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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: 4, Informative) by gman003 on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:30AM
Well, let's settle this like scientists. Experiment: open each program in LibreOffice, to the most recently-opened file on my laptop. Still on an ancient 3.5 version, as it happens. Program is stored on an SSD (a rather old one, a 120GB Crucial M3), data files are stored on a hard drive (750GB 7200RPM laptop drive, a Seagate if I recall correctly). Confirmed before, between runs, and after, that there was no background process hiding. It was a cold start each time.
Writer - 0.6 seconds to start, 0.1 second to open the file. 22KiB, no images or other stuff, just text.
Calc - 0.9 seconds to a CSV import dialog, then 1.3 seconds to display it. Granted, it's only a 1KiB CSV.
Draw - 1 second to start, 2 seconds more to open the file, and another 3.5 seconds before it displayed the embedded images. 125MiB file, though, so it's understandable for it to take nearly seven seconds to open and render the file.
Impress - 0.7 seconds to start, file not found error on the last .ppt I'd opened.
Math and Base I've never used, and startup time seems to be fairly consistent so no point opening them.
Conclusion: I don't know what machine you're running it on, but LibreOffice has been fast for quite a while. I do remember waiting forever for OpenOffice to start, even with the preloader, but that no longer seems to be an issue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @06:30PM
Took me only 16 seconds to load on this severely taxed machine I'm on now. That's pretty darn fast for this bad boy.