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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: 3, Interesting) by hash14 on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:26AM

    by hash14 (1102) on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:26AM (#149362)

    I opened writer in 5 seconds on this:

    processor   : 7
    vendor_id   : GenuineIntel
    cpu family  : 6
    model       : 42
    model name  : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2760QM CPU @2.40GHz
    stepping   : 7
    microcode   : 0x25
    cpu MHz     : 800.000
    cache size  : 6144 KB
    physical id : 0
    siblings    : 8
    core id     : 3
    cpu cores   : 4
    apicid      : 7
    initial apicid  : 7
    fpu     : yes
    fpu_exception   : yes
    cpuid level : 13
    wp      : yes
    flags       : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf eagerfpu pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid
    bogomips    : 4784.39
    clflush size    : 64
    cache_alignment : 64
    address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
    power management:

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   3  

  • (Score: 2) by hash14 on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:27AM

    by hash14 (1102) on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:27AM (#149364)

    Also note that I used a regular mechanical HDD, no SSD