files, support for reading and writing files on cloud servers, enhanced support for the ODF 1.2 file format, as well as additional Spreadsheet functions and features. Yesterday, even with the previous version, I was able to successfully use a moderately complex docx template without a hitch — the kind of thing that would have been a pipe-dream not too long ago.
What do you mean... (Score:5, Funny)
"redesigned user interface for improved ease of use"?
If it went "ribbon", that'll suck rocks.
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Clippy!
Re:What do you mean... (Score:5, Informative)
"redesigned user interface for improved ease of use"?
You might try watching the demo videos. They made improvements to the menus, improvements to the context menus, and improvements to toolbars (including a pop-out side panel formatting toolbar thing that I guess is new to the 5.x series).
No ribbon.
Here, have a playlist URL that lets you watch the demo videos directly from YouTube instead of using the embedded videos in TFA.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0pdzjvYW9RHSwdRnZfaxAWICrkBrQl7k [youtube.com]
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I did watch them. Four and a half minutes, and nothing about the UI.
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"Improvements" to the menus usually means that they moved things around so I now have to look for them again. Oh well ... could be MSOfc. The "properties" sidebar is nothing really new, and on my old-school non-wide-screen monitor will squeeze the actual document into an unusable sliver of screen space as most do. Hope the sidebar can be disabled or only pops up on demand.
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Who has time for that? Seriously, 5 seconds to read the following:
vs 4 minutes spread over 3 videos.
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The ribbon has been around for almost a decade, and people are still hating on it...?
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Shit deserves criticism until those who can (or are allowed to) fix, fix.
Yes, I know... (Score:2)
How long is it since Hitler? He's still not very popular.
Re: What do you mean... (Score:5, Insightful)
They're just haters. No modern computer user can honestly say they'd prefer searching through dropdown menus over the ribbon that focuses on putting the most used features at the users fingertips.
*Raises hand*
I dislike the ribbon. But then I'm a keyboard shortcuts guy. I know dozens of them for MS Office, and whenever there's a feature that I use often, I look up a keyboard shortcut if possible.
Which means the ribbon is useless to me. It takes up a bunch of space with buttons I don't need, and on the rare occasions when I need a feature advanced or rare enough that I don't know a shortcut, it's often not even on a ribbon button -- I end up going through advanced feature dialogs anyway. I use a Mac at work, so luckily I still have the drop down menus, which are usually at least twice as fast as wading through a bunch of non-intuitive icons in a half-dozen ribbon tabs with 20 buttons each.
Text was invented for a reason -- it communicates quickly, clearly, and efficiently. So I find it a lot easier to navigate when I'm searching for a feature I don't know -- which is the only time my mouse generally goes up to that part of the screen.
If you actually use the ribbon for common everyday tasks, I can understand how it might be useful for you. I'm not against offering a ribbon interface, but I do think it should be one option rather than the only one. I'm not a "hater." I just work differently and I'm just glad Mac versions of Office still give the menu options.
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I hated it to at first, but it IS much easier to find options that were once 10 minute hunting trips in the menu's mostly because the menu's were jumbled and not broken down into certain tasks like view, review, etc.
Having gotten used to the Ribbon I can say I completely believe the millions MS spent on usability testing that the Ribbon is easier to learn for new users and not just a little bit, it's significantly easier to learn. Though it was a pain to learn as an experienced user it's far more productive
Re: What do you mean... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hear, hear. Google is your friend. It took me all of 10 minutes searching and reading to learn how to customise the toolbar system in MSOffice versions prior to the ribbon, e.g. remove and add toolbar buttons for features as desired, and even create a keyboard shortcut for things in frequent use.
Thus, the features that I use most frequently *are* at my fingertips, and the items I don't use are banished back to their menus. It seems the ribbon was created to pander to those people who weren't able to figure out toolbar customisations. The ribbon is harder to customise, takes up far too much screen real estate in the "full" version, is almost useless in the minimised version, and it took a long time to get used to it.
And while we're at it, Microsoft's UI design team should be sent to a real design school. White, light grey, and dark grey are the colour schemes available in Office 2013, and I had customers complaining that they couldn't see things easily. How did such a design get past testing and QA? The response from the "experts" on answers.microsoft.com was to set the entire computer's colour scheme to "high contrast" - never mind ruining the interface for other programs, sheesh.
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It seems the ribbon was created to pander to those people who weren't able to figure out toolbar customisations. The ribbon is harder to customise, takes up far too much screen real estate.
The quick access toolbar does this. You add whatever you want to access quickly to the aptly named "Quick Access" toolbar. The ribbon is hidden by default, so you have everything you need, including all the shortcuts, just the same as before. And if you need the ribbon simply pin it on the screen.
There are plenty of reasons to not choose Microsoft, but this one sounds pretty lame.
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Oh, I still use Microsoft Office - I've just chosen to stick with Office 2003. It meets my needs, and I'm happy with it. I tried 2007, and 2010, and neither made any improvement in productivity. Your mileage may vary, and that's what's nice about being able customise an interface - the toolbars. Your needs are different from mine, and we can both have the way we want it.
Re: What do you mean... (Score:4, Insightful)
Programmers aren't designers. And one of the things they do the worst is design UIs for end-users. Every time I hear a programmer complain about how graphic designers don't know anything all I do is laugh, because it's elitist and pretentious to presume you know about designing graphics. You don't. You weren't trained to do that, and you probably don't even have the aptitude for it.
MS's ribbon UI, which is getting so much hate, is because programmers are biased. They're biased because they know what "Window" is but not what "Review" is. They know what "Format" should do, but not what "Design" should do. You're so caught up in your own jargon that you stop thinking like other, normal people do. Do you honestly people think that the Window menu item is going to have everything you need that would manipulate a window object in it? Come off it.
There's a reason why Office and Windows have such a large marketshare. The only reason ANY business, outside of maybe some select tech companies even use libreoffice is because its free. It's time to wake up and realize it's not MS's aggressive business tactics that really make them win the game here: it's that they sell a superior product and you can leave your overly convoluted menus to yourself and the few select people who mistakenly think it's better because they're too inflexible to learn new ways of doing things.
Enjoy your coding in C, since I'm sure you have the same issues with thinking everyone should be managing memory.
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My customers complain about the UI colour choices, and they complain about the ribbon. They pay me for advice and I try to be honest. I'll sell them MS Office if that's what they want, but I'll also inform them about other options.
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Graphic designers design posters, magazines and LP covers. They don't design user interfaces.
Or rather they didn't when I was a lad, and they still shouldn't.
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I support 120+ users at work (in a non-technical workplace) and I hear complaints about it all the time.
Just recently (a few weeks ago), one person was trying to do something, and after fifteen minutes of looking through all the ribbons she gave up and asked me. It took another five minutes to figure out it wasn't available in the ribbon and was under some other obscure dialog that you had to pop up using the ribbon. This pers
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That's odd. You can customize the ribbon in exactly the same way as you customize toolbars (right click, drag and drop). All the keyboard shortcuts are the same and you can still make your own. How on earth did you fail to realize this?
Also, there is a little icon to hide the ribbon if you don't want it. It looks exactly like the icon that hides toolbars in previous versions. Again, how on earth did you miss it?
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The thing is, most of these stupid UI changes, like the unreadable color schemes the Win 8 Start screen, etc. were implemented by political/marketing (Start screen) or fashion (colors) reasons. It was obvious they were disliked b
Re: What do you mean... (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't believe you got upvoted. Means none of them, including you know that you can use keyboard shortcuts with the ribbon. Just press the damn ALT key, watch and learn.
It's a better interface. Sometimes change can be good, and i tell you this as a hater of windows 8 menu and even windows 10 inferior start menu.
Re: What do you mean... (Score:2, Insightful)
If it were truly a better system I wouldn't have to switch endlessly between ribbon tabs while performing simple formatting tasks. Once configured (even minimally), the toolbar stayed *put*, allowing muscle memory to speed operation.
The ribbon is great for discovery and people who never get past "ransom letter" documents. It sucks ass for experienced users.
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If it were truly a better system I wouldn't have to switch endlessly between ribbon tabs while performing simple formatting tasks. Once configured (even minimally), the toolbar stayed *put*, allowing muscle memory to speed operation.
The ribbon is great for discovery and people who never get past "ransom letter" documents. It sucks ass for experienced users.
I'm glad that the tasks you do are so constrained that they fit into a single toolbar. As an experienced user I use many different features and being able to switch context to have a much wider selection then would fit into one toolbar is beneficial. This is even more true in Excel then Word.
Swore at it for a month when I first started using it because I needed to unlearn some habits, now find it much easier.
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I can't believe you got upvoted. Means none of them, including you know that you can use keyboard shortcuts with the ribbon. Just press the damn ALT key, watch and learn.
Actually, no -- of course I know that. Stop being a jerk and assuming everyone else is an idiot.
As I said, I prefer something else. You like the ribbon. Congratulations. I said explicitly I can understand why some people like it. I find it less useful than you do. I said why, and it had nothing to do with using shortcut keys WITH the ribbon. In case you misunderstood, I wasn't talking about using shortcut keys to NAVIGATE menus -- I was talking about shortcut keys as direct commands. Obviously one
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I look up a keyboard shortcut if possible.
Which means the ribbon is useless to me.
The shortcuts are still there, in fact there are more of them now.
It takes up a bunch of space with buttons I don't need
And the ribbon is hidden by default, you have to pin it if you want it visible all the time.
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You do know that you can hide the ribbon, don't you? You can get back your screen space that way.
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ad hominem attack.
appeal to modernity
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No modern computer user can honestly say they'd prefer searching through dropdown menus over the ribbon that focuses on putting the most used features at the users fingertips.
The ribbon wasn't introduced to improve the UI, it was introduced to create a UI that was consistent between desktop and web applications.
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Is this why debian stable is stuck on LO 4.x? Oh wait, that's just the usual Linux BS where you're not allowed to have new apps unless you meticulously install it from the command line and take responsibility for updating it by hand.
Debian stable is really meant more for a server than for a desktop, as in "a stable (albeit a little stagnant), well-tested, and rock-solid platform where you can run an application for years without unwelcome surprises creeping into the underlying software stack or into the environment in general." Servers and desktops have different needs.
If you want a desktop environment, maybe consider running a Debian-based distro that pulls responsibly from Debian Testing or Sid, or better yet, an Ubuntu LTS based sy
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Take a look at your response and ask why a simple issue like installing a current app has to be so complicated.
BTW, debian is very much a multi-purpose distro and (as with many distros) a lot of its users sell it as the ideal desktop. The fact is that current apps only appear on beta-quality OS releases, and PPAs introduce a _fourth_ party to the chain of trust. A person has to use OSX or Windows to get current FOSS apps (even Firefox!) without bending over backwards.
And the insinuation that new public rele
Re:What do you mean... (Score:5, Insightful)
I deal with it just fine, as do most people who care to run Linux.
I pay nothing for Linux. I pay nothing for LibreOffice. I don't complain about having to do a little work, which has the side benefit of allowing me complete control and choice over what I have on my system.
If you want it all done for you, more like if you want it all done to you, stay with Microsoft.
Re:What do you mean... (Score:5, Insightful)
Social isolation for Linux geeks is a stereotype which, like most stereotypes, don't apply universally, and in this case (Linux users) I suspect don't apply even to the majority.
Nice try, but you get a fail on this one.
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So, you are saying that all generalizations are wrong? Including this one?
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I have a nice, pretty, and many years my junior girlfriend. Why? Because I just happened to have my laptop bag with me and a Live USB disk handy. It was Lubuntu (as we seem to recall) but she's been using Mint Cinnamon lately.
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I have a nice, pretty, and many years my junior girlfriend. Why? Because I just happened to have my laptop bag with me and a Live USB disk handy. It was Lubuntu (as we seem to recall) but she's been using Mint Cinnamon lately.
So was it the laptop bag or the USB disk that caused you to age? Or did one of them make her younger? You should sell that to the cosmetics cartel.
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So try Ubuntu/Mint. They're usually only a couple of dot versions behind the official LO release. Same with FF (counting FF's seemingly monthly full versions as dot releases). I use LO in Windows, have used it for several years (and Star/OpenOffice before that), and seldom have problems exchanging files with MSOfc users unless they use truly obscure formatting and functions. Even commenting usually works cross-platform. Frankly, at the rate LO is going, MS might just have to buy them someday - more compatib
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Is this why debian stable is stuck on LO 4.x? Oh wait, that's just the usual Linux BS where you're not allowed to have new apps unless you meticulously install it from the command line and take responsibility for updating it by hand.
You mean how you can download the .deb package from the LibreOffice website, and double click on it to install it? You're right, that's such a huge, painful operation of cryptic commands that nobody could possibly remember. :-/
While you still have to update it manually, that's the same for just about every single program on Windows, including Microsoft Office, if you've still got the default settings for Windows Update.
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You mean how you can download the .deb package from the LibreOffice website, and double click on it to install it? You're right, that's such a huge, painful operation of cryptic commands that nobody could possibly remember. :-/
What a pain... I prefer the Windows way, where every program launches a system tray icon to burn CPU cycles checking their website for updates on their own schedule, then pester me at all times of the day to upgrade and reboot because I wasn't really doing anything important anyway (and of course, having to reboot to upgrade a userspace program just makes me feel safer).
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That's stupid: Besides not being able to update it easily, you installed unsigned code. Glad to know you make a habit of compromising system security to get up to date apps.
Wrong. LibreOffice signs all their apps, and provides their PGP public key to verify them. But you wouldn't know that, because if you actually looked it up, you'd have to let the facts get in the way of a good argument.
Unless you're meaning that they haven't had the package signed by a code signing certificate bought at stupidly high cost from a conventional CA. Because we know CAs are all perfect and NEVER do anything that screws up security for the entire planet......
Oh, and you can't install a tar full of debs just by clicking on it. If you extract it first then multi-select and choose Package install from the dropdown, it says the "action is not supported". You have to right-click and install all 46 files individually. Slashdot is full of morons who will upvote the worst, weasel-y defenses of their dysfunctional Linux desktops.
On what planet have you ever manage
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stable has 5.0.4 in backports and one would assume 5.1 soon after it reaches testing.
But if you weren't busy trolling you'd have learned how to configure sources.list
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You're absolutely right! Why, my Microsoft Office install automatically upgraded itself when 2016 came out, as did Matlab, and Adobe Photoshop. Oh wait....
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For me, it's the super laggy performance the new widgets seem to have, especially the document objects and popups. In contrast, 2k7 and 2k10 are quick (not as fast as office 2003 though).
WTF they need quit grafting crap on top of crap on top of crap on top of win32.
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What is wrong with the ribbon? I'll be first to say that their first attempt at the ribbon was messy but as of version 2010 everything is fine. Is the problem conservatism?
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The problem is that for those of us who grew up with alphabetic writing systems
How does that help the original menu system. It was categorized, not alphabetic (Except within it's sub menus).
Another problem, IMNSHO, is that the ribbon only has room for a small number of actions, most of which I (and probably you) don't use.
What makes the ribbon powerful is your ability to customize it to look however you want and make it context sensitive. From an end user perspective I can agree that one needs to relearn where things are and most people don't like having to adjust.
Like in Word, everything under the Mailings tab.
Not useful for you but I can assure those features are often used in smaller businesses.
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I just installed LO 5.1 on my Linux Mint system. It (LO 5.1) is both highly functional and beautiful in appearance (my opinion). I look forward to using this new, open source, free (as in free beer and free of spyware) software.
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Oh, forgot to mention, installing it took all of maybe two minutes and about three commands: tar xvfz L*z; cd L*z/DEBS; dpkg -i *.deb. Done. Wow, that was hard.
Re:What do you mean... (Score:5, Informative)
Oops! From the readme:
--
As a general rule, you are recommended to install LibreOffice via the installation methods recommended by
your particular Linux distribution (such as the Ubuntu Software Center, in the case of Ubuntu Linux). Th
is is because it is usually the simplest way to obtain an installation that is optimally integrated into
your system. Indeed, LibreOffice may well be already installed by default when you originally install you
r Linux operating system.
This "stand-alone" LibreOffice installer is provided for users in need of previews, having special needs,
and for out-of-the-ordinary cases.
--
They recommend against direct user installs! Who knew?! And BTW, to most people your 'easy' command line install looks like you had an epileptic seizure at your keyboard.
Oh, almost forgot to mention... You just installed unsigned code.
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Oh, almost forgot to mention... You just installed unsigned code.
So? For most purposes, for those of us not specifically targeted for intensive surveillance, checking md5s will do
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Of course, because no one ever heard of people downloading infected software from compromised distribution sites. And that's just for starters... what about the ability of security software to validate installed apps?
And the fact that you're cozy with your boyscouts-at-the-NSA image has exactly what bearing on this issue? There are people at all levels of society who try to spread malware and they will even fuck around with your LAN to do it.
No, sorry.... The norm for software distribution has to be app aut
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You're sssuuuuuch a brave iconoclast!
/popcorn_time :D
Code signing is not a good policy. It creates a false layer of trust...
It creates a layer of trust that fails passively which is exactly what people need when they cannot check a billion details about what's running in their systems. You seem to be advocating active security measures, IOW keeping umpteen antisocial numbskulls with ninja hax0r text-mode window managers and other frippery on retainer at great expense. Its also the kind of mentality that actually lends appeal to clusterfucks like Intel ME, and tries to stuff ev
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For LibreOffice, I actually find it best and easiest to download the latest release from the LO home site, and install manually, which is very easy. I do this because the distro repositories lag significantly, and I prefer to have the latest version.
So, it's not "a right mess" or "an epileptic seizure" or anything like that. It's a deliberate choice. Linux is about choices. Linux allows choices. If you're content to be a few releases back, you can use the repositories and it's a bit simpler. Up to you. If y
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I thought the layout was user-changeable? But it's been a while since I used it.
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La la la la [youtube.com]"
Congratulations (Score:1)
Well done guys!
Congrats, team! (Score:3, Insightful)
Big thanks to everyone who contributed to the LibreOffice project! Great product I couldn't live without. Your work is much appreciated!
I was able to successfully use a docx (Score:2)
> I was able to successfully use a moderately complex docx template without a hitch
Im sorry what?
How is that a new feature?
LibreOffice has been more compatible to MS Office than MS Office to MS Office, for years!
The only way nowadays to open old doc and docx files that were created with ancient versions of MS Office is to use LibreOffice since MS likes to drop support for its own file formats.
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It depends on the document. I still regularly encounter Word docs and Powerpoint presentations that don't render properly in LibreOffice; it'll be interesting to see how 5.1 improves that though.
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>"It depends on the document. I still regularly encounter Word docs and Powerpoint presentations that don't render properly in LibreOffice; it'll be interesting to see how 5.1 improves that though."
Most of the time, although not all of the time, it is due to either a very poorly formatted document, or using non-standard fonts, or both. At this point, it seems almost as likely that different versions of MS-Office with different OS's and different font sets have about the same success/failure rate as shar
Re: I was able to successfully use a docx (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep. I always use LibreOffice to edit and send back documents for work. It usually works OK, but with frequent glitches. I worried about that, so I once asked our admin if she had a problem with the docs I sent back. She said mine were no worse than those she got from everybody else, and she had never realized I wasn't actually using MS word to edit them. Glitches and formatting errors is apparently completely normal even with the same version of MS word on different computers.
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Wait, Word reformats the document automagically for your default printer? That's the funniest thing I've ever heard, not because I'm doubting you, but because I believe you
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Most of the time, although not all of the time, it is due to either a very poorly formatted document, or using non-standard fonts, or both.
Doesn't matter. That's still denialism. It still does not work. The end user will throw the software in trash. There must be compatibility even for badly-designed documents, because in real life we have those as well.
Often Linux is defended by saying that the BIOS writers simply did a bad job. Well, maybe they did, but at the end of the day, we just want a computer that works. So in the operating system we must write good workarounds for firmware bugs if we want a good user experience.
Re: I was able to successfully use a docx (Score:4, Interesting)
The only way nowadays to open old doc and docx files that were created with ancient versions of MS Office is to use LibreOffice since MS likes to drop support for its own file formats.
I've heard this repeated time and time again on Slashdot and in other nerd circles without a single example of such a document file ever posted to back up the claims. Do you actually have one to back up your claims? I routinely open doc files created back in Office 97 that open just fine in 2010 and beyond. Even saved back out and work perfectly fine in the older versions of Office as well.
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In my copy of Word 2010, under "Save As...", I see the following supported formats:
Word Document (*.docx)
Word Macro-Enabled Document (*.docm)
Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc)
PDF (*.pdf)
Word XML Document (*.xml)
Word 2003 XML Document (*.xml)
OpenDocument Text (*.odt)
Works 6-9 Document (*.wps)
and a bunch more besides, like HTML, plain text, rtf, xps, etc...
For opening documents, there are even more options, like old WordPerfect 5.x and 6.x documents. I didn't see an option for opening .wri files from twenty years
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The best bit of incompatibility with MS office products was the ability of MS Works to open MS Word documents ... and the inability of MS Word to open MS Works documents. There was a downloadable plugin one could install to convert Works to Word, but the flagship office product couldn't load the files from their other office product.
Was a real pain back when MS Works was included by default on new machines that people used for work/school, and they couldn't transfer files to computers using the full MS Off
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Can this be co-installed with the stock version? (Score:3)
Can this be co-installed with the current version (for instance, 4.8.2.8 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the latest Long Term Support Ubuntu release)?
Or do you have collisions which require you to purge the old one in order to try the new one, or which cause foulups if you don't?
(Honest question. I've seen a lot of that kind of thing with other projects. So now I'm a bit shy of trying the latest-and-greatest release of any tool on the production machines I depend on for time-critical work.)
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Yes you can install the latest version alongside the existing stock version. It's always a good idea to keep the old working version around should you encounter any bugs in the new version. Just grab the latest deb packages from libreoffice.org.
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By the way, the editor of the story should have pointed to http://www.libreoffice.org/ [libreoffice.org]
My Mac Experience (Score:1)
I use Pages, which comes with the Mac (not a Communist). I tried out LibreOffice by loading up a super-simple Pages document, really it's just a text document with a few lines bolded or using different fonts. In LibreOffice, every line is a new page, so my simple text document renders as 38 pages long! Why even offer Pages compatibility if it fails such a simple test?
It makes major failures in rendering keynote files (Mac Powerpoint) and small mistakes rendering Powerpoint. With .docx, just looked at a
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Did you bother to submit a bug report and include the document in the bug report? Or do you expect the developers to be psychic?
Re:My Mac Experience (Score:4, Funny)
Dude, the guy already stated that he's not a communist. So unless someone is paying him for working on submitting his bug reports, he ain't doing squat.
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I run a conference where the abstracts of presenters are published in a book. After a teeth-gnashing experience dealing with the output of Pages, much worse than the experience with Word or OpenOffice output, I decided to no longer accept submissions written in Pages. I just don't have the time for incompatibility for the sake of incompatibility.
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I just don't have the time for incompatibility for the sake of incompatibility.
You've hit on the crux of the issue with alternatives to MS Office. People expect to be able to open a document to and have it look right, and if it doesn't it's the senders fault, not theirs. In a work environment. That's a show stopper. Sure PDFs are great but if you have to send an editable document your SOL. I used to recommend a free OSS Office product to friends who were sending kids to school since for most of what they needed to do, at zero cost, that solution works as long as they remember to save
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or even better, drop your pages/keynote combo, they are the worse of them all, their native format changes without forward or backward compatibility in mind, has no documentation whatsoever,, nobody cares about the .pages that changes every year with hooks to iCloud and IOS versions.
I know you "think differently" but man, pages, really?
Wonderful, but a sloppy UI (Score:2)
Yesterday I spent several hours writing an article using LibreOffice v 5.0.4.2. Many very seriously weird and time-consuming things happened.
It would be sensible, in my opinion, for governments to get together and support LibreOffice, so that Microsoft Office could be abandoned.
Does matter (Score:2)
>Doesn't matter. That's still denialism. It still does not work. The end user will throw the software in trash. There must be compatibility even for badly-designed documents, because in real life we have those as well.
Yes it does matter, because the point is that a very badly formatted document or one that uses non-standard fonts is just as likely to not look the same from various people USING MS-OFFICE as is does when viewed by various people using LibreOffice.
Hopeful LibreOffice user here (Score:2, Interesting)
I've (finally) installed Linux Mint end of last year (dual booting with Win7 ATM) as well as LibreOffice 5.0. Here are my particular observations (YMMV):
* I have a quick&dirty (not too dirty for continued use though) tool made in Excel using Macros, for I18N purposes. It takes tabular data and generates plain text .properties files from it (a bit more complicated than exporting to .CSV). The macros worked "almost"-as-is in Libre Office, it took me no more than half an hour to port it. Very happy to use
Warning: Java broken on Mac (Score:2)
LO 5.1 does not detect the Oracle 1.8 JRE on my Macbook. Reverting to 5.0.4 fixed this. If you're on El Capitan and need LO Java functionality, spare yourself the trouble of upgrading until this is sorted out.
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Some documents get created by one person, and then, wait for it, get USED by somebody else! Such wizardry these days!
If using proprietary (but dominant) formats were such a non-existent case, why would the LO team bother to build in the functionality?
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Not thinking like others isn't necessarily a bad thing. Check your pack animal mentality.
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It's also not necessarily a good thing. There's good reason that almost no one jabs knives into their eyes. It's not because their "sheeple".
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Humans also evolved way beyond lemmings. Anon was appealing to popularity.
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Humans also evolved way beyond lemmings. Anon was appealing to popularity.
No, they didn't. Peer pressure takes care of those who stand in the crowd.
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I didn't say peer pressure wasn't a force, but humans have a choice. Lemmings do not.
Re:OpenOffice kind of sucked (Score:5, Interesting)
OpenOffice kind of sucked.
Want to know what sucked and sucked really badly? Having to pay for the mighty flagship Microsoft Office for the PC. Then paying for the mighty flagship Microsoft Office for the Mac. Then when you take a document from one to the other, they hardly resemble each other. If' I'm paying for a program on two computers it might be nice to have the same document look the same on each computer
After standardizing on the supposedly inferior free Office on my Mac's my PC's and My Linux boxes, documents are passed back and forth without an issue. Been several years now, and Microsoft Office is the incompatible one, the outlier.
Re:OpenOffice kind of sucked (Score:5, Interesting)
Want to know what sucked and sucked really badly? Having to pay for the mighty flagship Microsoft Office for the PC. Then paying for the mighty flagship Microsoft Office for the Mac. Then when you take a document from one to the other, they hardly resemble each other. If' I'm paying for a program on two computers it might be nice to have the same document look the same on each computer
It's worse than that. How about setting up a document, getting pagination, margins, font size, etc, all figured out, so it looks perfect. Then, you go to print it, and change the printer from your cheapo inkjet to your good laser, and suddenly your document formatting takes a dump.
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The tool you were after was Adobe FrameMaker
Or Scribus. Or TeX. Or anything that makes PDFs.
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The tool you were after was Adobe FrameMaker
Or Scribus. Or TeX. Or anything that makes PDFs.
Or Apache Office. Where I don't have those issues. They give a free refund as well, if I'm not satisfied.
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Or Scribus. Or TeX. Or anything that makes PDFs.
Has Scribus stopped exploding? I found that if you tried to do anything more complex than a newsletter, it was crashes all the way down. Went back to using Adobe CS2 in a VM and I couldn't be happier compared to using Scribus and Inkscape, even if it is a bit poky.
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I gotta break this to you, because it's hilarious... so did Wordpenis, I mean wordpervert, I mean wordperfect.* It had no problem with this even back in the DOS days.
* This is what we called this stuff back then, adults and not-so-adults alike, and if you don't like it, you can suck me while I'm Micro$oft on some Compu$erve.
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These days if I want someone to have an exact copy of a document, I produce it in LibreOffice (or OpenOffice) and export to PDF.
If exact were the metric, sure. But you don't think that the same program for two computers that you paid hundreds of dollars for shouldn't at least look sortakinda similar on both?
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Yep, first thing Word does when it opens a document is reformat it for the default printer you're connected to and you can't stop it.
Ach - I forgot about that one. It was a nuisance doing posters in PowePoint with that "feature."
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I've used MS office all my life, and never actually PAID for it.
Well, working for the folks I did, we sorta had to pay for it.
I switched and switched back (Score:2)
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"Do any genuinely objective metrics exists for office suite user interfaces?"
It shouldn't have to be too difficult. Just give a test document to a bunch of users and ask them to type it. Average time to type, typeset, etc. goes up or down? How about average deviations?
Want to go beyond that? add some instrumentation: how much non-typing time takes for people to put a text in bold? how much time between mouse-button clicks? how many clicks per hour? how many chars typed per hour?
Want to go even beyond? Us
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