from the shouldn't-this-create-a-pocket-universe dept.
Microsoft Office now available on all Chromebooks
Microsoft has been testing out its Office apps on Chromebooks for the past year, but they've been mainly limited to Google's latest PixelBook device. It now appears that testing has concluded, and a number of Chromebooks are now reliably seeing the Office apps in the Google Play Store for Chromebooks. Chrome Unboxed reports that the apps are showing up on Samsung's Chromebook Pro, Acer's Chromebook 15, and Acer's C771.
The apps are Android versions of Office which include the same features you'd find on an Android tablet running Office. Devices like Asus' Chromebook Flip (with a 10.1-inch display) will get free access to Office on Chrome OS, but larger devices will need a subscription. Microsoft has a rule across Windows, iOS, and Android hardware that means devices larger than 10.1 inches need an Office 365 subscription to unlock the ability to create, edit, or print documents.
Also at Engadget.
Related: Microsoft Office for Android Phones Released
Microsoft Office 2013 is Now Working via CrossOver 16
LibreOffice 5.3 Ships with Experimental Office-Like Ribbon UI
Related Stories
Do you have the desire to run PowerPoint on your Android smartphone? Good news:
Five weeks ago, we announced the Office for Android phone preview. We are so grateful to our preview users, and with their help we were able to test the apps on over 1,900 different Android phone models in 83 countries. During the preview, we heard from thousands of these users, and over the last few weeks we were able to incorporate a lot of their feedback into the apps we're launching today. For example, we made it easier to connect to other popular third-party storage offerings like Google Drive and Box, as well as many usability adjustments to make it easier to navigate commands within the apps.
You can download the Word for Android, Excel for Android and PowerPoint for Android apps from the Google Play store beginning today. We hope you enjoy using them as much as we enjoyed making them.
At AnandTech and The Register.
Original Submission
CodeWeavers reports
Gone are [...] the days that we hopelessly tried to register Microsoft Office 2013. You read that right, people. [On November 2], we successfully registered Microsoft Office 2013 in a CrossOver 16 alpha build. We [can] also:
- Open, create, edit, save, and print Microsoft office documents
- Activate a copy of Microsoft Office 2013 [with a] product key or a 365 subscription
- Use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Project
"Everyone at CodeWeavers is incredibly excited to see Microsoft Office 2013 installing, registering, and running in CrossOver. After four years of continued development, we are preparing to deliver support for the 2013 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Project in CrossOver 16 (due out later this year). And we hope that our development will continue making strides to include support for Outlook 2013 and Microsoft Office 2016 in the coming months." -- James Ramey, President
Martin Brinkmann at gHacks reports
LibreOffice 5.3 is the newest version of the popular open source Office suite, and one of the "most feature-rich releases in the history of the application".
The Office suite, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, is now also available as a private cloud version, called LibreOffice Online.
LibreOffice, at is[sic] core, is an open source alternative to Microsoft Office. It features Writer, a text editing program similar to Word, Calc, the Excel equivalent, Impress which is similar to PowerPoint, and Draw, which enables you to create graphic documents.
LibreOffice 5.3 ships with a truckload of new features. One of the new features is a new experimental user interface called Notebookbar. This new interface resembles Office's ribbon UI, but is completely optional [submitters emphasis] right now.
In fact, the new user interface is not enabled by default, and if you don't look for it or know where to look, you will probably notice no difference at all to previous versions.
To enable the new Ribbon UI, select View > Toolbar Layout > Notebookbar. The UI you see on the screenshot above is enabled by default, but you may switch it using View > Notebookbar to either Contextual Groups or Contextual Single.
[...] One interesting option that the developers built-in to LibreOffice 5.3 is the ability to sign PDF documents, and to verify PDF document signatures.
[...] The Writer application got some exciting new features. It supports Table styles now for instance, and there is a new Page deck in the sidebar to customize the page settings quickly and directly.
There is also an option to use the new "go to page" box, and arrows in the drawing tools which were not available previously in Writer.
Calc got a new set of default cell styles offering "greater variety and better names", a new median function for pivot tables, and a new filter option when you are inserting functions to narrow down the selection.
The article also has 4 demo videos embedded.
In the comments there, Donutz notes that the Ribbon UI requires the Java Runtime Environment.
Oggy notes that the suite is available from PortableApps. (Martin's site is largely Windows-centric).
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 27 2017, @11:50PM (1 child)
Anything worth reading digitally should be written in plain text, or at most Web markup.
Anything worth reading analogically should be written with plain TeX.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 28 2017, @09:12PM
If it's not worth reading, then it's not worth reading on a digital device.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 27 2017, @11:51PM (8 children)
to open a non-trivial xls(x?) spreadsheet including inter-file links and other fun things:
Is Microsoft Office really needed anymore, outside of specific plugins (which probably don't work with 365 to begin with!) or intentionally broken office features between versions?
In my albeit limited experience, it has long since passed being a necessity.
If this is not actually true, can anyone provide citations of office files that only work on M$ Office, what version, how they fail with LibreOffice, and whether they work/are broken on Office 365?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Gaaark on Tuesday November 28 2017, @12:38AM (1 child)
Unfortunately they got to the stupids in colleges, universities (and require students to use it) and head offices who think there is nothing else but MS orifice.
Stupids is as stupids does.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 28 2017, @09:17PM
The Stupids get corporations to approve purchase of MS Orifice. And then require everyone else to use it. So that the Stupids can read other people's documents. And so that they don't look stupid with their unnecessary power point slides.
The downfall of America can be traced back the Mars company when they introduced blue M&M's.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday November 28 2017, @12:45AM (1 child)
On a chromebook you don't expect to be doing high level work in Office, word or excel anyway, and the Google tools are more than good enough.
Typical student use is easily handled by those.
Our company switched over to LO a long time ago for all office type tasks and haven't found anything it couldn't handle
lately, although there were some bitchslap worthy spread sheets full of macros in the early days that caused problems.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 28 2017, @09:21PM
It is important that people get over this irrational prejudice against using Chromebooks for high level office work.
How else are Google and Microsoft going to be able to store your important and proprietary corporate documents in their clouds for analysis for, um . . . advertising.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @01:11AM (1 child)
It's impossible to be fully bug-for-bug compatible with MS-Office without actually being MS-Office. Some documents won't open or render "correctly" without the real McCoy. By "correctly" I mean matching MS-Word, even if misinterprets or illogically renders or inserts formatting meta data to do it.
I once read that MS tried to rewrite Word around the mid 90's to use cleaner coding techniques, but couldn't get backward compatibility to fully work. Some existing documents depended on bugs to look how they did. MS thus decided to keep most of the rendering engine code as-is. Mutants live.
Edge seems to have a similar problem: its bug profile doesn't match Internet Explorer's such that apps that only work in IE often don't work in Edge. MS is not compatible with itself.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @01:51AM
Even newer versions of Office aren't bug compatible with Office. My office (a Fortune 500, albeit on the lower end) switched everyone to Office 2016 a few months after it came out and then promptly switched everyone back to 2010 a few days later, as both Word and Excel were causing all sorts of problems due to improper rendering or formulas giving different results. They finally got most of those fixed, but we still run into issues with emailed documents in both directions.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday November 28 2017, @04:19AM
Amazon Marketplace offers a pre-upload validator for product and inventory feed files. It's implemented as an Excel file with macros (.xlsm). From LO's help wiki [libreoffice.org]:
I'm guessing it's analogous to the difference between POSIX and Win32 APIs.
(Score: 2) by theronb on Tuesday November 28 2017, @06:18AM
It's not the editing of normal documents that's the big hurdle. I worked for a large corporation that had widely implemented SAP and used many in-house applications that linked with Excel spreadsheets to keep managers' fingers out of SAP itself. We avoided Windows and Office upgrades for as long as possible because extensive sandboxing was necessary to ensure compatibility (I wasn't in IT but I owned one of the apps). I like LO and used it at home, but I doubt the SAP apps would have worked.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Tuesday November 28 2017, @12:47AM
Pretty much, who. fucking. cares.
Or is it KFC? Kuntz fucking cares?
Can't wait for the world to learn.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday November 28 2017, @01:13AM (6 children)
but back in my day, I didn't need to connect to any tubes just to run office.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @01:22AM (3 children)
I'll see your old fogie and raise you a geezer.
Back in my day Lotus SmartSuite worked just fine and we didn't need to run Office at all.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday November 28 2017, @01:50AM (1 child)
Green text on black editor for form letters which lived "on the mainframe" ftw
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday November 28 2017, @06:19AM
FORTRAN too.
They taught us basic in the intro class. The student terminals only had twelve lines because Solano College didn't have the cash to buy the memory for twenty-four.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @01:56AM
Dn kids, abacus or go home!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 28 2017, @09:26PM (1 child)
When I was young, it was uphill both ways, and in plain ASCII, no GUI.
You had to memorize a stack of manuals -- that couldn't be removed from the computer room because they were bolted (literally) to the table. Young people learned to type properly, otherwise you would have to DUP the card you were punching up to the column where you made the mistake. There was no backspace -- the hole is punched into the card and can't be un-punched. And stand up straight. Pay attention. Don't drop your deck of cards on the floor -- that's a real mess to sort out.
But you had to let the tubes warm up first.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday November 28 2017, @11:16PM
Our Cobol instructor at Solano Community College advised us to use a felt-tip pen to draw a diagonal line across one end of our decks.
But replacing some buggy code totally dephlogisticated my deck's Feng Shui.
By the time I turned in the line printer hardcopies of my code and its output, there were dozens of diagonal lines in all manner of different colors.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 28 2017, @04:17AM (2 children)
> Chromebook Flip (with a 10.1-inch display) will get free access to Office on Chrome OS
Anyone tried this free version of Office with a large external display? Just checked Flip specs and it supports multiple external screens including HDTVs.
Every now and then my big corporate customer sends me a complex docx or xlsx that won't open correctly in Libre Office. Also, they want me to join their SharePoint "conversations". I can't see paying for 365 from MS, but this free version is tempting and there is usually a TV around to use for a big screen. A little Chromebook would probably have some other use as well -- maybe for traveling to places where any computer will be searched (China, USA?). Just connect it to a throwaway Gmail/Google login for the trip.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday November 28 2017, @05:27AM (1 child)
Looked around, couldn't find anything. Seems like it should work though. Microsoft justified the 10.1-inch decision on the basis that people don't usually use external keyboards + mice with smaller touchscreen devices. The anon who connects the flipping thing to a TV is an outlier.
Ir anyone is willing to do this, please report back.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday November 28 2017, @05:28AM
Also, I think Microsoft might have picked the 10.1-inch cutoff to specifically exclude the 10.5-inch Apple iPad Pro.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]