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 export data from them than it was in certain commercial products.
The point of this is that in order for one of these FOSS office suites to survive, people who are critical and have use requirements beyond short documents get involved. For these packages to be competitive, they need to rise to a higher standard than Grandma's recipes, Son's book report, a weekend memo to the boss, etc.
How does your license make a crappy product any better? There are thousands if not millions of F/OSS apps out there that just suck. There are a few real Gems, but a lot of cheap crap. There is also a lot of Crap Closed Source apps too. But at least those companies in general will go out of business.
How does your license make a crappy product any better?
Answer:
There is also a lot of Crap Closed Source apps too. But at least those companies in general will go out of business.
If we're not talking about Angry Birds then you'll be investing energy in order to learn and use any product regardless of the level of shiny. The greater the chance that the product vendor will disappear in a puff of smoke or EOL the product you are using, the larger the risk to your investment and the more attractive alternatives become.
Perhaps you should follow your own advice and post the failing test cases so we could see what's broken. Then some enterprising developer could figure out how to fix them. Complaining without specifics, as you are doing, is not practically different from being "uncritical".
Perhaps you should follow your own advice and post the failing test cases so we could see what's broken.
That's a great idea! Let's think it through, however. I don't own the data; that belongs to the client. Thus, I have to be somewhat vague. Further, I'm available for consulting at my usual rate -- my contact should be on my user page. I give very specific reports (not written in OO, LibreOffice or Word) to clients.
That's a great idea! Let's think it through, however. I don't own the data; that belongs to the client. Thus, I have to be somewhat vague.
You couldn't modify the example enough to use the documents already examined in your tests? Or, if the problem was a missing feature instead of a bug, you couldn't explain it without that specific set of spreadsheet data?
I'm available for consulting at my usual rate -- my contact should be on my user page.
So you're saying that you don't volunteer your time to someone's project. Pay to play, right?
From your journal post earlier today:
Despite having other demands on my time, I've begun spending a half-hour or so every day making submissions to Slashdot and trying to write quality comments. I am doing this because I think Slashdot is an important part of the internet, which like other forms of media, for good or ill is a part of our "culture."...It's not perfect...I've been modded -1, Flamebait for a post I thought was insightful too. Nothing is perfect...Support Slashdot. With your energy, time, money, whatever. It's worth it.
Hold on now. If you're willing to take that stance regarding Slashdot, why not just be honest about F/OSS office suites? You don't care about them and have no interest in seeing them succeed. There really is nothing wrong with that position.
So you're saying that you don't volunteer your time to someone's project.
No, absolutely not. But in this case, I'm full up with projects and so this should be pay-to-play. As you can see, I give a lot of my time to free projects.
You don't care about them and have no interest in seeing them succeed.
Not really. But having an audience that can't tell "doesn't work" from "works" means I wouldn't waste my time on that particular product.
Further, my belief is that having more different types of word processors is
I didn't claim you opposed anything; in fact, I specifically suggested that you be honest about your "disengagement". However, your posts would certainly lend themselves to assuming that you are trolling. You hand wave about supposed specific problems but provide no specifics, then when asked to contribute the specifics you suggest that you might if someone pays you for your time. For testing and reporting problems with a F/OSS project. This certainly looks more like opposition, not apathy. But I also
If you're willing to take that stance regarding Slashdot, why not just be honest about F/OSS office suites? You don't care about them and have no interest in seeing them succeed. There really is nothing wrong with that position.
I think you're making his(?) point for him. He never said he cared about F/OSS office suites or had an interest in seeing them succeed. He said he'd been asked to evaluate them on several occasions and found that they fell short. There is no obligation on anyone, or even on everyone who posts on Slashdot, to find F/OSS inherently superior in some way.
He's not the only one with reservations. I, too, have evaluated many alternatives to MS Office for my own businesses, clients, and others. So far, I am still s
I think you're making his(?) point for him. He never said he cared about F/OSS office suites or had an interest in seeing them succeed. He said he'd been asked to evaluate them on several occasions and found that they fell short. There is no obligation on anyone, or even on everyone who posts on Slashdot, to find F/OSS inherently superior in some way.
Indeed. I expect many read his posts and assume he is a troll. I pointed out that perhaps he isn't, but that he probably could have been more forthcoming in his responses.
He's not the only one with reservations. I, too, have evaluated many alternatives to MS Office for my own businesses, clients, and others. So far, I am still strongly of the view that for anyone with non-trivial requirements and whose time matters more than a little money (which is almost everyone in business or government for a start) neither the OpenOffice family nor any of the on-line alternatives like Google Docs that I have seen to date are serious competitors. Home users can use toy software and might not mind. Professionals need tools that work reliably and efficiently, and £200 or so is nothing compared to the losses of using substandard and/or incompatible tools.
I used OpenOffice exclusively as the IT Director for a university for several years. At no point did we seriously consider moving the campus there, but I proved to myself that it was very possible to use it day in and day out. In my current job (where I'm back on MS Office), we spend several hundred thousand dollars per year with Micro
OK, I was being a little flippant with the "toy" vs. "professional" thing, but only a little.
If, as you say, the majority of your document creation could be handled by WordPad, then sure, it probably doesn't matter which word processor you use. In fact, by your own argument, you don't actually need a word processor at all.
On the other hand, for people who do actually need the kind of extra functionality that a good word processor or spreadsheet offers, the poor usability of the OpenOffice family in comparis
If he doesn't care about F/OSS and doesn't accept its principle of giving back, the honest thing would be to stop using F/OSS, or at least not to complain about supposed bugs while refusing to specify.
Governments should also operate under a constraint they rarely do.
Governments should avoid forcing their citizens to pay money to a private entity in order for their citizens to interact with them. This means that governments should avoid using software who's data format is largely proprietary.
Yes, yes, the stupid 'documented' XML format that's not really an open standard at all....
I think, for a document format to be considered standard, there must be at least one piece of fully-interoperable Open Source s
Governments should avoid forcing their citizens to pay money to a private entity in order for their citizens to interact with them.
The trouble with that argument is that taken to its logical conclusion it can't possibly work in general. For many government interactions, I now have a choice of filing on-line (requires an Internet connection), sending everything by post (requires paying postage) or personally visiting a government office (requires paying for transportation to get there and back if I don't live nearby). Life isn't free, which is why we get jobs to earn money that we spend on other things, some of which are essential.
The trouble with that argument is that taken to its logical conclusion it can't possibly work in general. For many government interactions, I now have a choice of filing on-line (requires an Internet connection), sending everything by post (requires paying postage) or personally visiting a government office (requires paying for transportation to get there and back if I don't live nearby). Life isn't free, which is why we get jobs to earn money that we spend on other things, some of which are essential.
Yes, but the post office is regulated and may only charge a legislatively limited amount of money. And for the others, you have a choice of providers.
For editing a Microsoft Word document (to, say, fill out a form) you have to buy a piece of software from a particular entity that has been granted a government monopoly on providing you with those bits. The government, in essence, has given them the power to impose an arbitrary tax on you that there is no reason for them to limit.
Out of curiosity, may I ask where you're based? It sounds like this is a real problem for you, and if I had to submit things myself in Word format then I might well agree. Here in the UK, information from the government is often provided as, e.g., a PDF file, but things that are interactive like filing tax returns are typically done using (usually fairly well done) government-hosted web sites.
It's not actually a real problem. I barely interact with the government at all.:-) And the government here is still almost obsessively paper based.
I have a problem with resume's sometimes. But I'm skilled enough that generally recruiters are more than happy to convert to Word for me, and that has nothing to do with government access.
You complain about unspecified bugs in software that other people, often unpaid, developed so you can use it for free, even commercially. When asked to specify and file those bugs, so other people can fix them for free, you reply:
I'm available for consulting at my usual rate
You don't get what free software is about, do you?
The issue always comes back to reading and editing MS Office documents.
An analogy to another MS proprietary product is IE. The fact is when IE 6 had 90% of the market you couldn't win by emulating IE hacks. Therefore, developers only targeted it and users refused to upgrade. People say Mozilla at the time was perfectly compatible most of the time but that 20% of sites that told you to leave Netscape( as they assumed anything non IE was that) otherwise.
Until something was much better users had no reason to l
Perhaps you should follow your own advice and post the failing test cases so we could see what's broken. Then some enterprising developer could figure out how to fix them.
That's not necessary.
OO and LO aren't even alpha quality yet, if you're considering using them in a workhorse capacity in the enterprise. These pre-alpha type bugs can easily be found by an internal testing staff within the OO and LO teams. There's no need to get end users involved in reporting problems until the software is realistically beta quality.
At work one day, I opened a sample of our documents that were all originally created with MS Word. (I'm the lone Linux advocate in our group.) All of the
1. SLOW! Slow to start. Slow to open documents, slow to do anything. 2. Formatting compatibility. Create MS Office document and save it in any version from 2000 to docx. Open it in Open/Libre Office... shit scattered everywhere. 3. Printing. I still can't print envelopes properly, the orientation does not shift correctly from one printer to the next. 4. Support! The above are not new complaints they have been present since the beginning. Responses to complaints about them are; -- It's not that slow, MS uses tri
Define "larger documents"? For example, I've created 500+ page legal documents in OpenOffice Writer with no issues - including lots of graphics. So what's the tipping point?
Define "larger documents"? For example, I've created 500+ page legal documents in OpenOffice Writer with no issues - including lots of graphics. So what's the tipping point?
Agreed. Microsoft Word, in all the times I have tried to work with very large documents with it, has always failed miserably.
Again, this time applied to MS Word: what's the tipping point? I've had the FractINT 20.0 manual open in Word 95 (runs to I think three hundred pages?), although that has no fancy formatting or illustrations, and all I was doing was fixing justification and pagination prior to printing. Handled that well enough.
ok, answered this one myself, and FYI: apparently the limit in Word 2003 is 32767 pages or 32MB-1 byte of text, whichever gets hit first. This has something to do with Words document table it uses for pagination and indexing/spellchecking, etc.
Which makes sense: I've hit much, much lower limits when doing mail merges for large values of "To:"; apparently Word treats each and every copy of the document you're merging, to each and every recipient, as a bunch of separate pages in the same document. So if you'r
I'm not sure about now, but several years ago MS Word exasperated me with its inability to handle large documents that Word Perfect had no problem with. I wrote The Paxil Diaries in Oo without any problems at all.
who sends.doc files when email suffices for short documents just fine and works way better on mobile devices.
Everyone. It drives me crazy.
Sometimes it's worse. Occasionally, I get a document that has been printed out and scanned to a pdf and sent as an email attachment.
If that wasn't enough, often those copied on the email will have a discussion over email and include the original attachments with every reply. That might be tolerable in the age of broadband, except the conversation usually goes like this: "Got it, thanks" followed by "Okay, great -- did everyone else get this?", "Yep, just hit my inbox", "Not s
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.
Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.
The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.
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.
Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.
The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.
From your comment and his comment I suspect that his test involved getting huge documents from different MS office versions and loading them. Then deciding that OO can't handle big documents in general. This is a very skewed test. For people moving completely to OO that's a non issue.
Strangely enough, I've had better lucking importing huge documents ( > 400 pages ) into OO and formatting for print than in Word itself.
Not strange at all, if the original document used styles sanely instead of going for complex direct formatting.
When things really break is when one has to collaborate with people who resist to LibreOffice on some badly formatted document, and then you have to convert to and back again several times.
I have published a couple of books in Create Space using OO and Libre Office to create the interior PDFs. I used templates supplied by Create Space that were intended for MS Word. The documents were both several hundred pages and included illustrations. I used The Gimp to create front and back cover images and free fonts from Font Squirrel for the title fonts. OO worked perfectly. I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone publishing a print on demand book.
I used templates supplied by Create Space that were intended for MS Word. The documents were both several hundred pages and included illustrations. I used The Gimp to create front and back cover images and free fonts from Font Squirrel for the title fonts. OO worked perfectly.
Sanity happens. Now, if the templates are badly done with complex direct formatting, and if you have to go back and forth with the proprietary word processor several times, or if it is ‘Open’XML, then bad things happen.
Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.
The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.
Because you say so, and yet, you're not a writer:)
The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files.
I think it's pretty clear that this is a fundamental shortfall of those files and formats, not of LO. The latter would have no problem opening and saving them if they were not obfuscated and undocumented. Just as with the nouveau driver, it's Jesus- worthy miracle that it works at all.
The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite files.
I think it's pretty clear that this is a fundamental shortfall of those files and formats, not of LO. The latter would have no problem opening and saving them if they were not obfuscated and undocumented. Just as with the nouveau driver, it's Jesus- worthy miracle that it works at all.
That was my point.
But I actually think it is not only the proprietary file formats being bad. It is also that the proprietary suite falls short in organising documents with styles and templates, so people use very complex direct formatting.
I need the ability to save in.docx so that people with Word 2007 can read and edit my document. I need to be able to have this make a full cycle, from MS to LO and back, or better yet, several cycles, without the formatting or inline equations getting garbled.
This isn't currently possible. I suspect it never will be.
That's on the network with several hundred people sharing documents through Sharepoint, with some of them using Office 2007, and some using Office 2010. So, yes, different computers/printers.
From actual experience, it can read and save in.doc most of the time, but has only basic support for reading.docx (numerous formatting errors) and only a token effort at saving.docx (with no warning that it cannot save formatting more complicated than newlines).
If you're not going to properly support a file type, include some indication that people should not try to use it.
I have been turned down for work because my resume looked like crap on their computers but fine on mine.
I switched back to Windows and Office and never looked back after that. IN the business world where you survive on 10% margins of profit a loss of a supplier, customer, or a good employee can have a staggering impact. When you hear on the phone sorry I have Xoffice people will think you are incompetent. It is like saying I do not have email or a fax number. I have a zigatron instead.
I have been turned down for work because my resume looked like crap on their computers but fine on mine.
I switched back to Windows and Office and never looked back after that. IN the business world where you survive on 10% margins of profit a loss of a supplier, customer, or a good employee can have a staggering impact. When you hear on the phone sorry I have Xoffice people will think you are incompetent. It is like saying I do not have email or a fax number. I have a zigatron instead.
We got into similar arguments 10 years ago on slashdot on why Netscape and the beta version of Mozilla was alllll so awesome compared to the new IE 6. Fact is, 90% of the world used IE 6 and if you can't code sites for it you did not belong to rest of the world.
It wasn't until Firefox came along that a real alternative existed and a reason to leave IE behind. Now we have the freedom to use whatever browser because the stranglehold was broke. What does this have to do with office?
Easy. MS Office is still superior, lighter, and owns the standards the world uses to get shit done. Until there is a better product people like myself will continue to pay money for it and use it. I am not a troll here but this is a serious problem. No StarWritter (or whatever the fuck it is called now) is not fully compatible with Word nor its formatting issues.
You want the world to switch you need a lighter and supperior product. StarOffice and OpenOffice 1.2 5 years ago was slow as hell. Most users will just stick to what they know and that is Office.
Use PDFs for resumes. Everyone accepts them now, they look identical across platforms and are immutable -- unless you really need the HR person to make changes for you.
So your using ms office 2010 or something? Legacy formats of MS are better supported in OO or LO than in their later products. At least, that's my experience.
1) I want better support for indexes. And in specific I want to be able to maintain several DIFFERENT indexes in the same document. (Think Alphabetic index, index of dates, index of places, etc.)
2) I want bettersupport for tables of contents. And in specific I want to be able to have several different tables of contents in the same document. (Think Table of contents, list of figures, etc.)
The difference between tables of contents and indexes is that indexes are sorted by name. Tables of contents by
Let me tell you that, as a developer, you are exactly the type of person I want writing feature requests and bug reports. Those are all necessary or neat features, and your descriptions are good. It's a shame LO doesn't have a feature request section or a task list of requested features being implemented (just check https://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/ [libreoffice.org] , I didn't see it).
I mean honestly the only rebuttial I could provide would be for 2 + 3, which would be to use documentation/guide generation tools - b
You want LaTeX. Take a look at LyX if you haven't already -- it'll make getting started really easy.
For the quarter-fold cards, check out the rotating package.
Just FYI, I found an easy way to create quarter fold cards in LibreOffice. Create two new paragraph styles (e.g. French Fold Inside, French Fold Outside). Modify the styles and, under the 'position' tab, set the rotation to 90 degrees for the outside, and 270 degrees for the inside. You can make a card now by simply setting the page orientation to
Well, I looked at LaTex via KLyx awhile ago, and it wasn't what I want. Sorry. Mainly I want things to work the way they work in Open/Libre Office. I just want a few extensions.
I do agree that LaTex can do what I want. So can Scribus, and I don't want to use that, either. And Scribus wouldn't require and extensive learning curve.
OTOH, I may be being unfair. It was quite awhile ago that I looked at KLyx (which I'm assuming is the same program as LyX). So I'll give it another look, just to be certain.
The LO Calc charting features are so godawful that they should be embarrassed to claim support for charts at all. And no, I don't want to have to learn gnuplot just to make charts and graphs that don't look like ass. That alone is enough to make me stick to Excel.
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.
I wonder if the problem isn't more that people are failing to recognize that there are different audiences with different needs. For example in office suites, there are loads of people who just need a decent work processor for typing up simple documents, and then there are people who really want integration between their word processor, spreadsheet editor, and groupware client, and groupware server. The latter audience may be well served by going with the full MS Office/MS Exchange combination, and that keeps a lot of people using MS Office.
It reminds me of an argument between a GIMP fan and a Photoshop fan. The Photoshop user was saying, "GIMP is terrible because it doesn't have good support for CMYK." and the GIMP user responded by saying, "Well nobody actually uses CMYK, but GIMP lets me script things easily, so GIMP is much better!" These two users were talking past each other, failing to recognize that each had probably chosen their solution well.
As a small aside to your experiences, I found that when using LibreOffice and I want to use the following as a separator: ______________ (that's holding down Shift to get the underline)
in LibreOffice, it creates an entire line across the page whereas in Word 2010, it creates the line exactly as shown. If I try to delete the extraneous lines, the entire line is deleted in LO.
I did do some looking, but did not find a way in LO to stop this "feature" from occurring.
Your comment is a clear indication that this kind of stuff should not be on by default - like auto-completion, which is just annoying, since I can type faster than I can use the auto complete (Thank you, Mavis Deacon)
The automation *is* sometimes annoying. But for that on in particular the FIRST thing I'd try is an underlined tab, with the tab positioned where I wanted the underline to end.
OTOH, as another answer said, you can just turn off the automation. I have some of it turned off already, as it was just too annoying. Other parts I find quite useful, and I would bet that which parts annoy different people is quite different. (I don't like it's automatically correcting capitalizations, as I find that most of it's
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.
One would think, after reviewing them 3 times, you could be more specific. Can you name one fundamental way in which LO fell short? Define "large document" and "disaster"? No, of course not, because LO is strictly better than MSO: it doesn't spy on you, doesn't hold your data hostage, not a significant malware vector, has simpler, more familiar, and highly customizable interface, can be fully supported (including adding features and bug fixes) by a third party, runs natively on every major consumer OS, stre
This is so true--I really want to use open source software, but it simply doesn't cut it for some things. This is painfully obvious with some packages more than others, for example, LO Calc is just ridiculously clunky and slow compared to MS Excel. I use Excel almost every day of my working life to look at data sets, usually as scatter plots. Even with several thousand data points to plot up, when you click Ok, Excel basically displays your plot immediately. In turn, LO Calc can take many seconds up to
OTOH, I have "saved" several Word/Excel documents that had become too corrupted to be used in Microsoft Office. All I had to do was load them in OpenOffice and then save them with a different name, and they suddenly worked again in MS Office.
Well, about 6 months to one year back I was trying to show a friend that OpenOffice (or was it LibreOffice, can't remember) was a nice alternative to Microsoft Word. I typed some text in a OpenOffice Writer file, saved it as a doc and went to open it on Microsoft Word. The point I was trying to make was that it was interoperable with the de facto standard office suite. And she would have it legally.
As soon as I opened it on Microsoft Word, it crashed the program. It had about 20 characters of text. No form
I've found LO spreadsheets to be easier to work with that the Microsoft counterpart. We programs that output information on product, I cannot tell you the number of times I've foamed at the mouth by Excel converting the UPC into scientific notation. LO seems to understand that the column is text, but no matter what we do with Excel, it always wants to turn UPC, EAN, GTIN-14 into a number.
Additionally, we find that working with large documents to be easier and more fluid with LO than Word or Excel. If som
The problem is that we live in a world where everyone demands MS file formats, and MS doesn't play well with others.
Or at least I assume that is what you are talking about. Did you really test the ability of Libre Office to handle large ODF files, or was the "total disaster" related to converting to and from MS Office formats?
If it is the latter, all you are saying is that MS Office offers superior vendor lock-in and incompatibility with products from other vendors. Call it unfairness or just the real wor
Your vague statements are completely useless. You should provide specific and precise examples demonstrating your claim that F/OSS products "were a total disaster for larger documents."
I would suspect that all of your criticisms stem from the fact that you have been so conditioned to the methods of MS Office that you cannot appreciate or even perceive new ways of doing things. IOW, I wouldn't trust you to evaluate software for my company.
Maybe. And maybe I just haven't used OpenOffice diligently enough. But I prefer the section tags of Word 98 to OpenOffice. I can't talk about any later versions of MSWord, however, as I've never used them. (And at that point MSWord was going downhill from version to version. The best version of MSWord I ever used was a version that I used on a Mac LC II. In many ways it was superior to the current version of Open Office (if you got the correct version...prior and later versions tended to crash unexpec
This. I have done similar comparisons for myself many times. I used OOo way back in the beginning and have contributed bug reports to both OOo and LibreOffice. I upgraded from OOo to NeoOffice to LibreOffice Mac version. But, Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac is STILL superior so I need both! It kills me! The reason why is "LibreOffice will wreck this layout" and "which means I would not be able to share the document with other people", and also "And even simple things like bulleted or numbered outlines get scr
The reason why is "LibreOffice will wreck this layout" and "which means I would not be able to share the document with other people", and also "And even simple things like bulleted or numbered outlines get screwed up and wrongly numbered when sending from LO to MSO"!! How utterly braindead. And wasn't there a thing where "passwords are not secure so we won't implement them"? Anyway you just have to have MS Office if you want to do work in the real world, unless you can live in a
I'll agree with you that the answer to someone asking about a particular MSO feature is not to say "You're stupid for requesting it."
On the other hand, I think OO is perfectly viable for use if you're a new company deciding on your own tech infrastructure as opposed to trying to be the OO loner in a MS-based company.
Hi, and thanks for a great comment. What have found is that there is a clear road to follow in development. Over the years a number of the issues I have submitted, mostly user experience related, are treated as enhancements, even if they are pretty important. Sometimes these get handled much later I think.
The most recent issue I mentioned about RTF and RTFD (LO can't open them but should) was picked up and treated seriously by more than one person and I am excited about that. At least, it is silly if you are
Many good points, but these two hit me as particularly relevant:
Over the years a number of the issues I have submitted, mostly user experience related, are treated as enhancements, even if they are pretty important.
Steve Jobs left us a hell of a legacy, even for Apple haters. His legacy is the idea that the complete experience is the measure of a product. That includes everything from ordering it, to unboxing, to whether it "just works" when it starts up, to customer service and its ability to stand up to d
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 (aroun
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 export data from them than it was in certain commercial products.
The point of this is that in order for one of these FOSS office suites to survive, people who are critical and have use requirements beyond short documents get involved. For these packages to be competitive, they need to rise to a higher standard than Grandma's recipes, Son's book report, a weekend memo to the boss, etc.
Hey, these are exactly the reasons I did not use a GUI Office back in 1996:-)
Tex for long documents, whatever office is installed for short.
When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers.
-- The Wall Street Journal
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 export data from them than it was in certain commercial products.
The point of this is that in order for one of these FOSS office suites to survive, people who are critical and have use requirements beyond short documents get involved. For these packages to be competitive, they need to rise to a higher standard than Grandma's recipes, Son's book report, a weekend memo to the boss, etc.
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My wife wrote Her PhD thesis in first Open then Libre Office...
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People will settle for less, when they get it for free, the question really is, how much less are people willing to settle for?
That said, often less is more (no pun) and F/OSS is the superior alternative.
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"F/OSS is the superior alternative"
How does your license make a crappy product any better? There are thousands if not millions of F/OSS apps out there that just suck. There are a few real Gems, but a lot of cheap crap. There is also a lot of Crap Closed Source apps too. But at least those companies in general will go out of business.
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Question:
How does your license make a crappy product any better?
Answer:
There is also a lot of Crap Closed Source apps too. But at least those companies in general will go out of business.
If we're not talking about Angry Birds then you'll be investing energy in order to learn and use any product regardless of the level of shiny. The greater the chance that the product vendor will disappear in a puff of smoke or EOL the product you are using, the larger the risk to your investment and the more attractive alternatives become.
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Nice cherry picking there.
Read the entire line before trying to make me say something I didn't.
often F/OSS is superior, I never said always, and yes, a lot is crap, same with closed source.
Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you should follow your own advice and post the failing test cases so we could see what's broken. Then some enterprising developer could figure out how to fix them. Complaining without specifics, as you are doing, is not practically different from being "uncritical".
Posting test cases (Score:2)
That's a great idea! Let's think it through, however. I don't own the data; that belongs to the client. Thus, I have to be somewhat vague. Further, I'm available for consulting at my usual rate -- my contact should be on my user page. I give very specific reports (not written in OO, LibreOffice or Word) to clients.
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you're full of shit
Re:Posting test cases (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a great idea! Let's think it through, however. I don't own the data; that belongs to the client. Thus, I have to be somewhat vague.
You couldn't modify the example enough to use the documents already examined in your tests? Or, if the problem was a missing feature instead of a bug, you couldn't explain it without that specific set of spreadsheet data?
I'm available for consulting at my usual rate -- my contact should be on my user page.
So you're saying that you don't volunteer your time to someone's project. Pay to play, right?
From your journal post earlier today:
Despite having other demands on my time, I've begun spending a half-hour or so every day making submissions to Slashdot and trying to write quality comments. I am doing this because I think Slashdot is an important part of the internet, which like other forms of media, for good or ill is a part of our "culture."...It's not perfect...I've been modded -1, Flamebait for a post I thought was insightful too. Nothing is perfect...Support Slashdot. With your energy, time, money, whatever. It's worth it.
Hold on now. If you're willing to take that stance regarding Slashdot, why not just be honest about F/OSS office suites? You don't care about them and have no interest in seeing them succeed. There really is nothing wrong with that position.
Don't confuse disengagement for opposition (Score:2)
No, absolutely not. But in this case, I'm full up with projects and so this should be pay-to-play. As you can see, I give a lot of my time to free projects.
Not really. But having an audience that can't tell "doesn't work" from "works" means I wouldn't waste my time on that particular product.
Further, my belief is that having more different types of word processors is
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Don't confuse disengagement for opposition
I didn't claim you opposed anything; in fact, I specifically suggested that you be honest about your "disengagement". However, your posts would certainly lend themselves to assuming that you are trolling. You hand wave about supposed specific problems but provide no specifics, then when asked to contribute the specifics you suggest that you might if someone pays you for your time. For testing and reporting problems with a F/OSS project. This certainly looks more like opposition, not apathy. But I also
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If you're willing to take that stance regarding Slashdot, why not just be honest about F/OSS office suites? You don't care about them and have no interest in seeing them succeed. There really is nothing wrong with that position.
I think you're making his(?) point for him. He never said he cared about F/OSS office suites or had an interest in seeing them succeed. He said he'd been asked to evaluate them on several occasions and found that they fell short. There is no obligation on anyone, or even on everyone who posts on Slashdot, to find F/OSS inherently superior in some way.
He's not the only one with reservations. I, too, have evaluated many alternatives to MS Office for my own businesses, clients, and others. So far, I am still s
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I think you're making his(?) point for him. He never said he cared about F/OSS office suites or had an interest in seeing them succeed. He said he'd been asked to evaluate them on several occasions and found that they fell short. There is no obligation on anyone, or even on everyone who posts on Slashdot, to find F/OSS inherently superior in some way.
Indeed. I expect many read his posts and assume he is a troll. I pointed out that perhaps he isn't, but that he probably could have been more forthcoming in his responses.
He's not the only one with reservations. I, too, have evaluated many alternatives to MS Office for my own businesses, clients, and others. So far, I am still strongly of the view that for anyone with non-trivial requirements and whose time matters more than a little money (which is almost everyone in business or government for a start) neither the OpenOffice family nor any of the on-line alternatives like Google Docs that I have seen to date are serious competitors. Home users can use toy software and might not mind. Professionals need tools that work reliably and efficiently, and £200 or so is nothing compared to the losses of using substandard and/or incompatible tools.
I used OpenOffice exclusively as the IT Director for a university for several years. At no point did we seriously consider moving the campus there, but I proved to myself that it was very possible to use it day in and day out. In my current job (where I'm back on MS Office), we spend several hundred thousand dollars per year with Micro
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OK, I was being a little flippant with the "toy" vs. "professional" thing, but only a little.
If, as you say, the majority of your document creation could be handled by WordPad, then sure, it probably doesn't matter which word processor you use. In fact, by your own argument, you don't actually need a word processor at all.
On the other hand, for people who do actually need the kind of extra functionality that a good word processor or spreadsheet offers, the poor usability of the OpenOffice family in comparis
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If he doesn't care about F/OSS and doesn't accept its principle of giving back, the honest thing would be to stop using F/OSS, or at least not to complain about supposed bugs while refusing to specify.
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Governments should also operate under a constraint they rarely do.
Governments should avoid forcing their citizens to pay money to a private entity in order for their citizens to interact with them. This means that governments should avoid using software who's data format is largely proprietary.
Yes, yes, the stupid 'documented' XML format that's not really an open standard at all....
I think, for a document format to be considered standard, there must be at least one piece of fully-interoperable Open Source s
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Governments should avoid forcing their citizens to pay money to a private entity in order for their citizens to interact with them.
The trouble with that argument is that taken to its logical conclusion it can't possibly work in general. For many government interactions, I now have a choice of filing on-line (requires an Internet connection), sending everything by post (requires paying postage) or personally visiting a government office (requires paying for transportation to get there and back if I don't live nearby). Life isn't free, which is why we get jobs to earn money that we spend on other things, some of which are essential.
This
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The trouble with that argument is that taken to its logical conclusion it can't possibly work in general. For many government interactions, I now have a choice of filing on-line (requires an Internet connection), sending everything by post (requires paying postage) or personally visiting a government office (requires paying for transportation to get there and back if I don't live nearby). Life isn't free, which is why we get jobs to earn money that we spend on other things, some of which are essential.
Yes, but the post office is regulated and may only charge a legislatively limited amount of money. And for the others, you have a choice of providers.
For editing a Microsoft Word document (to, say, fill out a form) you have to buy a piece of software from a particular entity that has been granted a government monopoly on providing you with those bits. The government, in essence, has given them the power to impose an arbitrary tax on you that there is no reason for them to limit.
For example, it would be perm
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Out of curiosity, may I ask where you're based? It sounds like this is a real problem for you, and if I had to submit things myself in Word format then I might well agree. Here in the UK, information from the government is often provided as, e.g., a PDF file, but things that are interactive like filing tax returns are typically done using (usually fairly well done) government-hosted web sites.
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It's not actually a real problem. I barely interact with the government at all. :-) And the government here is still almost obsessively paper based.
I have a problem with resume's sometimes. But I'm skilled enough that generally recruiters are more than happy to convert to Word for me, and that has nothing to do with government access.
But, I live in Seattle, Washington in the USA.
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You complain about unspecified bugs in software that other people, often unpaid, developed so you can use it for free, even commercially. When asked to specify and file those bugs, so other people can fix them for free, you reply:
I'm available for consulting at my usual rate
You don't get what free software is about, do you?
Re:You can't really win this way (Score:0)
The issue always comes back to reading and editing MS Office documents.
An analogy to another MS proprietary product is IE. The fact is when IE 6 had 90% of the market you couldn't win by emulating IE hacks. Therefore, developers only targeted it and users refused to upgrade. People say Mozilla at the time was perfectly compatible most of the time but that 20% of sites that told you to leave Netscape( as they assumed anything non IE was that) otherwise.
Until something was much better users had no reason to l
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Perhaps you should follow your own advice and post the failing test cases so we could see what's broken. Then some enterprising developer could figure out how to fix them.
That's not necessary.
OO and LO aren't even alpha quality yet, if you're considering using them in a workhorse capacity in the enterprise. These pre-alpha type bugs can easily be found by an internal testing staff within the OO and LO teams. There's no need to get end users involved in reporting problems until the software is realistically beta quality.
At work one day, I opened a sample of our documents that were all originally created with MS Word. (I'm the lone Linux advocate in our group.) All of the
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I had one of those. Boiled it down to the smallest possible test case (AFAICT), even.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35664 [freedesktop.org]
Couldn't tell you why it's still marked 'new', though.
Here's My List, AGAIN! (Score:0)
1. SLOW! Slow to start. Slow to open documents, slow to do anything.
2. Formatting compatibility. Create MS Office document and save it in any version from 2000 to docx. Open it in Open/Libre Office... shit scattered everywhere.
3. Printing. I still can't print envelopes properly, the orientation does not shift correctly from one printer to the next.
4. Support! The above are not new complaints they have been present since the beginning. Responses to complaints about them are;
-- It's not that slow, MS uses tri
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Define "larger documents"? For example, I've created 500+ page legal documents in OpenOffice Writer with no issues - including lots of graphics. So what's the tipping point?
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Define "larger documents"? For example, I've created 500+ page legal documents in OpenOffice Writer with no issues - including lots of graphics. So what's the tipping point?
Agreed. Microsoft Word, in all the times I have tried to work with very large documents with it, has always failed miserably.
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Again, this time applied to MS Word: what's the tipping point? I've had the FractINT 20.0 manual open in Word 95 (runs to I think three hundred pages?), although that has no fancy formatting or illustrations, and all I was doing was fixing justification and pagination prior to printing. Handled that well enough.
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ok, answered this one myself, and FYI: apparently the limit in Word 2003 is 32767 pages or 32MB-1 byte of text, whichever gets hit first. This has something to do with Words document table it uses for pagination and indexing/spellchecking, etc.
Which makes sense: I've hit much, much lower limits when doing mail merges for large values of "To:"; apparently Word treats each and every copy of the document you're merging, to each and every recipient, as a bunch of separate pages in the same document. So if you'r
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I'm not sure about now, but several years ago MS Word exasperated me with its inability to handle large documents that Word Perfect had no problem with. I wrote The Paxil Diaries in Oo without any problems at all.
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professionals have stopped listening. ...
a weekend memo to the boss, etc.
See how I can tell you're a professional? You write memos, to the boss. On the weekend!
Who writes memos anymore? And who sends .doc files when email suffices for short documents just fine and works way better on mobile devices.
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who sends .doc files when email suffices for short documents just fine and works way better on mobile devices.
Everyone. It drives me crazy.
Sometimes it's worse. Occasionally, I get a document that has been printed out and scanned to a pdf and sent as an email attachment.
If that wasn't enough, often those copied on the email will have a discussion over email and include the original attachments with every reply. That might be tolerable in the age of broadband, except the conversation usually goes like this: "Got it, thanks" followed by "Okay, great -- did everyone else get this?", "Yep, just hit my inbox", "Not s
Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never
corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.
The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.
Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never
corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.
The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.
From your comment and his comment I suspect that his test involved getting huge documents from different MS office versions and loading them. Then deciding that OO can't handle big documents in general. This is a very skewed test. For people moving completely to OO that's a non issue.
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Strangely enough, I've had better lucking importing huge documents ( > 400 pages ) into OO and formatting for print than in Word itself.
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Strangely enough, I've had better lucking importing huge documents ( > 400 pages ) into OO and formatting for print than in Word itself.
Not strange at all, if the original document used styles sanely instead of going for complex direct formatting.
When things really break is when one has to collaborate with people who resist to LibreOffice on some badly formatted document, and then you have to convert to
and back again several times.
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I have published a couple of books in Create Space using OO and Libre Office to create the interior PDFs. I used templates supplied by Create Space that were intended for MS Word. The documents were both several hundred pages and included illustrations. I used The Gimp to create front and back cover images and free fonts from Font Squirrel for the title fonts. OO worked perfectly. I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone publishing a print on demand book.
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I used templates supplied by Create Space that were intended for MS Word. The documents were both several hundred pages and included illustrations. I used The Gimp to create front and back cover images and free fonts from Font Squirrel for the title fonts. OO worked
perfectly.
Sanity happens. Now, if the templates are badly done with complex direct formatting, and if you have to go back and forth with
the proprietary word processor several times, or if it is ‘Open’XML, then bad things happen.
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If OO cannot handle large MS Office documents, it is useless.
Here's a test-case that may work (Score:0)
though the problem was with Codeweavers/Wine under Office, instead of with LO, but it's the *kind* of thing that fscks-up people's work...
Say you get a document of 1 kind or another, so you open it,
but it's got embedded other documents in it ( word in excel, or vice versa ),
and the embedded document doesn't exist in your Libre-based system,
but it's there as far as your client is concerned?
Do you fight with your Libre system?
Or do you discover that this bug was reported 2 years earlier, realize you will econ
We live on different planets (Score:0)
Because you say so, and yet, you're not a writer :)
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The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite files.
I think it's pretty clear that this is a fundamental shortfall of those files and formats, not of LO. The latter would have no problem opening and saving them if they were not obfuscated and undocumented. Just as with the nouveau driver, it's Jesus- worthy miracle that it works at all.
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The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files.
I think it's pretty clear that this is a fundamental shortfall of those files and formats, not of LO. The latter would have no problem opening and saving them if they were not obfuscated and undocumented. Just as with the nouveau driver, it's Jesus- worthy miracle that it works at all.
That was my point.
But I actually think it is not only the proprietary file formats being bad. It is also that the proprietary suite falls short
in organising documents with styles and templates, so people use very complex direct formatting.
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You keep referring to The Proprietary Suite as if you're used to writing documents comparing it to open alternatives. "TPS Reports", if you will.
Sorry, I did not get your point. But yes, unfortunately I am often required to use it.
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Speaking of crying wolf,
can you list any of the major issues that made OO or LO a no-go? (pun not intended)
(Mod Posting as AC)
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This. I can't name a single feature that I need for business use that is not included in LO. I really wonder why parent is rated 5 Interesting.
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I need the ability to save in .docx so that people with Word 2007 can read and edit my document. I need to be able to have this make a full cycle, from MS to LO and back, or better yet, several cycles, without the formatting or inline equations getting garbled.
This isn't currently possible. I suspect it never will be.
Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:4, Insightful)
try this with MSO2009 and MSO2007 and see if it works
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What, exactly, is "MSO2009"?
If you meant Office 2007 and 2010, then it works just fine.
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on different computers?? (not counting Clone systems) with different default printers??
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That's on the network with several hundred people sharing documents through Sharepoint, with some of them using Office 2007, and some using Office 2010. So, yes, different computers/printers.
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Word 2007 is perfectly capable of reading and editing .doc documents, and as far as I know, Openoffice can read and edit both .doc and .docx.
Your objection is a non issue.
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From actual experience, it can read and save in .doc most of the time, but has only basic support for reading .docx (numerous formatting errors) and only a token effort at saving .docx (with no warning that it cannot save formatting more complicated than newlines).
If you're not going to properly support a file type, include some indication that people should not try to use it.
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Works fine for me. This too is actual experience.
Re:FOSS is not compatible with doc/docx (Score:1)
I have been turned down for work because my resume looked like crap on their computers but fine on mine.
I switched back to Windows and Office and never looked back after that. IN the business world where you survive on 10% margins of profit a loss of a supplier, customer, or a good employee can have a staggering impact. When you hear on the phone sorry I have Xoffice people will think you are incompetent. It is like saying I do not have email or a fax number. I have a zigatron instead.
We got into similar ar
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I have been turned down for work because my resume looked like crap on their computers but fine on mine.
I switched back to Windows and Office and never looked back after that. IN the business world where you survive on 10% margins of profit a loss of a supplier, customer, or a good employee can have a staggering impact. When you hear on the phone sorry I have Xoffice people will think you are incompetent. It is like saying I do not have email or a fax number. I have a zigatron instead.
We got into similar arguments 10 years ago on slashdot on why Netscape and the beta version of Mozilla was alllll so awesome compared to the new IE 6. Fact is, 90% of the world used IE 6 and if you can't code sites for it you did not belong to rest of the world.
It wasn't until Firefox came along that a real alternative existed and a reason to leave IE behind. Now we have the freedom to use whatever browser because the stranglehold was broke. What does this have to do with office?
Easy. MS Office is still superior, lighter, and owns the standards the world uses to get shit done. Until there is a better product people like myself will continue to pay money for it and use it. I am not a troll here but this is a serious problem. No StarWritter (or whatever the fuck it is called now) is not fully compatible with Word nor its formatting issues.
You want the world to switch you need a lighter and supperior product. StarOffice and OpenOffice 1.2 5 years ago was slow as hell. Most users will just stick to what they know and that is Office.
Use PDFs for resumes. Everyone accepts them now, they look identical across platforms and are immutable -- unless you really need the HR person to make changes for you.
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So your using ms office 2010 or something?
Legacy formats of MS are better supported in OO or LO than in their later products. At least, that's my experience.
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OK.
1) I want better support for indexes. And in specific I want to be able to maintain several DIFFERENT indexes in the same document. (Think Alphabetic index, index of dates, index of places, etc.)
2) I want bettersupport for tables of contents. And in specific I want to be able to have several different tables of contents in the same document. (Think Table of contents, list of figures, etc.)
The difference between tables of contents and indexes is that indexes are sorted by name. Tables of contents by
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Let me tell you that, as a developer, you are exactly the type of person I want writing feature requests and bug reports. Those are all necessary or neat features, and your descriptions are good. It's a shame LO doesn't have a feature request section or a task list of requested features being implemented (just check https://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/ [libreoffice.org] , I didn't see it).
I mean honestly the only rebuttial I could provide would be for 2 + 3, which would be to use documentation/guide generation tools - b
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You want LaTeX. Take a look at LyX if you haven't already -- it'll make getting started really easy.
For the quarter-fold cards, check out the rotating package.
Just FYI, I found an easy way to create quarter fold cards in LibreOffice. Create two new paragraph styles (e.g. French Fold Inside, French Fold Outside). Modify the styles and, under the 'position' tab, set the rotation to 90 degrees for the outside, and 270 degrees for the inside. You can make a card now by simply setting the page orientation to
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Well, I looked at LaTex via KLyx awhile ago, and it wasn't what I want. Sorry. Mainly I want things to work the way they work in Open/Libre Office. I just want a few extensions.
I do agree that LaTex can do what I want. So can Scribus, and I don't want to use that, either. And Scribus wouldn't require and extensive learning curve.
OTOH, I may be being unfair. It was quite awhile ago that I looked at KLyx (which I'm assuming is the same program as LyX). So I'll give it another look, just to be certain.
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The LO Calc charting features are so godawful that they should be embarrassed to claim support for charts at all. And no, I don't want to have to learn gnuplot just to make charts and graphs that don't look like ass. That alone is enough to make me stick to Excel.
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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
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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 busines
Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if the problem isn't more that people are failing to recognize that there are different audiences with different needs. For example in office suites, there are loads of people who just need a decent work processor for typing up simple documents, and then there are people who really want integration between their word processor, spreadsheet editor, and groupware client, and groupware server. The latter audience may be well served by going with the full MS Office/MS Exchange combination, and that keeps a lot of people using MS Office.
It reminds me of an argument between a GIMP fan and a Photoshop fan. The Photoshop user was saying, "GIMP is terrible because it doesn't have good support for CMYK." and the GIMP user responded by saying, "Well nobody actually uses CMYK, but GIMP lets me script things easily, so GIMP is much better!" These two users were talking past each other, failing to recognize that each had probably chosen their solution well.
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As a small aside to your experiences, I found that when using LibreOffice and I want to use the following as a separator:
______________ (that's holding down Shift to get the underline)
in LibreOffice, it creates an entire line across the page whereas in Word 2010, it creates the line exactly as shown. If I try to delete the extraneous lines, the entire line is deleted in LO.
I did do some looking, but did not find a way in LO to stop this "feature" from occurring.
This is why everything except the bare essent
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The automation *is* sometimes annoying. But for that on in particular the FIRST thing I'd try is an underlined tab, with the tab positioned where I wanted the underline to end.
OTOH, as another answer said, you can just turn off the automation. I have some of it turned off already, as it was just too annoying. Other parts I find quite useful, and I would bet that which parts annoy different people is quite different. (I don't like it's automatically correcting capitalizations, as I find that most of it's
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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.
One would think, after reviewing them 3 times, you could be more specific. Can you name one fundamental way in which LO fell short? Define "large document" and "disaster"? No, of course not, because LO is strictly better than MSO: it doesn't spy on you, doesn't hold your data hostage, not a significant malware vector, has simpler, more familiar, and highly customizable interface, can be fully supported (including adding features and bug fixes) by a third party, runs natively on every major consumer OS, stre
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You are a paid FUD spreader, aren't you?
Reads pretty much like the average Copy&Paste FUD, useable for Slashdot to Financial Times: Little hard facts, lots of feat, uncertanity and doubt.
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Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Interesting)
OTOH, I have "saved" several Word/Excel documents that had become too corrupted to be used in Microsoft Office. All I had to do was load them in OpenOffice and then save them with a different name, and they suddenly worked again in MS Office.
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Well, about 6 months to one year back I was trying to show a friend that OpenOffice (or was it LibreOffice, can't remember) was a nice alternative to Microsoft Word. I typed some text in a OpenOffice Writer file, saved it as a doc and went to open it on Microsoft Word. The point I was trying to make was that it was interoperable with the de facto standard office suite. And she would have it legally.
As soon as I opened it on Microsoft Word, it crashed the program. It had about 20 characters of text. No form
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I've found LO spreadsheets to be easier to work with that the Microsoft counterpart. We programs that output information on product, I cannot tell you the number of times I've foamed at the mouth by Excel converting the UPC into scientific notation. LO seems to understand that the column is text, but no matter what we do with Excel, it always wants to turn UPC, EAN, GTIN-14 into a number.
Additionally, we find that working with large documents to be easier and more fluid with LO than Word or Excel. If som
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The problem is that we live in a world where everyone demands MS file formats, and MS doesn't play well with others.
Or at least I assume that is what you are talking about. Did you really test the ability of Libre Office to handle large ODF files, or was the "total disaster" related to converting to and from MS Office formats?
If it is the latter, all you are saying is that MS Office offers superior vendor lock-in and incompatibility with products from other vendors. Call it unfairness or just the real wor
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Your vague statements are completely useless. You should provide specific and precise examples demonstrating your claim that F/OSS products "were a total disaster for larger documents."
I would suspect that all of your criticisms stem from the fact that you have been so conditioned to the methods of MS Office that you cannot appreciate or even perceive new ways of doing things. IOW, I wouldn't trust you to evaluate software for my company.
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What are you talking about? Word is famous for crashing on huge documents, especially master documents. OO is great for large documents.
OO has fundamental advantages over MS Word for large documents, including the fact that it has page styles while Word does not.
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Maybe. And maybe I just haven't used OpenOffice diligently enough. But I prefer the section tags of Word 98 to OpenOffice. I can't talk about any later versions of MSWord, however, as I've never used them. (And at that point MSWord was going downhill from version to version. The best version of MSWord I ever used was a version that I used on a Mac LC II. In many ways it was superior to the current version of Open Office (if you got the correct version...prior and later versions tended to crash unexpec
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This. I have done similar comparisons for myself many times.
I used OOo way back in the beginning and have contributed bug reports to both OOo and LibreOffice.
I upgraded from OOo to NeoOffice to LibreOffice Mac version.
But, Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac is STILL superior so I need both! It kills me!
The reason why is "LibreOffice will wreck this layout" and "which means I would not be able to share the document with other people", and also "And even simple things like bulleted or numbered outlines get scr
FOSS shoots itself in foot with false claims (Score:2)
You make a really good point:
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I'll agree with you that the answer to someone asking about a particular MSO feature is not to say "You're stupid for requesting it."
On the other hand, I think OO is perfectly viable for use if you're a new company deciding on your own tech infrastructure as opposed to trying to be the OO loner in a MS-based company.
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Hi, and thanks for a great comment.
What have found is that there is a clear road to follow in development. Over the years a number of the issues I have submitted, mostly user experience related, are treated as enhancements, even if they are pretty important. Sometimes these get handled much later I think.
The most recent issue I mentioned about RTF and RTFD (LO can't open them but should) was picked up and treated seriously by more than one person and I am excited about that. At least, it is silly if you are
FOSS needs to focus on quality of user experience (Score:2)
Many good points, but these two hit me as particularly relevant:
Steve Jobs left us a hell of a legacy, even for Apple haters. His legacy is the idea that the complete experience is the measure of a product. That includes everything from ordering it, to unboxing, to whether it "just works" when it starts up, to customer service and its ability to stand up to d
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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 (aroun
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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 export data from them than it was in certain commercial products.
The point of this is that in order for one of these FOSS office suites to survive, people who are critical and have use requirements beyond short documents get involved. For these packages to be competitive, they need to rise to a higher standard than Grandma's recipes, Son's book report, a weekend memo to the boss, etc.
Hey, these are exactly the reasons I did not use a GUI Office back in 1996 :-)
Tex for long documents, whatever office is installed for short.