SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Touché) by hemocyanin on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:39AM
I'm am by no means a math expert, but instinctively, I feel that -2^2 is the same as -2*-2, which does equal 4. I'm not the only one who thinks that either apparently: http://www.mathsisfun.com/algebra/exponents-squaring-negative.html [mathsisfun.com]
I'm still using open office 3.something, and when enter =-2^2 in a cell, I get "4". when I enter =-2^3 I get -8, which makes sense to me (-2*-2*-2).
Am I missing something or is AC just wrong? Like I said, I'm not a math expert.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:58AM
I'm not an expert either, but common.
-2^2 = -2*2 = -4
(-2)^2 = (-2)*(-2) = 4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations [wikipedia.org]
Where one can also read "Exceptions to the standard" which imo basically means 'How some people messed simple rules to ... make a mess'.
Any TI calculator, Octave, R, Python, Google, Wolfram etc.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-2^2&dataset= [wolframalpha.com]
See also:
http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/tutorials/spreadsheet-addiction/ [burns-stat.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Wednesday February 25 2015, @01:41AM
Based on the last link, it looks like Excel does things contrary to your expectations too. Confirmed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plus_and_minus_signs#Minus_sign [wikipedia.org]
I'm guessing open office is doing it the same way to maintain compatibility. In my mind, I suppose I would think of the non-excel/calc method as something like: -1*(2^2)
I kind of like the excel method because it feels like for -2, negative is a property of the number itself that is being squared. But, I don't get to make the rules because my math is weak, and there may be perfectly good reasons my instinct sucks. Anyway, it is good to know that these things are treated differently and I suppose the best practice would be to liberally use () in any context to ensure no erroneous assumptions about order sneak in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:04AM
You are correct regarding the ().
I don't know about folks around here, but i don't remember being taught the unary minus in school. There was a pencil, paper, calculator (no PC), and an aggressive teacher.
I only remember one minus, but i confess there's a lot i don't remember.
How does one keep consistency (and sanity) if:
-2^2 = 2^2
1-2^2 = 1+2^2
http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-1862-page-2.html [hpmuseum.org]