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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 Common Joe on Wednesday February 25 2015, @03:48PM
[Smirking.] I know software. No, there is no "temporary light install" when you run a program. The same exes and dlls are loaded and executed between both installed and portable versions. (If you download the portable app, it unzips once, then you can use the executables repeatedly after that.)
There may be tricks that programmers use to fool you, though. I know older versions of Microsoft Office and the WordPerfect Suites used to "preload" a lot of files on bootup so it looked like the word processor or spreadsheet quickly popped up once the machine was done booting. In reality, you paid for it when you booted up (even if you never used that program when the machine was on) and you lost RAM to the preloaded files. I suspect Microsoft Office does the same today, although I haven't checked lately. I have no idea what LibreOffice does.
I do mention that I use the portable version because, yes, it could be a factor in some way and throw off the anecdotal timing tests we're doing here. If I get up off my lazy butt and run some trials between the portable version and the installed version, I'll post somewhere on this thread. If anyone does know off hand, I'd appreciate knowing more about it.
As for being an old timer: I have my reasons for running portable programs in Windows that are not important to this conversation. Hardware? I'll gladly accept any donations of time, hardware, and money that youngersters freely give to old people like me. I'd love to have a zippy laptop that I could use on a daily basis.