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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @02:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28 2015, @02:50PM (#151060)

    IFF it was the first "Micros..." entry created in that directory. The second would be "Micros~2". Then the intuitive "Micros~3" and "Micros~4". After that things start to get hairy...

  • (Score: 1) by justthinkit on Saturday February 28 2015, @02:56PM

    by justthinkit (2427) <floyd@just-think-it.com> on Saturday February 28 2015, @02:56PM (#151063) Homepage

    Same poster (didn't know I wasn't logged in). I was going to ask where one downloads the fine office suite. Then I thought I shouldn't be lazy so I googled and found this: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/ [libreoffice.org]. Just surprised neither the article, nor the high rated comments in this thread provided this info...I guess times have changed and its time to trim my gray beard.