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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, Interesting) by dx3bydt3 on Tuesday February 24 2015, @08:13PM
For years I've thought open office, and more recently libreoffice much nicer to use for word processing than Microsoft word, particularly since they've ruined the interface with the ribbon. Calc is great too, there used to be some key things that were lacking compared to excel, but I think now familiarity with the program is the only reason to stick to excel over calc. Impress is impressive too, I have had .pptx presentations that wouldn't work correctly in office 2007 but worked fine in Impress.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Doctor on Tuesday February 24 2015, @09:43PM
I still have Microsoft Office 2003. I refuse to upgrade to the ribbon interface and I hate everyone who uses the ribbon as nothing is where I expect it and it makes new options undiscoverable. I do have Libre Office loaded as well. I find certain things just do now work right in MS Office. I probably just should switch over to Libre Office completely as I will avoid the ribbon as long as possible. What a crap interface.
"Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way." - The Doctor
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Wednesday February 25 2015, @04:42AM
The ribbon is pretty useful once you're used to it. If anything Microsoft made a mistake by not leaving the traditional menus as an option.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @05:45AM
The whole point of a GUI is to make things easy before you are used to them. CLI is easy when you are used to it...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jbWolf on Wednesday February 25 2015, @06:42AM
I never got used to the ribbon because my brain is wired to words, not pictographs. I can use the ribbon just fine, but I would not consider it useful. Hunting down a function is a real pain in the brain.
Having said that, I am in 100% agreement with you about having both the ribbons and the menus. I don't see why they couldn't have both. If people really like the ribbon that much, then there is no reason why Microsoft couldn't have had both with an easy option to turn on one, the other, or both at the same time.
www.jb-wolf.com [jb-wolf.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 26 2015, @08:09AM
the problem with ribbons is that in a world of widescreen landscape aspect screens, ribbons take up a bucketload more vertical real estate than they should, which letterboxes my documents even moreso