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Blogger Dedoimedo is known for his fascination with bling and his attention to compatibility with MICROS~1's pseudo-standards. So, how did the most recent version of the popular FOSS office suite fare in his test?
LibreOffice 4.4 review - Finally, it rocks
[...]As a free, open-source and cross-platform solution, LibreOffice allows people to enjoy the world of writing, spreadsheets, presentations, and [the like] without having to spend hefty sums of money. The only problem till now was that it didn't quite work as advertised. Microsoft Office support was, for the lack of a better word, lacking.
[...] The most important part, [it now has] Microsoft Office support
[...]my 182-page [DOCX] document, full of images, references, footnotes, preformatted code, and other cool elements, all of which were initially conceived in LaTeX then transformed to PDF and finally to DOCX looked pretty much spotless. The image quality was a little low, but it has nothing to do with LibreOffice. I was amazed. I had not expected this, and it seems for the first time ever, LibreOffice is a most viable solution for home office use. Blimey.
LibreOffice 4.4 is everything you could have hoped for, and then some. It's beautiful. It's streamlined. It has an improved UI, which offers much more intuitive work flows, resulting in an immediate boost in productivity. It comes with enhanced menus, a more intelligent way of working with styles, easier graphics, copy & paste options, a simpler method of polishing up presentations. Most importantly, it offers a genuinely good support for the proprietary Microsoft file formats, allowing you, for the very first time, to consider LibreOffice as the one and only office suite you'll ever need.
I have never quite expected this. In fact, LibreOffice 4.4 should have been called 5.0, because it is that much better. Perhaps grander changes are needed to justify a full new release. Just think of the possibilities, if we got all this in a single dot revision. Imagine what will happen when LibreOffice finally matures toward the next large release.
One wonders how long it will be till MSFT alters their "standard" so that compatibility is broken again.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by CoolHand on Tuesday February 24 2015, @07:02PM
I read this article the other day, and I noticed that while he goes on about Word/Writer compatibility in this version, he doesn't even touch on compatibility between Excel/Calc.. IMHO, that has always been more of a problem and a show-stopper than Word/Writer. There are a lot more heavy spreadsheet users that have no tolerance for their data being mangled than there are word processing users.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Tuesday February 24 2015, @07:19PM
I, and a few other members of my team have been quietly using LibreOffiice for the last three years or so. I've encountered exactly *one* problem opening a document, a Word document with a lot of embedded objects. I've also encountered documents that *I* could pen and MS Office users could not, I assume due to compatibility issues. It's very compatible. If you like the "Ribbon" menu, you're out of luck, as Libreoffice has a menu that's always the same (for me that means things stay where I expect). I actually prefer using the open product. The only problem I've really had with it had to do with using it with dark themes, and that was several years ago.
As always, your experience may vary, but it's probably worth trying again (Linux too, KDE in particular).
(Score: 3, Informative) by CoolHand on Tuesday February 24 2015, @08:23PM
Well, one spreadsheet that Calc won't open that is very important to my team is this one:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/Power%20Systems/page/nmon_analyser [ibm.com]
I know that it's not libre's fault that this IBM developer chooses to use Excel, but the fact remains that we can't replace excel because of it.. That's just one example of the type of thing that I'm talking about. I use Libreoffice as much as I can, but I can't push it to the rest of my team until everyone can use it for everything.. otherwise we end up keeping copies of Office around anyway...
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 5, Informative) by pTamok on Tuesday February 24 2015, @09:07PM
Given that IBM strongly support the use of Open document formats, I hope you have fed back this issue to them. If nothing else, you could send a message to Rob Weir (http://www.robweir.com/blog/) so he can go and rattle somebody's cage.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @10:21PM
That is similar to what I was thinking.
The angle of IBM's commitment to open standards and FOSS didn't immediately occur to me, so kudos for mentioning that.
I was thinking that--unless it is super-secret--folks should send their non-compatible documents to the LibreOffice devs so they can identify which M$-only features need a higher priority on those guys' list.
-- gewg_
(Score: 5, Funny) by WillR on Tuesday February 24 2015, @07:41PM
There are a lot more heavy spreadsheet users that have no tolerance for their data being mangled...
They should probably stop using Excel, then.
(And whoever is responsible for Excel "helpfully" converting long strings of digits into scientific notation should be fired. From a cannon. Into the sun.)
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Archon V2.0 on Tuesday February 24 2015, @11:14PM
> (And whoever is responsible for Excel "helpfully" converting long strings of digits into scientific notation should be fired. From a cannon. Into the sun.)
That's a horrible thing to say, I demand you call my friend at Microsoft and apologize. His phone number is 6.51E+09.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday February 26 2015, @08:20PM
What I always hated was the mysterious adding digit many decimal places down at the end of a number in a cell.