SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @08:07PM
While we're on the topic of FAT patents, can we collectively resolve to refresh our "cache" and check the expiration date(s) on those patent(s) ?
For instance, this: http://www.pubpat.org/microsoftfat.htm [pubpat.org] says that at least one of MS's FAT patents was supposed to have expired in 2013. If you're going to claim "Microsoft has ridiculous patents on FAT32", could you please make sure they still do, or make everyone aware of the fact that they have, in fact, expired, and we should finally be able to move on with our lives...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @10:19PM
Yes, FAT, FAT32, and VFAT have been out from under protection for a while.
M$ got their proprietary exFAT protocol baked into the Secure Digital (SD Card) spec.
THAT is what Android folks are paying M$ for.
-- gewg_
(Score: 4, Interesting) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday February 24 2015, @11:11PM
Well, maybe. A lot of modern phones don't even support external SD cards, and afaict exFAT hasn't really taken off. I think it's more accurate to say they're just paying protection money because they don't want to get sued and have to defend themselves, even if the patents are probably bogus or not applicable.
And with Alice v. CLS Bank in the US, software patents have been dealt a fatal or near-fatal blow. It will be interesting to watch this.