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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: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:17AM
I find this discussion interesting because it feels very retro. Arguing about the merits of word processors, of all things. Who still prints things out? Heck, how many people still use anything but phones anymore? Or arguing about the propriety of calling Microsoft names--did we unwittingly pass through a time warp back to Slashdot circa 1999? Good lord, people, these are topics that were. beaten. to. death. a generation ago. What's next, the second coming of the vi vs. emacs jihad?
If you really, truly, honestly want to compose something that will be printed on paper, why not use something that will look beautiful like LaTeX or one of its variants? As far as I know (admittedly, I haven't printed out a document in 8 years), it renders the whole Microsoft or not argument moot because Microsoft doesn't have an equivalent. I say that not as a LaTeX fanboy because, as I said, never have a need to print anything anymore, but because if you're a stickler about print quality it's about the best I've ever seen.
I would honestly expect more heated debates these days on the merits of cloud platforms or VMs than this stuff. Is that a reflection of the current poppulation of the SN community? Are we a bunch of grumpy old guys still rehashing the Great War?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Funny) by CirclesInSand on Wednesday February 25 2015, @04:18AM
What's next, the second coming of the vi vs. emacs jihad?
Thank god that fight is behind us. And that emacs won.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @05:48AM
> Thank god that fight is behind us. And that emacs won.
I completely agree with that - except vi won, is all.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday February 25 2015, @06:52AM
You'd be surprised. I've been working on a project for a couple of years that generates a 2.7 MB HTML file. For an HTML file, it works fairly well. I thought a friend of mine in the financial industry might find my project useful so I emailed it to him. He liked it, but then requested that I convert it to PDF for him. [Sigh.] I just print it out to a PDF and it's over 50 pages -- and it's page broken in all the wrong spots. He still loves it. It's much better as an HTML, though.
Me for one. Phone can't do the things I need to get done. I need laptop power or above. I have documents that I work on that span hundreds of pages. Some things are HTML based, but most are LibreOffice based.