My mistake was actually seeing "Desktop Manager" but reading "Display Manager". The intention was just to point out that KDM was retired as the default DM for KDE Plasma 5, but I wasn't paying close enough attention. I deleted my comment to avoid further confusion.
It is fast for sure, and it does its job. I am a lay user and don't use it much, but I have been satisfied as I recently downloaded (compared to my last experience few years ago).
I installed 4.4 when it came out, and I am amazed at the improved DOC/DOCX conversion. I use it every day, since my company doesn't consider me important enough for a MS Office license (mostly a Google Apps shop, though).
Libre calc is very lacking, compared to Excel. Same with Base - Access. No Outlook alternative at all. No cloud integration. With office365 you get Sharepoint AND Exchange servers.
I'm sure Excel does more. My question was what features do people miss. Cloud integration is the new buzzword. A few years ago, no one cared. It's not a deal breaker for me.
In 10 years (since 2004), over 400-600 users, I've seen exactly one instance of Access in use, and that was by a developer (not a casual user) who had been using it prior to 2004. On the flipside, Excel and Word are so prevalent that they've now become the default "operating system" - window/OS X are secondary to those two apps.
I have clients in the health insurance industry that use Access all the time. These are not devs, but rather business analysts. Datasets become to much for Excel, and many learn basic sql.
Most users probably don't miss features in LO as such. The issue like with much open source software, is UI and stability related.
Joe Marketing ain't going to jump through UI hoops and do complex bug work-arounds, when he can avoid this entirely by buying a MS office license for 200 USD or whatever the price is.
No you do not get Sharepoint AND Exchange servers with Office365. Sure you can access them, but that's not what you said.
Also, Calc has Python (and other language scripting) which puts it above Excel in my book. For built in functions yes Excel is better. As soon as you start venturing outside of Spreadsheets and into data analysis (where Macro's come into play) stop using Excel. Move to Matlab or Pandas. Excel Macro's should not be used as a selling point, they are rarely, if ever, the right tool for the job. At least with Calc you can take the business logic from your Macro's and move them into a real script. VBA isn't C# nor VB.Net compatable.
There are a plethora of plugins to do monte-carlo simulations, linear programming, statistical models and anything else a business user would do in the data analysis world.
Vendors include SAS, Oracle, IBM, Predixion.
Also Excel is used as a self-service BI tool. It has ETL, OLAP and dynamic dashobarding.
My first job out of college was converting all the Excel spreadsheets that ran the business to web apps so I certainly know how they are used, and more importantly, how they are abused.
If Excel had a real scripting language as it's Macro language the problem wouldn't be nearly so bad. All that business code could just be copy/pasted, have some unit tests implemented then refactored so that the accountants code is now updated by the developer. As it is now the code has to completely rewritten in a new language.
As for the language choice, VB.Net or C# would be fine. I'm not saying it has to be Python. My complaint is that the code is non-transferrable. The apps cannot grow past Excel, and the email the most recent version to the next guy game gets you into versioning hell rather quickly.
But you're a developer. A sales manager (for example) couldn't care less about your objections.
He wants his pivot tables, KPIs and Solver and some macros. He wants point-and-click ETL. If it's a department/cross-department model, do it in SQL Server, or whatever else you use. You can use your IT kung-fu there. This is about what libre office lacks. Excel has power and flexibility and remains easy to use for non-programmers.
I agree with those points. My comments are in regards to Macros. Why is VBA better for a sales manager? Why not use VB.Net, Python or C#? There is nothing inherently better about VBA.
My issues with Excel come from the perspective of modifying these ad-hoc apps (many business run off these for a long time as they grow). Yes, there are other great features, but for me, for growth, Calc is taking a better approach.
My company uses SAS fairly heavily for data analysis and bussiness reporting. It's also our go to tool for ad-hoc querries of production databases (essentialy a SQL gui).
Excel (and other spreadsheet packages like Calc) are good for non technical users it's useful for rapidly prototyping stuff but it is absolutely a pain for automation and any type of statistical heavy lifting. Once a spreadsheet reaches a certain level of complexity it becomes a pain to support and maintain much better to have a real database driving things.
I've heard a lot about R which is kind of an open-source version of SAS (at least the statistical parts) not sure what its automation and reporting support is like my limited understanding is it doesn't have the BI parts.
> For built in functions yes Excel is better. As soon as you start venturing outside of Spreadsheets and into data analysis (where Macro's come into play) stop using Excel.
I see Excel users in 2 camps:
Those that don't know what functions are, and if the do, tread carefully with '=if(...,...)' and get intrigued. Though those that get intrigued are in a minority.
Those that know what functions are have Excel act as a full-fledged IDE, which it does pretty well. This second camp either write libraries to call from Excel, or have someone write them in C++ if the libraries are that important.
Excel is exceedingly good for hacking, or I should say, playing. It is not a spreadsheet, it is an extension of skin from keyboard to screen for visualizing data, from brain to 2D hackable multi-dimensional grid, that is as easy as playdough.
> Why wouldn't most companies try to get employees to use Libre Office instead of MS Office? Shouldn't it be sufficient for most people?
Should be, but when it comes down to it, it just isn't Microsoft Office. Kind of like GIMP isn't Photoshop.
> Btw, are there some features that you feel that you're missing?
As a Mac user - full integration into the desktop experience. We get the same from Microsoft Office, but, of course, it's Microsoft Office and we're used to it there.
Look, I'm not going to claim that it makes sense. However, if you're going to beat Microsoft Office, you have to be far, far better than it. No almost-there, not equal, but demonstrably better.
And not on moral grounds, either. Most users aren't going to give a damn about moral grounds.
Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice tend to crash on me. I stopped using them, but my wife still does and they still occasionally crash/hang on her. So in terms of stability I cannot recommend them.
They also just look uglier. I have not looked at this new LO version yet.
I mainly use PowerPoint for science talks. I'd like to use Impress, but it's very buggy. It may be caused by importing PPT(X) files, but parts of slides become randomly uneditable and styles randomly don't work. The PPTX import often randomly breaks.
This is the wrong question to ask. What blocks people from switching isn't some specific MS Office feature missing in LibreOffice. It's a lack of compelling features in LibreOffice that are not available in competing products to justify the cost of migration.
You can try, but you realistically will never be able to convert all the finance/analyst type folks off Excel. Their workflows are too ingrained in how Excel does things (vbscript, proprietary extensions, even simple vlookup tables that need to be converted to work with Calc). Hackers will (rightly) complain that a lot of that is abuse of Excel and should be done in a proper programming language--you can either try to change the rest of the world or you buy some Office licenses and continue building your business.
> Why wouldn't most companies try to get employees to use Libre Office instead of MS Office?
Because the license cost savings are so small compared to the payroll costs of the people using the software that even a small hit in efficiency from existing staff (and new staff as rotation occurs) being less familiar will outweigh it quite easily.
Heck, its also why lots of firms give a pass to major version upgrades even when their license would allow the major version to be rolled out at no additional license cost until the version they are on is old enough that it is causing a drag because any new staff are having trouble converting back to the old version.
Ribbon-era Excel had massive take up for a number of reasons, but there was certainly reluctance to switch (from what I saw at the time).
One of the biggest reasons the company I was working with at the time made the switch was sheet size, we came up against the 65536 rows limit at least once. Formula calculation speed was another big one. In many ways the ribbon does feel like a step forward, perhaps the only thing 2003 still does better is keyboard shortcuts, but luckily you can still use Excel 2003 keyboard shortcuts in newer versions if you can remember them (Alt,d,f,f and Alt,d,f,s are probably the ones I use most frequently).
At which point you have a database and would be better served with a different product designed to work with large data sets or moving data to external ODBC sources that Excel can query.
That only works if you have the IT infrastructure to support it. In the company I was referring to before, the IT team was effectively one guy. Plus, there was a considerable Excel expertise in the team I was in at the time, aside from calculation time Excel was working very well for what was needed.
This is true but empirically, nobody cares: they're gonna do it in a spreadsheet. So spreadsheet software has to allow for this massive use case, and arguing they're doing it wrong gets no traction.
Collaboration with people inside and outside the company that use Office. The conversion back and forth hasn't been faithful enough, and who wants to bother with fixing things on both ends, both times?
I don't think I'd ever give anyone an odt document; the rare doc I produce with LO is exported to PDF before sending, not the least because virtually no one has LO or even knows what it is. And if I export to some Word format, who the hell knows what version of Word is on the other end? It's just not worth it.
If someone insists on a Word doc, I'll write a plain text document, give it a .doc suffix, and when the other end double clicks on it, it will open in Word.
It is absolutely sufficient for the vast majority of users. Most people use Excel for lists, and for simple spreadsheets.
There are some niche industries, like finance, where there are legacy spreadsheets (where, scarily, much of the business is run. Wall Street runs on Excel spreadsheets) that don't run, and with users who have a very unique knowledge and can't easily accommodate the change, but that is a small minority.
For new and growing companies that just need this sort of functionality, these apps are fantastic.
> Why wouldn't most companies try to get employees to use Libre Office instead of MS Office? Shouldn't it be sufficient for most people?
Licensing costs are only a small fraction overall cost:
* Training and lost productivity as users learn the new software. It may seem simple to you, but many end users are easily confused by interface changes. Also, there is a serious learning curve for users doing complex tasks (e.g., complex spreadsheets; long, complex documents, etc.)
* IT labor costs: Configuration, deployment, administration and support; doing it on 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 desktops, local, remote, and at home, is expensive and challenging. Is LibreOffice fully integrated with Active Directory? With whatever deployment and patch mechanisms you use (think about that, how do you patch 10,000 desktops? Consider that an error could effectively shut down your entire company)? How available are support, labor and tools? How available are IT professionals with expertise in these areas (i.e., who will you hire? What happens to your existing staff)? Users tend to think of these things as peripheral, but they are the largest items on the IT budget. Microsoft Office passes meets all these needs with flying colors.
* Integration with other systems: Every other application and system is designed and supported for integration with and Microsoft Office. Every vendor has staff experienced in this integration.
* Data integrity: What happens when the total in the Excel spreadsheet is wrong because the formula didn't convert properly? Employees would have to check for formatting and other errors in every important file where data integrity matters. Consider that, because most people in business use Microsoft Office, many documents will be converted back and forth frequently. That means employees have to deal with these issues repeatedly, verifying conversion will be accurate before sending the presentation to the client; verifying the spreadsheets' values and formulas, in case someone on the other end decides to change some numbers; fixing these problems ... and explaining constantly to everyone outside the organization why you have these continual problems.
Much as I support FOSS, LibreOffice isn't a consideration for many businesses.
Not really first. Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect were already entrenched in businesses, and there were rival office systems for Windows from IBM and Novell. Microsoft Office won by being better and cheaper, but it took a very long time to displace 1-2-3 in particular.
hackuser's points about the cost of labor and the enormous potential cost of mistakes are very well made. If you are paying knowledge workers $50,000 to $150,000 a year, then saving pennies on the cost of Office is not a smart move. When mistakes can cost your company a lot more than that, even more so....
Well for one thing the conversion still isn't perfect. I tried loading a 12-year old .doc, and the header doesn't work properly. It should show the current section name in the header, but in LibreOffice and OpenOffice it just shows "Glossary" (the first section name) in the header for all sections.
It's frankly still not as good, the savings are not so big from a company's perspective, the amount of time spent doing the switchover would easily outweigh the license savings, and most big companies do not have people who want to stake their reputations on a hot new alternative to an established product that is nearly universal.
I think you have to look at it from the other perspective:
Would switching to Libre Office actually save me money or would it cost me money?
People using MS Office are knowledge workers. They make money from their knowledge and their ability to manipulate knowledge tools such as MS Office.
Without volume licensing, MS Office is $99 a year for each worker (and many companies pay a bit less than that). Let's say the average worker at your firm makes $50,000. If you have a full benefits package, that adds tens of thousands to their cost. Add in computers, office space, etc. and that worker could cost you upwards of $100,000 a year.
Now look at that $99 a year cost for that one employee. Sure saving $99 would be nice, but what if switching made that employee 5 percent less productive? What if that employee has to interface with outside clients who use other programs and this causes issues with interoperability?
For me, as a manager, $99 a year is nothing if it makes my employees more productive. On the other hand, saving $99 for something that makes my employees less productive costs me a ton of money.
Nickel and diming knowledge workers is not a good way to make them productive or to keep them happy. This is why I don't care what programs employees like to use or even what OS they use. I want them as productive and happy as possible.
At a previous job I was forced to use Windows, even though I've been an OS X users since 10.1. The reasoning was that a Windows machine was cheaper to purchase and maintain for the IT department. Let's say the difference was something like $250-500 over the course of that machine's life (which could be four years or so). Is the IT staff saving a few hundred bucks really worth a significant drop in productivity for an employee?
Because my old job put computer and software purchases under IT, instead of my department, the IT department got to make their budget smaller by making my department less productive. Had the budget rested with my manager, of course I would have gotten the machine I wanted because a few hundred dollars for a big productivity boost is a no brainer for him.
I know how to use Windows well and can get work done on it, but I am more productive with the OS of my choice (and the applications that go along with it). With knowledge work, five percent productivity gain here, five percent productivity gain there and you're talking about a lot of money.
I have a half-hearted look for it every time I fire up a new version of Open/Libre office but I've stopped bothering to check for it actively.
Seems baffling to me that this wouldn't be a higher priority issue as this seems to be the commonest mode of use of Word for creating new documents - where the absolute commonest mode is using an existing document as a template and forgetting to change headers, metadata, and random boilerplate text throughout :)
I hope they fix pivot tables in Calc. The UI for constructing them is less friendly than the one in Excel. They are also very single threaded which means larger ones take longer to manipulate and explore, while CPU capacity sits there idle.
Could you log a bug with a sample that takes a long time? Our primary Calc guy (Kohei) is pretty good about tracking down performance problems and we've made some decent improvements to Calc performance in 4.4
I've used LibreOffice on my Mac all the way since it first forked from OpenOffice (never had a need for MS Office because I use LaTeX for most important document stuff, so mainly just a light office user). I think the UI change on Mac OS is a big step backward unfortunately. Maybe it works better in Mavericks, but in Yosemite it sticks out so much. Yosemite's icon style is super lightweight, and the icons in this update are really heavy, and the gradient in the toolbars doesn't match up at all. Maybe there's a bit of uncanny valley happening because it felt a lot better to use when it didn't try to look like Mac OS...
Still a great project and lots of great features (the docx importer updates are awesome, because opening documents other people send me is a large proportion of what I need it for), but I really wish I could find an option to make it look like it used to...
I'm sure I'll get used to it, but it's distracting as hell at the moment. Half of the problem is that I'll have to learn what all the new icons mean which will take a little while.
How closely does NeoOffice track LibreOffice (or is it a fork of original OpenOffice and not LibreOffice at all?). For instance, are new features in the latest LibreOffice (like better MS Word import) present in the latest NeoOffice, or will they be soon?
That I can't really tell from their web page leaves me not optimistic.
It basically doesn't. It tracked Go-OO (the predecessor of LO) up to 3.1, and since then it's just worked from the Go-OO 3.1 codebase, backporting security fixes from AOO and LO as it goes.
So it looks more Maclike but in every other way LO is better.
Did they ever fix the Cmd/Ctrl/Alt-Arrow functions to work the same as they do in every other Mac app?
Last time I tried NeoOffice was several years ago, after I got sick of OpenOffice always doing the wrong thing when I tried to word-skip/line-home/whatever and turning my efficient reflexes into frustration. Turned out NeoOffice did exactly the same wrong things. So much for OS X integration.
Michael Meeks' tech overview goes into depth on the looks: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-01-29-under-the-... Now that the dialogues are Glade .ui based, the designers are able to edit them easily and submit changes, and they've been going wild with fixing up the interface. 4.5 should look even nicer.
The only reason I'm going with openoffice currently is because supposedly the conversion to/from word/excel is more faithful than libreoffice, though the UI isn't as nice.
Have you checked? AOO has basically had not a lot of work on the actual code since OOo days (and now has around 0 non-volunteer contributors, and no contributions on the .doc converter in the last several months).
Installing an "office suite" these days is becoming less and less of a need. I can only speak for myself, but online versions at Google, or Microsoft (to mention two) are all I need.
Not sure if this has changed since then, but around a year ago, I was using Google Docs to collaborate with a few other people on a school project. I lost connection to the internet, and when I reconnected, Docs popped up with an error message telling me that something went wrong and I had to refresh. That was the only option, though: it disabled all controls and I couldn't copy off the work I'd done that didn't get saved.
So, speaking for myself, I wouldn't trust these online office suites with my data or time. They also tend to lag more on lower-end hardware (I frequently use a netbook for notes, etc).
I can't provide an answer on what happened to you, but I use Google Drive (which has word processing, spreadsheets, etc) extensibly. Any document created resides on Drive, instantly synchronized with my computer, autosaved on change. And I can edit it while offline.
I had not had any problem, but that is not to say it is problem free.
Here is online version of LibreOffice:
https://www.rollapp.com/libreoffice, so you can check ver. 4.4 out without installing.
BTW cloud version of LO is quite popular among Chromebook users.
Google implementation of an office suite is very popular at middle, high school, and online universities (even though most of them offer the free Office365).
All remote application access technologies are similar to a certain extent. It is similar to VNC in the way image of application is captured, but does much more than simply showing content of the frame buffer on the client.
I still prefer LibreOffice to cloud document editors because it has better support for writing in Finnish through plugins like Voikko (for proofreading and the like). I would assume this also applies to a few other languages.
What features do you need that it lacks? I've found GSheets good enough to satisfy all of my personal spreadsheet needs so far.
The only real deal-breaker level annoyance I've found with any of the Drive apps so far is that whatever Javascript the writer one is using eats up enough CPU power to drop my Macbook's battery life to about a quarter of what it normally is.
I remember discovering pivot tables in Excel way back when, and thinking that was a really useful tool. I was amazed to find that Google Sheets could do this too, and to me that marked it's promotion to my first choice for spreadsheet work.
I'm not a power user, but I'd say Google Sheets are good enough for almost all of us. Google Write, not so much.
I suspect that this is because people have different standards for software installed on their computer compared to web apps. They expect the software installed on their computer to do what their old software did (as a drop in replacement) whilst the web app is a gimmick (too many people) and is only used to produce new documents.
I can similarly only speak for myself, or perhaps myself and my colleagues in this case, but our experience with Google's on-line suite has been less happy.
As a handy collaborative text editor with some basic formatting, it's fine. For longer documents, technical documents, anything that needs professional levels of review and revision control, or basically any other "serious" work, it's not even entry-level.
Likewise if you want to share some tables with light formatting and maybe some simple calculations, the on-line spreadsheets are fine. However, anyone who does significant number crunching using a real spreadsheet isn't going to last five minutes.
In short, if you find the real-time collaboration useful and need only very simple formatting and manipulation, these on-line suites are fine (and of course this probably does cover a fair amount of useful work). If you need anything more sophisticated, they aren't really competing with the heavyweight desktop applications at all.
I would love to use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office, but there are still minor things lacking that I require. For example, I need to search and replace manual page breaks. This is not possible in Writer, yet seems a simple and obvious task. There are a few other simple omissions that keep me stuck on MS Office. Maybe 4.5 will rock.
This. I looked up this exact bug to post it in this thread, but you beat me to it :). Such as shame that this bug was reported way back in 2012 and never fixed.
How good the signatures are if they are served from HTTP as well? It only serves as an integrity check, but it still won't guard you from a malicious person putting a virus into the package and adjusting the signatures.
If you're validating the signatures properly, then it's impossible for a malicious attacker to adjust the signatures in a way that they will still validate.
However, validating the signature properly involves you being certain of using the correct public key. This is the tricky part. Being in the PGP strong set helps with this. Using HTTPS gives you some confidence, but no protection against server compromise.
Once you do have the correct public key, however, you can be protected against server compromise for all future releases, too.
Or, at the least, you can verify that future releases are coming unmodified from the same origin.
What is good (and often overlooked) about package updates over HTTPS is that you don't leak metadata about which packages you are updating or installing. Not a big issue with an office suite but still it's an option I would prefer.
Sorry, but such a strong claim requires more justification. From what I know, it is orders of magnitude harder to hijack a package download over HTTPS than over HTTP.
It is technically feasible for me to sit in a random coffee shop and do a drive-by infection of .exe files downloaded via HTTP by arbitrary other people on the same WLAN. The same is not true for HTTPS, because I am not able to forge arbitrary SSL certificates.
Yes, there are problems with SSL, but to claim that "it doesn't do any good" seems wrong.
NSA can figure out the traffic from donate.libreoffice.org (or wherever; I can't see where the downloads are coming from right now because their website isn't loading for me) is not worth of decrypting based on the hostname passed in the clear via SNI. Unless libreoffice makes a habit of also hosting interesting content on their site too.
How does the mobile version compare to Microsoft Office for iOS and Android? What kind of cloud offering does LibreOffice have, where do I go to use it online and what kind of online storage options does it come with?
Calc still doesn't understand the euro symbol as a currency.
Try pasting in the following:
€85.00
€56.00
€52.00
€44.00
If you change the cell format to 'currency', it silently quotes the entries making them literal values (the leading tick mark is only visible in the formula box):
'€85.00
'€56.00
'€52.00
'€44.00
Now it's impossible to treat them as numeric values without doing a weird regex find/replace [1]. This doesn't happen with sterling or pound.
I just tried this and while what you say is true, I found a workaround for the issue. Euros are now treated like numeric values and you get the euro character (€).
(1) Select some _empty_ cells you wish to make euro currency
(2) Right click -> Format Cells
(3) Category should be "Currency"
(4) Format should be "EUR € English (Ireland)"
(5) Save and then enter numbers into the cells (the euro symbol should be appended)
It seems to work with things like sum() and you still get the euro symbol and them being the correct "currency" cell type.
Here's the "Format Code" which you can just paste into the Format Code box to save yourself time with the above procedure:
[$€-1809]#,##0.00;[RED]-[$€-1809]#,##0.00
No white space around it.
Pasting remains completely broken. They need to fix that.
Well, one of the reasons is that it depends from country and language. I would outright say that your Euro format is wrong. Yet it isn't that simple. I'm used to write 1,23 € and euros work fine if written as 1,23 if I write 1.23 then it's a string. Just strip euro signs and put numbers. There are also plenty of systems which can't handle unicode so using € sign is bad idea. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_issues_concerning_th...
I never understood why some countries insist to write currency type before the amount. It is weird and inconsistent among multiple currencies. Would be way better to write every numeric value before its type like in physics, though I suspect physics also may have some strange rules somewhere :) .
Agree. Even the spoken form (at least in the languages I know) is formated this way: You say "ten euros" and not "euros ten". I'd be curious to know why it was decided to write it the other way around.
Rocks? Enh... It's very good. It does a lot of things very well. For example, it has an amazingly strong underlying file format (ODF) which enables excellent integration into complex processes; its import/exports are improving all the time; and its drawing engine is increasingly smart about SVG. I like it and admire it. But the team is also trying to fix/improve/move forward what started as a massive code base with beaucoup legacy issues. As either the comments below or a few minutes' hands-on use demonstrate, numerous "fit and finish" issues remain. If recent incremental releases move it from "unusable" to "usable" for some folks, great! But there hasn't been a recent massive upgrade; just steady progress.
Slow and steady wins the race. I would much rather see steady progress than a massive upgrade in just about any FOSS project. I take it as a sign of direction and dependability. It seems like any time a project undergoes an overhaul of sorts, it leads to forks and a fractured community (especially so in recent years).
Microsoft Office isn't exactly perfection. It's main selling point is the file format (OOXML) - which Microsoft managed to get standardized (read manipulated ISO by buying members) despite it's obvious tie-in to proprietary code in various versions of Office.
Yes it is because people expect their office suite to handle MS formats flawlessly as a basic requirement, and the best at that is naturally MS Office. Nobody cares how or if Word handles ODT files, but if another word processor doesn't handle DOCX for exporting and importing without issues then it will be treated as unusable by lots of users, no matter how wonderful it is in other respects.
In this space UI and features are (for me, sadly) secondary and support for a specific file format is king.
I would say that the main selling point of MSO is Excel - because it's the program the people who sign the cheques live in all day every day. So they buy themselves and everyone MSO, not anything else.
Completely agreed. There isn't a credible competitor to Excel, because Excel isn't in the spreadsheets business--spreadsheets are in the Excel business, and nobody else is good at being Excel. (This is distinct from the file format, because we're talking about bug-for-bug compatibility at runtime too.) Even Mac Office isn't sufficiently good at being Excel to be Excel.
Until that changes--I'll check back in a decade or two--LibreOffice and friends, no matter how legitimately good, will be also-rans in the corporate world.
That's questionable. Is Google Apps a friend? 'Cos a lot of offices are shifting to that, even if its spreadsheet is pitiful. With Excel for the few that seriously need it.
I do concur that Calc is the main issue for LO. They've finally got it to a state where serious improvement work can start ...
One of the most common tasks I want to do in a spread sheet is to graph data once I've put it in there.
Calc: Insert -> Object -> Chart (near the bottom)
Gnumeric: Insert -> Chart (near the top)
There are hundreds of little things like this that have made me a dedicated Gnumeric user. Calc apes excel badly, while gnumeric has forged its own distinct user interface. It's a little different, but the differences make sense and work well once you get the hang of them. An additional nice feature of gnumeric is that it's a tiny stand-alone download as compared to the slow pain of installing LibreOffice. Whether on linux or windows, you can have Gnumeric up and running in ten seconds. I seem to recall from my last flirtation with OSX that it was pretty annoying to get gnumeric running there, but it was still possible.
Unfortunately, gnumeric has been gradually degenerating into a memory-hole riddled piece of crapware under linux, and the developers responsible for this slide have recently stopped development on the windows executable as well. The fact that the windows binary was working better than the linux version when they gave up on it is all manners of stupid. I honestly don't know what they're doing, but gnumeric is getting pretty much unusable under linux. Maybe running an old version of the windows executable under Wine would work better. If so, that's just sad.
Abiword's last Windows release was in June of 2010. The last Mac release was in 2006 and it's not even listed for download on the official site anymore.
That's a shame. Abiword was, for years, my favorite word processor. Simple enough to be instantly useable, but powerful enough to get the jobs I needed to do done. And, its PDF export was among the best and most fool-proof available (aside from using Adobe Acrobat tools on Windows on Mac) for quite a while.
But, I haven't installed it or needed a local word processor in years. I use Google Docs for everything, because I don't have to keep up with where stuff is. I just login and there it is, no matter what device I'm on (though I should redo my Google Drive and Gmail backup setup...I used to have it automated, but haven't done a backup in years now; the cloud makes me lazy and too trusting).
This is a sad excuse for a review. Most of it is downloading it, installing it and showing a couple of screenshots wile raving madly about how great it is. This doesn't even try to use the suite seriously.
1. Word, if a lawyer sends me a critical document in review mode it's always Word and I want to be sure that he and the other party gets all my additions. Moreover, Word is performant and fully featured. I haven't seen any word processor handling a 600 pages document with over 1,500 footnotes on an 5 years old Macbook Air 11 with such an ease. The Windows version is smoother and faster though. Google Docs for collaboration stuff and really small things since it still doesn't support proper chapter numbering and many other details.
2. For big complex stuff Excel and smaller easy stuff always Google Spreadsheet b/c of the collaboration and great integration in Google Mail. BTW, the online version of Excel (Office 365) is quite nice too and very smooth and has collaboration too.
3. Presentations, clearly Keynote which is not much better than Powerpoint but the UI is more intuitive and everything looks crisper, then Powerpoint but the Windows version. Google Slides is living crap, yes you can do stuff and collaboration is great but it lacks so many features and feels often very cumbersome and tedious to work with.
I tried a few times Libre Office/Open Office but the problem is: if you do serious office stuff like important presentations for board, legal documents or the next lawsuit, larger bizcases for new investors—stuff HAS to work and there are too many smaller quirks with all Libre Office apps, if you just play around a bit, yes it is very impressive 'hey an full Office for free!' but the 'free' comes with a price and to get things done under time pressure or your life is in danger this software monolith is so the wrong thing and you instantly switch back to mentioned products. And frankly, always when I use office stuff it's about serious matters, I do not open Word for fun.
> and to get things done under time pressure [...] you instantly switch back to mentioned products.
Doesn't instantly switching to Word/Excel require you to have it installed in the first place? In your case, you already have it bought and installed so it's easy, but that's not always the case.
True and it heavily depends on your profession. My office stack matches my profession, i.e. a designer rather cares about Adobe CS than MS Office and is happy with Google Docs. So, it depends really on what you do.
I was using Google Docs in my business for several years until one day I one day I embarrassed myself point out paragraph numbers were wrong in a contract I was trying to sign. If it can't get them right, what else is it doing wrong.
I looked at it, also quite impressive, nice animation stuff, but not always smooth presentation (low frame rate) and the presentation look too gimmicky—people think that you spend 24/7 to build a flashy presentation which doesn't make a good impression in several audiences where you sometimes need a 'dry' 80 pages consultant presentation with tons of charts and footnotes.
It’s funny you mentioned footnotes as being important to you. When my company was considering upgrading from Office 2003 to 2010, I pushed hard for LibreOffice. When we ran the shared drive folder though the batch converter, we found many more interoperability issue with LibreOffice than competing suites like WPS Office. Broken footnotes/endnotes was a major reoccurring issue. Four years later, and this basic word processing feature is still broken. [1] If they just focused on interoperability, they’d be much more competitive in the business world.
You may find it interesting to note that pagination for footnotes and endnotes have always been broken in Word (and will probably continue to be broken in the future so as to maintain backward compatibility with pagination in older versions). I used to work at Corel on WordPerfect and this is practically the only reason WordPerfect is still a viable product -- the US DOJ must have correct pagination of footnotes. Your link didn't work for me, so I couldn't see what kind of bugs you are referring to, but there are probably some DOC import bugs that are practically impossible to fix because Word renders things incorrectly in the first place.
I don’t know what style requirement the DOJ had, but I do know that when the marketing team put a footnote on one page, and LibreOffice moved it on a separate page, they considered it a serious bug. If Word renders a .doc file a certain way, LibreOffice should also render it that way regardless of what the DOJ specifies.
WP was a great product. I miss those days of being able to fix most anything with reveal codes.
Just to add an anecdotal datapoint: my wife needed to make a presentation to her faculty and I suggested she use the LibreOffice presentation software since Office wasn't installed on her laptop. She finished all of her slides, went to review them and found LO had deleted all of her images.
I was swiftly kicked off my laptop while she recreated her entire presentation in PowerPoint.
Another anecdotal: That type of thing usually happens when you are trying to save as a microsoft format. I've personally not had any of issues when using the open document formats.
Frankly I don't think anything else has the robust automation, footnote, reference management, etc. features that Office has either. It's the emacs of word processors (right down to people constantly complaining about its "bloat").
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http://thetrendythings.com/read/21632
Btw, are there some features that you feel that you're missing?
It is, but from experience, people will find a way to complain.
Most people don't use Access.
A couple of the senior people write queries and import routines, and the clerks/etc use them in their workflow. Works great.
Joe Marketing ain't going to jump through UI hoops and do complex bug work-arounds, when he can avoid this entirely by buying a MS office license for 200 USD or whatever the price is.
Also, Calc has Python (and other language scripting) which puts it above Excel in my book. For built in functions yes Excel is better. As soon as you start venturing outside of Spreadsheets and into data analysis (where Macro's come into play) stop using Excel. Move to Matlab or Pandas. Excel Macro's should not be used as a selling point, they are rarely, if ever, the right tool for the job. At least with Calc you can take the business logic from your Macro's and move them into a real script. VBA isn't C# nor VB.Net compatable.
Vendors include SAS, Oracle, IBM, Predixion.
Also Excel is used as a self-service BI tool. It has ETL, OLAP and dynamic dashobarding.
If Excel had a real scripting language as it's Macro language the problem wouldn't be nearly so bad. All that business code could just be copy/pasted, have some unit tests implemented then refactored so that the accountants code is now updated by the developer. As it is now the code has to completely rewritten in a new language.
As for the language choice, VB.Net or C# would be fine. I'm not saying it has to be Python. My complaint is that the code is non-transferrable. The apps cannot grow past Excel, and the email the most recent version to the next guy game gets you into versioning hell rather quickly.
He wants his pivot tables, KPIs and Solver and some macros. He wants point-and-click ETL. If it's a department/cross-department model, do it in SQL Server, or whatever else you use. You can use your IT kung-fu there. This is about what libre office lacks. Excel has power and flexibility and remains easy to use for non-programmers.
My issues with Excel come from the perspective of modifying these ad-hoc apps (many business run off these for a long time as they grow). Yes, there are other great features, but for me, for growth, Calc is taking a better approach.
Excel (and other spreadsheet packages like Calc) are good for non technical users it's useful for rapidly prototyping stuff but it is absolutely a pain for automation and any type of statistical heavy lifting. Once a spreadsheet reaches a certain level of complexity it becomes a pain to support and maintain much better to have a real database driving things.
I've heard a lot about R which is kind of an open-source version of SAS (at least the statistical parts) not sure what its automation and reporting support is like my limited understanding is it doesn't have the BI parts.
I see Excel users in 2 camps:
Those that don't know what functions are, and if the do, tread carefully with '=if(...,...)' and get intrigued. Though those that get intrigued are in a minority.
Those that know what functions are have Excel act as a full-fledged IDE, which it does pretty well. This second camp either write libraries to call from Excel, or have someone write them in C++ if the libraries are that important.
Excel is exceedingly good for hacking, or I should say, playing. It is not a spreadsheet, it is an extension of skin from keyboard to screen for visualizing data, from brain to 2D hackable multi-dimensional grid, that is as easy as playdough.
Should be, but when it comes down to it, it just isn't Microsoft Office. Kind of like GIMP isn't Photoshop.
> Btw, are there some features that you feel that you're missing?
As a Mac user - full integration into the desktop experience. We get the same from Microsoft Office, but, of course, it's Microsoft Office and we're used to it there.
Look, I'm not going to claim that it makes sense. However, if you're going to beat Microsoft Office, you have to be far, far better than it. No almost-there, not equal, but demonstrably better.
And not on moral grounds, either. Most users aren't going to give a damn about moral grounds.
They also just look uglier. I have not looked at this new LO version yet.
Though this is becoming less and less of an issue, I still keep Office 2007 in a virtual machine just to turn them at least into PDFs.
Also bear in mind that Office is a moving target. Office 2016 is due out this year... http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/22/microsoft-announces-office...
Because the license cost savings are so small compared to the payroll costs of the people using the software that even a small hit in efficiency from existing staff (and new staff as rotation occurs) being less familiar will outweigh it quite easily.
Heck, its also why lots of firms give a pass to major version upgrades even when their license would allow the major version to be rolled out at no additional license cost until the version they are on is old enough that it is causing a drag because any new staff are having trouble converting back to the old version.
One of the biggest reasons the company I was working with at the time made the switch was sheet size, we came up against the 65536 rows limit at least once. Formula calculation speed was another big one. In many ways the ribbon does feel like a step forward, perhaps the only thing 2003 still does better is keyboard shortcuts, but luckily you can still use Excel 2003 keyboard shortcuts in newer versions if you can remember them (Alt,d,f,f and Alt,d,f,s are probably the ones I use most frequently).
At which point you have a database and would be better served with a different product designed to work with large data sets or moving data to external ODBC sources that Excel can query.
Although I definitely agree that Word and friends are good products.
I don't think I'd ever give anyone an odt document; the rare doc I produce with LO is exported to PDF before sending, not the least because virtually no one has LO or even knows what it is. And if I export to some Word format, who the hell knows what version of Word is on the other end? It's just not worth it.
If someone insists on a Word doc, I'll write a plain text document, give it a .doc suffix, and when the other end double clicks on it, it will open in Word.
There are some niche industries, like finance, where there are legacy spreadsheets (where, scarily, much of the business is run. Wall Street runs on Excel spreadsheets) that don't run, and with users who have a very unique knowledge and can't easily accommodate the change, but that is a small minority.
For new and growing companies that just need this sort of functionality, these apps are fantastic.
Licensing costs are only a small fraction overall cost:
* Training and lost productivity as users learn the new software. It may seem simple to you, but many end users are easily confused by interface changes. Also, there is a serious learning curve for users doing complex tasks (e.g., complex spreadsheets; long, complex documents, etc.)
* IT labor costs: Configuration, deployment, administration and support; doing it on 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 desktops, local, remote, and at home, is expensive and challenging. Is LibreOffice fully integrated with Active Directory? With whatever deployment and patch mechanisms you use (think about that, how do you patch 10,000 desktops? Consider that an error could effectively shut down your entire company)? How available are support, labor and tools? How available are IT professionals with expertise in these areas (i.e., who will you hire? What happens to your existing staff)? Users tend to think of these things as peripheral, but they are the largest items on the IT budget. Microsoft Office passes meets all these needs with flying colors.
* Integration with other systems: Every other application and system is designed and supported for integration with and Microsoft Office. Every vendor has staff experienced in this integration.
* Data integrity: What happens when the total in the Excel spreadsheet is wrong because the formula didn't convert properly? Employees would have to check for formatting and other errors in every important file where data integrity matters. Consider that, because most people in business use Microsoft Office, many documents will be converted back and forth frequently. That means employees have to deal with these issues repeatedly, verifying conversion will be accurate before sending the presentation to the client; verifying the spreadsheets' values and formulas, in case someone on the other end decides to change some numbers; fixing these problems ... and explaining constantly to everyone outside the organization why you have these continual problems.
Much as I support FOSS, LibreOffice isn't a consideration for many businesses.
But most of it boils down to MS Office was there first (and made by the same company as the OS).
Each of your bullet points assumes a migration from Office to LO, and that there isn't already an infrastructure that supports it.
hackuser's points about the cost of labor and the enormous potential cost of mistakes are very well made. If you are paying knowledge workers $50,000 to $150,000 a year, then saving pennies on the cost of Office is not a smart move. When mistakes can cost your company a lot more than that, even more so....
But they weren't made by the same company as the OS was.
And I do agree that moving away from MS Office would be very foolish, if money saving is the reason behind it.
Would switching to Libre Office actually save me money or would it cost me money?
People using MS Office are knowledge workers. They make money from their knowledge and their ability to manipulate knowledge tools such as MS Office.
Without volume licensing, MS Office is $99 a year for each worker (and many companies pay a bit less than that). Let's say the average worker at your firm makes $50,000. If you have a full benefits package, that adds tens of thousands to their cost. Add in computers, office space, etc. and that worker could cost you upwards of $100,000 a year.
Now look at that $99 a year cost for that one employee. Sure saving $99 would be nice, but what if switching made that employee 5 percent less productive? What if that employee has to interface with outside clients who use other programs and this causes issues with interoperability?
For me, as a manager, $99 a year is nothing if it makes my employees more productive. On the other hand, saving $99 for something that makes my employees less productive costs me a ton of money.
Nickel and diming knowledge workers is not a good way to make them productive or to keep them happy. This is why I don't care what programs employees like to use or even what OS they use. I want them as productive and happy as possible.
At a previous job I was forced to use Windows, even though I've been an OS X users since 10.1. The reasoning was that a Windows machine was cheaper to purchase and maintain for the IT department. Let's say the difference was something like $250-500 over the course of that machine's life (which could be four years or so). Is the IT staff saving a few hundred bucks really worth a significant drop in productivity for an employee?
Because my old job put computer and software purchases under IT, instead of my department, the IT department got to make their budget smaller by making my department less productive. Had the budget rested with my manager, of course I would have gotten the machine I wanted because a few hundred dollars for a big productivity boost is a no brainer for him.
I know how to use Windows well and can get work done on it, but I am more productive with the OS of my choice (and the applications that go along with it). With knowledge work, five percent productivity gain here, five percent productivity gain there and you're talking about a lot of money.
Open Office: https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959
Libre Office: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38262
I have a half-hearted look for it every time I fire up a new version of Open/Libre office but I've stopped bothering to check for it actively.
Seems baffling to me that this wouldn't be a higher priority issue as this seems to be the commonest mode of use of Word for creating new documents - where the absolute commonest mode is using an existing document as a template and forgetting to change headers, metadata, and random boilerplate text throughout :)
Still a great project and lots of great features (the docx importer updates are awesome, because opening documents other people send me is a large proportion of what I need it for), but I really wish I could find an option to make it look like it used to...
How closely does NeoOffice track LibreOffice (or is it a fork of original OpenOffice and not LibreOffice at all?). For instance, are new features in the latest LibreOffice (like better MS Word import) present in the latest NeoOffice, or will they be soon?
That I can't really tell from their web page leaves me not optimistic.
So it looks more Maclike but in every other way LO is better.
Last time I tried NeoOffice was several years ago, after I got sick of OpenOffice always doing the wrong thing when I tried to word-skip/line-home/whatever and turning my efficient reflexes into frustration. Turned out NeoOffice did exactly the same wrong things. So much for OS X integration.
Go to Preferences > LibreOffice > View, choose "Sifr" as your icon style. That's the look they should have shipped it with by default.
Have you checked? AOO has basically had not a lot of work on the actual code since OOo days (and now has around 0 non-volunteer contributors, and no contributions on the .doc converter in the last several months).
So, speaking for myself, I wouldn't trust these online office suites with my data or time. They also tend to lag more on lower-end hardware (I frequently use a netbook for notes, etc).
I had not had any problem, but that is not to say it is problem free.
Google implementation of an office suite is very popular at middle, high school, and online universities (even though most of them offer the free Office365).
For text documents though I agree with you.
The only real deal-breaker level annoyance I've found with any of the Drive apps so far is that whatever Javascript the writer one is using eats up enough CPU power to drop my Macbook's battery life to about a quarter of what it normally is.
I'm not a power user, but I'd say Google Sheets are good enough for almost all of us. Google Write, not so much.
As a handy collaborative text editor with some basic formatting, it's fine. For longer documents, technical documents, anything that needs professional levels of review and revision control, or basically any other "serious" work, it's not even entry-level.
Likewise if you want to share some tables with light formatting and maybe some simple calculations, the on-line spreadsheets are fine. However, anyone who does significant number crunching using a real spreadsheet isn't going to last five minutes.
In short, if you find the real-time collaboration useful and need only very simple formatting and manipulation, these on-line suites are fine (and of course this probably does cover a fair amount of useful work). If you need anything more sophisticated, they aren't really competing with the heavyweight desktop applications at all.
But then again, I'm the sort of user who runs LO on Linux compiled from git master just because I can ;-)
Except if you don't need all of that, in which case you could do the same work with 10 other small scale word processors even in 2000.
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49853
https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/x135.html
However, validating the signature properly involves you being certain of using the correct public key. This is the tricky part. Being in the PGP strong set helps with this. Using HTTPS gives you some confidence, but no protection against server compromise.
Once you do have the correct public key, however, you can be protected against server compromise for all future releases, too.
Or, at the least, you can verify that future releases are coming unmodified from the same origin.
It is technically feasible for me to sit in a random coffee shop and do a drive-by infection of .exe files downloaded via HTTP by arbitrary other people on the same WLAN. The same is not true for HTTPS, because I am not able to forge arbitrary SSL certificates.
Yes, there are problems with SSL, but to claim that "it doesn't do any good" seems wrong.
[1] https://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.h...
[2] http://blog.codinghorror.com/should-all-web-traffic-be-encry...
Try pasting in the following:
If you change the cell format to 'currency', it silently quotes the entries making them literal values (the leading tick mark is only visible in the formula box): Now it's impossible to treat them as numeric values without doing a weird regex find/replace [1]. This doesn't happen with sterling or pound.[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/25764467/6691
(1) Select some _empty_ cells you wish to make euro currency
(2) Right click -> Format Cells
(3) Category should be "Currency"
(4) Format should be "EUR € English (Ireland)"
(5) Save and then enter numbers into the cells (the euro symbol should be appended)
It seems to work with things like sum() and you still get the euro symbol and them being the correct "currency" cell type.
Here's the "Format Code" which you can just paste into the Format Code box to save yourself time with the above procedure:
No white space around it.Pasting remains completely broken. They need to fix that.
It's not. See: http://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-370303.htm
The best non MSOffice Outlook equivalent that I've found is Outlook web access IF you need Exchange connectivity.
Until that changes--I'll check back in a decade or two--LibreOffice and friends, no matter how legitimately good, will be also-rans in the corporate world.
I do concur that Calc is the main issue for LO. They've finally got it to a state where serious improvement work can start ...
Calc: Insert -> Object -> Chart (near the bottom)
Gnumeric: Insert -> Chart (near the top)
There are hundreds of little things like this that have made me a dedicated Gnumeric user. Calc apes excel badly, while gnumeric has forged its own distinct user interface. It's a little different, but the differences make sense and work well once you get the hang of them. An additional nice feature of gnumeric is that it's a tiny stand-alone download as compared to the slow pain of installing LibreOffice. Whether on linux or windows, you can have Gnumeric up and running in ten seconds. I seem to recall from my last flirtation with OSX that it was pretty annoying to get gnumeric running there, but it was still possible.
Unfortunately, gnumeric has been gradually degenerating into a memory-hole riddled piece of crapware under linux, and the developers responsible for this slide have recently stopped development on the windows executable as well. The fact that the windows binary was working better than the linux version when they gave up on it is all manners of stupid. I honestly don't know what they're doing, but gnumeric is getting pretty much unusable under linux. Maybe running an old version of the windows executable under Wine would work better. If so, that's just sad.
But, I haven't installed it or needed a local word processor in years. I use Google Docs for everything, because I don't have to keep up with where stuff is. I just login and there it is, no matter what device I'm on (though I should redo my Google Drive and Gmail backup setup...I used to have it automated, but haven't done a backup in years now; the cloud makes me lazy and too trusting).
I love it, it is the best spreadsheet I know, especially if you plot time series.
By the way, why is their main site down? I can't open https://www.libreoffice.org
1. Word, if a lawyer sends me a critical document in review mode it's always Word and I want to be sure that he and the other party gets all my additions. Moreover, Word is performant and fully featured. I haven't seen any word processor handling a 600 pages document with over 1,500 footnotes on an 5 years old Macbook Air 11 with such an ease. The Windows version is smoother and faster though. Google Docs for collaboration stuff and really small things since it still doesn't support proper chapter numbering and many other details.
2. For big complex stuff Excel and smaller easy stuff always Google Spreadsheet b/c of the collaboration and great integration in Google Mail. BTW, the online version of Excel (Office 365) is quite nice too and very smooth and has collaboration too.
3. Presentations, clearly Keynote which is not much better than Powerpoint but the UI is more intuitive and everything looks crisper, then Powerpoint but the Windows version. Google Slides is living crap, yes you can do stuff and collaboration is great but it lacks so many features and feels often very cumbersome and tedious to work with.
I tried a few times Libre Office/Open Office but the problem is: if you do serious office stuff like important presentations for board, legal documents or the next lawsuit, larger bizcases for new investors—stuff HAS to work and there are too many smaller quirks with all Libre Office apps, if you just play around a bit, yes it is very impressive 'hey an full Office for free!' but the 'free' comes with a price and to get things done under time pressure or your life is in danger this software monolith is so the wrong thing and you instantly switch back to mentioned products. And frankly, always when I use office stuff it's about serious matters, I do not open Word for fun.
Doesn't instantly switching to Word/Excel require you to have it installed in the first place? In your case, you already have it bought and installed so it's easy, but that's not always the case.
True and it heavily depends on your profession. My office stack matches my profession, i.e. a designer rather cares about Adobe CS than MS Office and is happy with Google Docs. So, it depends really on what you do.
I had to go buy Office for Mac that day.
[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=58521
I don’t know what style requirement the DOJ had, but I do know that when the marketing team put a footnote on one page, and LibreOffice moved it on a separate page, they considered it a serious bug. If Word renders a .doc file a certain way, LibreOffice should also render it that way regardless of what the DOJ specifies.
WP was a great product. I miss those days of being able to fix most anything with reveal codes.
I was swiftly kicked off my laptop while she recreated her entire presentation in PowerPoint.