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Review of v4.4 - Finally, LibreOffice Rocks

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday February 24 2015, @06:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the new-and-improved dept.

"gewg_" writes:

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.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by pTamok on Tuesday February 24 2015, @09:07PM

    by pTamok (3042) on Tuesday February 24 2015, @09:07PM (#149287)

    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.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @10:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @10:21PM (#149322)

    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_