LibreOffice is one | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice is one

blogs.computerworlduk.com

98 pointsgorglax25 comments

I think my one issue with LibreOffice is, honestly, the name. I speak Spanish, so I get the meaning behind Libre meaning free (as in unencumbered, or available, not referring to price).

But for some reason the name still bugs me. OpenOffice was such a nice, clean name. LibreOffice just doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way.

As another spanish speaker I have to say that the name isn't a problem at all. But I must acknowledge that for the majority of people the name sounds stupid, I wonder how many will get used to it.

I definitely agree. Libre does not nicely roll into Office like Open did. It makes you need to pronounciate more.

I think you mean "enunciate"?

Yes and thanks, that is a handy new word for me.

Hopefully the major distros will just rebrand it, thus removing that problem and allowing for tighter integration with the rest of the OS.

> OpenOffice was such a nice, clean name.

Actually technically it was called OpenOffice.org, which is pretty silly.

True, but it was easy enough talking to non-techies to just drop the .org and no one was the wiser. I also agree the .org was a bit odd to include in the official name.

I am an LibreOffice user since the StarDivision days - at those times on OS/2, before Internet became available for public in Germany. I am happy that this product survived all this and I am especially happy that LibreOffice gained success after one year and so is less under control of companies. Congrats to all the contributors!

By looking at the chart showing which companies contribute how much I am surprised that Canonical has such as small slice in contribution? How comes? It is the distribution that is focused on end users and pushes the desktop, innovates on the UI. Is Canonical putting higher priority on the app store? What do you think?

Another feature that I think is important for LibreOffice and to the OpenSource scene in general is to get some synchronization (and maybe collaboration) functionality, without a vendor lock-in. Mozilla is managed to do this - though the amount of data is surely not comparable. I understand that it costs money to keep all the servers running and adding hard disks, but I think people would be ready to pay a fee - if it is guaranteed to be free of advertisement, the code to stay open source and the data private.

I always wanted to support OpenOffice and then LibreOffice, but it has never been as good as Word. Sadly, the corporate world uses MS Office and that forces me to use Office. The compatibility for complex files are lacking. Formatting would regularly be screwed up in one or the other. I tried LibreOffice again a couple months ago and it crashed 4 times while trying to create one document. I have given up and lost hope in LibreOffice.

Yep. In particular, "track changes". As soon as you have to collaborate on a document with a lawyer or a counterparty, track changes becomes a must-have.

I'm not quite as pessimistic. These are solvable problems. It's just taking a really long time.

In 2004/5 I had to collaborate with a windows shop and used some change tracking and other collaborative features without any problem. I sometimes feel like these compatibility troubles aren't as bad as people want them to be.

I opened a doc today where libre office would crash predictably once i scrolled past some page.

The whole office software system hasnt evolved much since frameworks on my brothers XT 25 years ago. By that i mean it is still as painful, it sure has more features now.

My migration away from Microsoft started in 2000 when I ditched MS Office 2000 for StarOffice. Word for instance constantly opened popups such as "Word can't find the serbo-croatian dictionary. would you want to install it?" while I was typing.

Please be kind and file an issue and provide the test-case. thank you.

http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/

Yes, it's a must-have, that's why it's been part of LibreOffice for quite a while: go to menu Edit > Changes > Record, or to review all the changes to the document use the "Accept or Reject" function. It's all there, isn't it? What is it with LibreOffice's change tracker that you don't like?

I think the issue is that it doesn't play well with Word's change tracker. But I could be wrong; my change tracker is diff(1).

Yes, exactly what ams6110 said. The change tracking just isn't compatible enough.

If you have a completely plain vanilla document -- no formatting, no line breaks, no headers, no footers, no tables, nothing -- then OpenOffice/LibreOffice's tracking is good enough. But documents are rarely that simple. And, unfortunately, your lawyer or VC or potential acquirer really isn't interested in discussions about document formats. They have better things to do, and they expect you to be able to communicate with them.

I agree that LibreOffice has a long way to go. It is the only software I use that crashes regularly.

I haven't had it crash ever (that I remember). I am running it on windows XP and 7. Maybe I am lucky or are other OSes less stable?

I tried v3 on OS X when it came out, and got several crashes in a few hours. I went back to MS Office 2007, for the lack of something better, and haven't tried it eversince. I'm giving it a new shot right now (OS X 10.6 32bit).

I was sent a 50MB spreadsheet. OpenOffice couldn't open it, Google docs refused to even try, but LibreOffice did. Happy user.

Seconded - LibreOffice frequently opens large sheets that Numbers struggles with.

And Impress still sucks. :(

Trying to re-adapt after using Keynote for a year. It's rough. Even the simple things, like having to click half a dozen times to find the "edge" of a text box, because clicking in the middle either does nothing (if there is no text there) or clicks "through" to edit the text inside.

This is a fine, fine product and community.

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