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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: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @07:28PM
I have used Open Office, then Libre Office exclusively for the past 8 years. All my spreadsheets, documents, and presentations have been made with it. I've convinced most people that I work with to download it and final products are always PDFs so nobody else knows any better.
The problems I've had with Microsoft compatibility have been less than the train wreck of .doc -> .docx
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Wednesday February 25 2015, @01:19AM
+1 to this! I haven't actually had to open and or use a word doc for the past, I dunno, four years or so. This is probably why its so confusing whenever I see articles claiming that OpenOffice has "finally" caught up. It's been here, it's just that the reviewers have finally caught up.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday February 25 2015, @07:32PM
In some areas. LO / OO still hasn't caught up, "finally" or otherwise, with Word features from around 20yrs ago, and until they start doing what every development team I've ever worked on does and actually a) listening to users or b) looking at what the competition does, they will remain behind.
Basic functionality like outline view and "normal" view (in Word terms) just isn't there, bugs about these date from _2002_ (https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=4914 https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959). [apache.org] The outline view is highest or second highest voted bug, and I believe has been for years - but there seems no point in voting as even though it's at the top it seems to be just ignored, for years. LibreOffice bug tracker has similar open bugs referring back to the OO ones, and there are multiple dupes since new users keep reporting them as well, the only difference in the LO case seems to be that they just haven't had as many years in existence to ignore it for as long. Every so often a developer seems to show up and close one or other of them on the basis that the product already does it (use Navigator etc.), completely ignoring page after page of previous discussion as to why the existing features are not a replacement (5 minutes of actually looking at the competition would show the same, but apparently they don't bother to do that either), users get upset, and the bug gets reopened, and ignored again.
Don't just take my word for it, various people have been blogging about it for years e.g.: http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2006/11/05/openoffice-outline-mode [ruwenzori.net] http://www.datamation.com/open-source/nine-improvements-that-are-overdue-in-libreoffice-writer-page-2.html [datamation.com] https://purplewelshy.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/outline-mode-in-libreoffice-writer/ [wordpress.com]
Been hoping that LibreOffice would bring good changes to this area, but sadly it doesn't look like it so far - this page says it's due to be updated with user requirements in Feb 2014: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Outline_view [documentfoundation.org] . LO folks do seem to be better at looking at the competition in other places though, e.g: this page https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Track_changes [documentfoundation.org] documents where the change tracking and comparison functionality still has a way to catch up with the competition, including some competitive analysis. It also notes that collaborative editing is not there at all yet.
I'll guess I'll keep hoping that it catches up, and you'll keep believing it has...
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday February 26 2015, @01:12PM
Yeahh...I've only ever found one document that I couldn't open in LO/OOo. It was a few years back in college, and it was some form from the university administration I had to fill out and return. The formatting was a little wonky on OOo, so I walked over to the computer lab to open it on the official copy of MS Office instead...at which point I discovered that it looked *exactly* the same in MS Office as it did in OOo. Probably an old form that nobody had bothered to update from an older Office version of something.