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
Interesting. I have been working on collecting a large number of authors and books (perhaps something the guy looking for good reading material last week might be interested in?) I had zero problem moving from Libre Office on Debian to Windows 7 Office Excel 2010 using the Microsoft.xlsx file format. Then, yesterday, I made some formatting changes on the Windows 7 machine, applying a bold font and increasing the font size on a few dozen cells for visual purposes. When I saved the file, the file size (around 10 tabs and probably around 10,000 cells total info) went from below 90K to over 1900K. That is, the file ballooned by 20 times. I took the file back to the Linux machine, and opened it there, and resaved, and the file size dropped back to the mid 80s. I haven't reversed the process to see if Microsoft will re-balloon the file, or if they are holding on to extra versions of the file inside for version control. Very interesting. If I ever run into a file that can't be saved due to size issues, or if I want to save for archive purposes, I know that I'll make a point of saving from Libre office before I consider the document final.
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:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:2)
Interesting. I have been working on collecting a large number of authors and books (perhaps something the guy looking for good reading material last week might be interested in?) I had zero problem moving from Libre Office on Debian to Windows 7 Office Excel 2010 using the Microsoft .xlsx file format. Then, yesterday, I made some formatting changes on the Windows 7 machine, applying a bold font and increasing the font size on a few dozen cells for visual purposes. When I saved the file, the file size (around 10 tabs and probably around 10,000 cells total info) went from below 90K to over 1900K. That is, the file ballooned by 20 times. I took the file back to the Linux machine, and opened it there, and resaved, and the file size dropped back to the mid 80s. I haven't reversed the process to see if Microsoft will re-balloon the file, or if they are holding on to extra versions of the file inside for version control. Very interesting. If I ever run into a file that can't be saved due to size issues, or if I want to save for archive purposes, I know that I'll make a point of saving from Libre office before I consider the document final.