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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 mendax on Tuesday February 24 2015, @09:55PM
I am very impressed with the quality of open-source office software such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice. I just finished ghostwriting a university-level text book using OpenOffice. It has little "quirks" and has some strange display artifacts which are fixed by causing the area to be repainted, but it worked very well for me. For my next assignment, I may try LibreOffice and see how it works, but not in SnowLeopard because the latest LibreOffice does not support it. I'll have to use Linux.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday February 24 2015, @11:16PM
If you're not aware of it, have a look at https://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/download.php [neooffice.org]
I've never used it and last heard of it years ago, but it may nevertheless suit your needs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RedBear on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:24AM
FYI, the free version of NeoOffice -- and I'm having trouble actually believing this is true, but it's right there on the features page of their site now -- the free version of NeoOffice "cannot save documents".
CANNOT SAVE DOCUMENTS.
I don't recall the free version having this limitation in the past. Seems insane to me, but apparently they felt it necessary to turn the free version into what is basically a demo that you can use to open, edit and print, and test to see if it works for you before you buy the $29.99 version from the Mac App Store. Or from the website for $10, but that appears to be an older version of NeoOffice. Confusing, NeoOffice guys.
I'm not objecting to NeoOffice's right to charge for their product or anything like that. After all, they need to support development somehow. I just wanted to warn anyone like me, who remembers successfully using the free version in years past to edit and _save_ documents, that things seem to have changed and the free version is just a rigged demo.
Personally I haven't seen any particular need for NeoOffice for several years, especially since the advent of LibreOffice and its relatively rapid UI improvements. I happened to download LibreOffice 4.4 just a few days ago and was impressed by the clarity and uniform style of the new monochrome icon set. It's really becoming an application that fits in well and performs well even on OS X. NeoOffice was started because OpenOffice years ago ran horribly slow and crashy and used non-native (Java) file dialogs and keyboard shortcuts, but both OpenOffice and now LibreOffice have improved by leaps and bounds since then, so much so that I haven't bothered to use or recommend NeoOffice to anyone in several years.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:39AM
Wow, that seems parasitic. Didn't know about that. Guess that's what copyleft is good for. Or not, since maybe NeoOffice wouldn't even exist if they couldn't charge money.
I assume they must be basing their work on Apache OpenOffice, since LibreOffice uses the MPL which appears to be copyleft.
Thanks for the info. That's good to know.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:37AM
Well, as far as paint issues are concerned, MS Word in a relatively small document (~ 15000 words with a few tables/figures) and change tracking and EndNote (no other choice, this POS sucks don't even get me started...) for references, has many of them. I often think I am typing somewhere but upon scrolling I realize that I am on the next/previous page... Quite frustrating. I should give those a try again, last time they weren't up to par speed-wise (regardless of the MS' advantage due to having access to low level kernel functions I am sure).