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Comment by Saad_M | Hacker News Reader

One thing I keep hoping for is improvements in the UI side of LibreOffice. I presume under Windows and Linux the UI feels more fluid and natural, but under macOS it is definitely inferior to that of MS Office or Apple’s iWork apps.

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On Linux, I still miss MS Office. Not just because of the UI, much as I prefer the MS Office one, but also because of compatibility issues. This is for LibreOffice Writer. Simply opening a file and saving it on LibreOffice or OpenOffice gets it distorted on MS Office. I've resulted to using Google Docs more often that I would like.

Agreed. All other improvements LO makes are futile until compatibility is 100%. LO works very well in a closed environment with only LO users, but it doesn't work to share documents with Office users.

MSO works very well in a closed environment with only MSO users, but it doesn't work to share documents with Office users.

That is because LO actively uses a standardized and well documented document format while MSO created it's own that has dependencies that only MSO resolves.

It will never get there. Not just because the OOXML spec is a behemoth but because MS has every incentive to not let it get there. They have the most popular document format in the world which is open enough to avoid legal trouble but unwieldy enough to ensure that people have to buy MS if they want to use it.

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