LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab
theregister.com
theregister.com
(The connected experiences, including Copilot, can be disabled with a dialog hidden deep in Office's Trust Center, but even that's confusingly worded. It's unclear from the wording and the structure of the dialog what the combination of checking "all connected experiences" but unchecking "experiences that analyze your content" should actually do, for example.)
MS Office is certainly the more polished product, especially Excel. There are some spreadsheets I can't feasibly convert to LibreOffice Calc without equivalents to Excel's lambdas and tables.
But LibreOffice does the job in most cases. I'm really excited to see this new work—especially CRDT-based sync between desktop app instances over a network file server, which would turn LibreOffice into a significantly better experience than MS Office for my purposes.
Are the more recent versions really that necessary or useful for features? I miss using 2007 when the ribbon was introduced and the UI finally felt organized.
I use the online version because it worked out cheaper than the offline version + Dropbox.
There is another commercial German competitor from this time, SoftMaker. I used to buy the suite for Linux, just recently switched to LibreOffice. I never liked the clunky Libreoffice but since SoftMaker refuses to support LanguageTool....
There is actually a third German text processor from this time, Papyrus. Born on Atari ST.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Division
[2] https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office
[4] https://papyrusauthor.com/
English new version of Papyrus seems to be released in a few days.
Sun named it OpenOffice. LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun. OpenOffice was subsequently donated to the Apache foundation.
Oracle stalled development, made the bugtrackers etc private, and kicked out all of the contributors and tried to commercialize the product at the time. The reason for Oracle "dumping" it to the Apache graveyard is that most of the "free" (as in unpaid) contributors switched sides to LibreOffice because of Oracle's hostile behavior towards the development community. And they donated OpenOffice because it was effectively a dead project for a couple of years.
There's probably still some contributor talks about it on one of the old CCC conferences on their media server.
If you want to learn about how to manage open source, Oracle's track record is a prime example of how not to.
Some links for others to read-up:
Press Announcement for "Oracle Open Office" which wasn't open anymore:
- https://web.archive.org/web/20101217212955/https://www.oracl...
Oracle trying to upsell Standard Editions and Enterprise Editions:
- https://web.archive.org/web/20100924092655/http://www.oracle...
Announcement of the Document Foundation (Oct 2010, before Oracle's announcement in Dec 2010):
- https://web.archive.org/web/20101001004543/http://www.docume...
IBM being the reason that Oracle donates Open Office to Apache Foundation due to them pointing out to Oracle that their copyleft license agreement with Sun invalidates Oracle's proprietary claims:
- https://web.archive.org/web/20131207051759/http://www.h-onli...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20110603142320/http://www.zdnet....
Slightly more correct: Sun kept StarOffice as a commercial offering and also open sourced it under the name of OpenOffice.org in parallel. The .org was quite important to them in the name.
> LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun.
The actual forking happens earlier with a patch set living outside Sun and sponsored by some Linux distros for a while. After Oracle's acquisition however the foundation was built and the name LibreOffice was picked.
Apparently because, in some country in which Sun did business, someone else had already trademarked “OpenOffice”, but Sun’s lawyers believed the addition of “.org” was enough to sidestep that trademark.
I think in many jurisdictions, if someone else already has legal claim to a trademark, sticking “.org” on the end may not be sufficient to escape infringement. But, maybe under the laws of whichever country this trademark existed in, it was. Or at least, so Sun’s lawyers believed-hence, they were quite insistent on including the “.org”
Within Benelux, the company had an agreement with nl.openoffice.org where the latter would include a notice on their website to clarify that they were not affiliated with the trademark holder.
According to https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1372955 it was also used by Orange UK, but that happened after OpenOffice.org was released: https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/orange-laun...
[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-let...
Excellent lately though.
A) great commit messages, B) comments that are worse than the commit message so that you have to go scavenge in revision control, C) a single or very few commits where the craziness happened, and D) a codebase that hasn't drifted enough that this signal is hard to find.
I've had poor luck spelunking for reasons in things like the Linux kernel. 90% of my revision control effort looks at things from the past couple of years, and before then it rapidly becomes diminishing returns.
[1] https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/server/tree/8f4fd3383656602115...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
Turned out the issue was if you set a print range then it has to talk to the printer driver on windows and that takes forever to respond if the thing is a network printer and it's asleep. You open the ODS file it just hangs.
I'm not sure if they fixed it. It was reported on bugzilla and was rotting already for years. I got so annoyed with it and just thought fuck it and bought an Office license.
Edit: downvoted to -1. Stay classy HN. I need to get stuff done not bugger around with defects all day. Nothing wrong with that!
I'd rather there was no upvote or downvote at all.
You've had an account for 11 days, I'm not sure you've had enough experience to form a proper opinion on this. I feel like the upvoting/downvoting system helps a lot.
I was there when it wasn’t possible to criticise MSFT because of the second coming of Satya. I was there when Google did no evil. Now look where we are.
Laughs in 4-digit Slashdot ID
Why the new a/c, then?
I offer no solution.
Beyond your current self you have room to craft the even greater art-work you aspire to become. The creative effort ideally captures the emotions and experiences.
You are your own composition.
Arguably, judging you should be a privilege reserved for people who know you.
Should civilized men engage in this assumption that everyone is easily understood entirely by written words or does the act describe how shallow the jury is?
I'm sure I have much to learn from people down voting my comments without saying anything.
If only we could all be more like them, then we wouldn't need to have these conversations. haha
Instead of the increasingly uphill battle with Acrobat torrents and cracks, I am a happy LibreOffice user. Congrats Adobe, you won.
Customer exports a csv file, then verifies the contents in excel. They never realize that excel modified some of the data, and pass it on to us.
Just, constantly! (I use notepad++ for CSV files however)
It should be able to sniff the csv flavor before ingesting it.
Maybe it would be cool to tie the settings to the file path so that it simply opens /banana/2.csv assuming it is just like /banana/1.csv (skipping the dialog)
I wonder how much StarOffice code still remains in the repo.
The UI/UX doesn't feel like it's changed very much
Don't get me wrong, I use LibreOffice a lot, but I kind of despise it. The biggest headache I have, with Writer - which is what I use most often - is that if I select text in order to change the formatting, it changes formatting of stuff not selected. I think this has to do with paragraph styling .. it's just very unintuitive how it figures out what belongs to a paragraph or not. My human brain wants to separate paragraphs with line breaks. So why would formatting selected text on one line change the styling on adjacent lines that aren't selected?! It is extremely infuriating how its styling behaves in general.
I think it's also worth noting that rich text formatting is the primary reason to even use a word processor instead of a plain text editor in the first place. Embedded objects and exporting tools are all useful too. But most of what I use Writer for could be done in a text editor if I didn't need styling. So all these years later, a core feature - arguably THE core feature that necessitates the existence of the application to begin with - is still broken and unintuitive.
And when I search for help on how to get styling things working etc. and I find posts by other people that share these concerns, the answers are legacy document formats etc. that contain these bugs by design so it's something that's really hard for the developers to fix.
There is an absolutely mind boggling amount of programming work that goes into making a WYSIWYG word processor. and this complexity tends to bleed out into editing quirks and corrupted documents. Not that there are no quirks or corruption with an explicit separate compiler it is just that it will not touch your original source, so you can fight the quirks in a systematic way. I think this is why word perfect users love the show codes function so much.
"You know why they call a word processor right? Have you ever seen what a food processor does to food?"
I have written a lot of words in troff/groff + various macros and adjacent tools (eqn, pic) over many years and produced consistently decent if plain looking documents. And I've started using it again. Still covers about 85% of getting words on paper in a readable format. Spent lots of time with LaTeX, too, which produced perhaps nicer looking documents over all (and beautiful mathematics), but at the expense of much more complexity; YMMV.
I suppose Markup is the inheritor.
Sadly... The rich text editor I mostly use these days (Google Docs) goes in the complete opposite direction; trying to apply a new stylesheet is mostly a waste of time. Which is why for any non-trivial document, I mostly rely on Markdown -> HTML + CSS.
Character styles are settings for selected group of characters (things ike emphasis, italic, underline). Paragraph styles are set for whole paragraph you are in. You make new paragraph by hitting enter. If you hit enter twice you make two paragraphs. In paragraph style you define how paragraphs should be separated (empty line, first line indent, rule whaever you want). You should never do what can be done using paragraph style by writing them because later when you want to change them you would have to change it everywhere instead just changing style.
Create a document with two one-line paragraphs.
In Word, put the cursor at the start of the first paragraph. Press SHIFT+DOWN. This selects the first paragraph. Apply a paragraph style, Heading 1, say. Paragraph one has the new style, paragraph two does not.
In Writer, do the same thing. The style is applied to both paragraphs!
I use Writer all the time but this funkiness in paragraph selection continues to bug me. You have to select paragraphs excluding the final paragraph mark, which requires more keystrokes than Word's selection behaviour.
Single character can only be part of a single paragraph. So if you select characters that are in different parahraphs and want to set their paragraph styles it should set all of them.
Ive just tried it in Writer and like i said its seems to be the “norm” how other soft does it (i dont have acess to Word to test that).
To guard against such problems especially in paragraphs that use "bullets and numbering", where the font used for bullets and numbers appears to be linked with the font used on the associated line, I have become used to insert some random letter before the place where I would paste formatted text, if it is a place where this may not work as expected, which blocks any spreading of that format. After pasting the specially formatted text, I delete the previously inserted letter.
This undesired spreading of the formatting style happens only over white spaces and invisible control characters, it does not happen over normal printable characters, so inserting a printable character is guaranteed to contain the style.
Reminds me of devenv.exe.
I have also tried to use the javascript API for LO Calc but I couldn't find any documentation even though I have read it was possible in some places... was it unmaintained and taken away ?
I tried to do things with Draw quite some time ago, it was a clunky clunky. I hope it got better.
Writer is just fine though imho, pretty much does what you expect from rich text editor
What personally bothers me more is the performance, which can be pretty hit or miss.
Still, I hope the project remains going for the decades to come.
Exactly this. I much prefer LO to any version of MS Office since 2007. And early in my career I trained people on how to use MS Office and was something of a domain expert.
18Y ago they threw that into the shredder along with all my knowledge and muscle memory. What little functionality is left is literally not worth the pain and annoyance of trying to use it.
Personally i like the "Single toolbar" UI, it only shows a menubar and a toolbar with the most common stuff, which i find a great balance between minimalism and discoverability.
Though i only use like 1% of LibreOffice's features - and really only use Writer (which i mainly use as a dumb rich text editor) and Calc (mainly for a few calculations one could most likely even do in VisiCalc :-P).
Then we learned about the password recovery mechanism, the non-logging of useful things, and the support system.
I recommend it highly to certain people, but not people I like.
ASC.Mail.MainThread - CreateTasks(need 10 tasks).
ASC.Mail.MainThread - No more mailboxes for processing.
ASC.Mail.MainThread - All mailboxes were processed. Go back to timer.
and not one entry about actually sending or receiving mail.
The nag I will always repeat: libreoffice should have made much bigger, much sooner, strides to integrate the Python ecosystem in deep ways (striking on its own and ignoring Microsoft's path).
Had it done so, it would now undisputably own the desktop productivity future, with local LLM integration just the trendy example.
- desktop / local first
- cross-platform and first-class wasm build
- optional online/collab capabilities
- low bloat and fast compile time
- highly extensible and reusable libraries, practically a GUI toolkit for building office-like applications
- first class scripting e.g. creating/editing docs with python, as well as API for GUI / LLM control
- Prefer to innovate completely new doc/spreadsheet formats rather than adhering to past baggage
- Spreadsheet cells more like a shell/repl/notebook interface
- first class touch & ink support
Many of your bullet points is what I am trying to do at IronCalc[1], that's a very small step in that direction.
LibreOffice is an impressive technology, but I don't see it running smoothly on the browser. Maybe I am wrong, I want to be wrong.
Thank you for sharing. The embeddable nature of this sounds great, the idea of having one spreadsheet solution that can run as code, on the browser, desktop or even within another app sounds amazing.
As someone with a couple of apps kicking around that would benefit massively from a robust spreadhsheet solution, I wish you luck.
Actually the history goes back way further. If anyone's curious:
- First release of StarOffice was 1985. It was a closed source commercial word processor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
- Sun, now Oracle, bought StarOffice in 1999 and released it as OpenOffice the following year
- Oracle bought Sun in 2010, and the community fragmented because nobody trusts Oracle
- In 2011 LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice
- Later that year Oracle gave up on OpenOffice and gave it to Apache, but that version (Apache OpenOffice) is an orphan that nobody maintains anymore.
So yeah, there's probably still LibreOffice code that dates back to 1985 in some form!
That's not true. The team maintaining AOO is small, but it's not abandoned. As evidence, I submit the fact that the last push to the Git repo[1] was a whopping 42 minutes ago.
And even if one person is committing nothing but typo fixes, that's still a binary difference versus being "orphaned" as far as I'm concerned. Sure, it would be nice if the project had more active contributors, but I'd rather celebrate the folks who are contributing rather than denigrate them and the project. But that's just me.
> Three issues in OpenOffice over 365 days old and a number of other open issues not fully triaged.
Do you think it is responsible to keep serving users vulnerable software and misleading them that it's being updated with pointless code commits?
It's vulnerable, there's been no major update since 2014, and now unfixed issues over a year old. Those changing typos in the source code instead of actually fixing the issues should really be ashamed.
I don't know why Apache doesn't just shut it down; it serves no purpose anymore.
If anything their disclaimer makes clear:
> None of the changes being evaluated will affect the license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionality. LibreOffice will always be free software and nothing is changing for end users, developers and Community members.
Reading the page and comments the whole thing was most likely a stupid name to try and differentiate the regular LibreOffice from 3rd party versions/forks that provide commercial support. They seem to have changed that name to "community" as one of the comments suggested, though instead of being plastered everywhere it is only seemed to be used when comparing the regular LibreOffice vs the "Enterprise" versions offered by 3rd parties.
It's been a month, so far it's great, I hope I will be able to stick to it.
(I am an occasional user of Office, I used to be a heavy one.)
As long as it's just a "a document" that's consisting of headlines, paragraphs and bullet points it might not matter, but anything involving more advanced formatting, even just formal letter will usually look bad once loaded in LibreOffice, unfortunately.
I think they're beautiful, and much more communicative than modern icons. Personally, I prefer the density of the small ones although I'm surprised there's no larger setting (in general, buttons got bigger when touchscreens were introduced but I still do all my serious work with a keyboard and mouse).
Am I that unusual?
The reason such a thing should exist is to drive industry adoption: it's a lot easier to get things into the corporate and government world, ironically, if there's someone selling a subscription and support and looking like a normal software vendor for it.
But there are, and has been for years, such versions: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business...
Thanks, but not quite what I'm looking for. I want a fully maintained and supported offline word processor and spreadsheet for Linux, much as Windows/OSX has Microsoft Office.
If I felt that LibreOffice was maintained and supported, I would not be asking.
Even though the paid offer includes technical support and a simple git log shows 50 commits in the past 24 hours in the core repository?
Old binary word docs or recent OOXML based ones? Do you file bug reports?
Bug reports: no. I do participate in open source projects, but I really just want to pay someone else for an office suite.
The problem is I think so few people care about those old binary formats these days, so there probably isn't much demand to improve compatibility for the edge cases you are encountering.
[1] https://www.collaboraonline.com/collabora-office-latest-snap...
Not sure why they don't have an online store or something and you have to contact them to purchase it though, that seems to add unnecessary friction for someone who just wants a single license (makes more sense for enterprise users).
I only wish it auto-updated on Windows...
OnlyOffice is leaps and bounds better.
Never heard of onlyoffice thanks I will check it out.
> Very bad UX.
I disagree. I think it is _much_ better than most rivals such as OnlyOffice, WPS Office, and of course MS Office itself since 2007.
> OnlyOffice is leaps and bounds better.
It's years since I wrote about it.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/21/onlyoffice_7_3_and_wp...
But I not only disagree, I strongly and vehemently disagree.
I am not saying you are wrong to like what you like; you do you. I'm saying I personally despise ribbon-based UIs; I find them unusable.
I want the choice. MS and WPS do not give that. I can't even remember if OnlyOffice does but I don't think so.
It is very important to always remember that "what I like" is not the same as "what is best".
LibreOffice continues to be a fascinating C++ codebase. If you want to work on a large scale C++ legacy product, then I'd say this is the best codebase to work on.
I'm currently, for no better reason than that I haven't upgraded, running LibreOffice 24.8.0.3 on macOS Sequoia. I haven't given it FDA (checked the list of apps with FDA permissions, and it's not there), but just tried opening a few files from within the app, and had no issues.
Edit: I installed via the App Store. Double-clicking a file in Finder works but opening from within LibreOffice does not.
Direct.
It hadn't even occurred to me to look for it on the App Store. I went to check, and noticed that it's $9. Since the reviews suggest that it's not always kept up to date there, and since part of that $9 is going to Apple, I wonder what the advantage of installing through the App Store is over installing directly and donating $9 to the Document Foundation?
No, but I can tell you that the speaker is a lovely friendly and approachable guy. Email him and ask.
Edit: we had to go back to an older draft and split it into two parts, as I recall..
> 40 years to catch Word 6 for Windows. Hopefully it doesn’t take another 40 to reach Word 95.
I used both.
TBH there is no functional difference whatsoever that I can remember. 95 just changed the look and feel to look less like Win3 and more like Win95.
Office 97 had some functional changes and new file formats. The main changes in Word were:
1. Highlighter functionality 2. Saved to RTF by default due to a bug
The end. That's it. #2 was fixed in SR1.
Word 2000 built on that; the new feature I recall was:
1. Tables can contain a table inside a cell.
The end.
The points to take away from this:
* Do not listen to marketing people. They lie. It's their job.
* Don't judge by version numbers or cosmetics. Contrary to most of 21st century design, cosmetics are always much less important than functionality.
Sun acquired StarOffice Suite in 1999, that's not when it originated.
Maybe you should spend a few minutes checking facts before calling things hoaxes?
If I remember correctly, the PowerPoint program didn't have text size as a front page icon. Instead you had to click a few buttons or something... I didn't really care to learn what symbols meant what, or the workflow.
I switched to Google Slides and moved on.