The problem with F/OSS office suites is that their audience tends to be uncritical, so much as in the fairy tale "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" (but in inverse), professionals have stopped listening.
I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents. Their main strength was that it was often easier to ex
That would explain why LibreOffice can't actually save in some of the file formats I try to save and doesn't seem to be able to correctly read formatting more complicated than the basic paragraph justification.
Since I'm a programmer, not a writer, I don't consider the cost of MS Office to be a reasonable business expense. On the other hand, I sometimes need to read, edit, or write documents, and both OO and LO have failed quite dramatically just often enough to get annoying.
I've got the same background and needs... and I've found more and more that Google Docs seems to work pretty well 98% of the time. It keeps getting better and better and for most interoffice stuff just works. Sometimes it hits a macro or something that it doesn't get and I have to download it, but the last time I did that was about 2 years ago (and it's improved a lot since then anyway).
I'm quite happy that I'll be able to completely ditch office software installs soon.
(Disclaimer, we have gmail for business here so if you open anything from the webmail client, it does it through Google Docs.)
The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with F/OSS office suites is that their audience tends to be uncritical, so much as in the fairy tale "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" (but in inverse), professionals have stopped listening.
I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents. Their main strength was that it was often easier to ex
Re: (Score:1)
That would explain why LibreOffice can't actually save in some of the file formats I try to save and doesn't seem to be able to correctly read formatting more complicated than the basic paragraph justification.
Since I'm a programmer, not a writer, I don't consider the cost of MS Office to be a reasonable business expense. On the other hand, I sometimes need to read, edit, or write documents, and both OO and LO have failed quite dramatically just often enough to get annoying.
I know that document handling is
Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:2)
I've got the same background and needs... and I've found more and more that Google Docs seems to work pretty well 98% of the time. It keeps getting better and better and for most interoffice stuff just works. Sometimes it hits a macro or something that it doesn't get and I have to download it, but the last time I did that was about 2 years ago (and it's improved a lot since then anyway).
I'm quite happy that I'll be able to completely ditch office software installs soon.
(Disclaimer, we have gmail for business here so if you open anything from the webmail client, it does it through Google Docs.)