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Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

I use LibreOffice for 99% of documents completely fine, and generate my own documents via Pandoc. The setup has served me really well so far.

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I do this too, however there is considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS Office.

True, I had a large contract recently with this issue, but it worked out in the end.

The problem is that we thought "let's switch to the online MS Word editor", which then proceeds to delete your text as you write [1]. Bare in mind that my company pays an Office subscription per employee for that crap.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/11be6wd/firefox_...

[2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-c...

Try ONLYOFFICE Desktop, it is open source and has superior compatibility with MS Office.

There are considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS office when you are using MS office too.

We gave up for large documents, assigned an editor and just send them chunks of text.

I can’t stand libreoffice - between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..), extremely janky UI from 20 years ago, poor performance, exceptionally slow load times, and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities.. it’s just an awful experience overall.

> between tons of bugs (waiting for printers on startup is a default..),

Never had issues with printers to be fair, but it sounds like something that could be done in a background thread.

Bare in mind that we are contrasting this with Office, which is itself incredibly slow to start.

> extremely janky UI from 20 years ago

I love this about Libreoffice, everything can be located super reliably.

> poor performance

For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?

> and bad formatting issues and incompatibilities

It's certainly not a 100% drop-in replacement. A lot of the formatting issues I have experienced is because a Office user did something that assumes a perfect renderer - something we don't even get in browsers. Like people pressing enter multiple times to create a new page and not just CTRL+ENTER.

> For a Java application I think it's crazily fast?

LibreOffice isn't written in Java. It can optionally use Java for extensions and for some database reporting features: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/015

I believe you're correct, I saw some error message on start-up and always assumed it was a Java application.

I've been using OnlyOffice lately. I'm not a hardcore office user so maybe someone else can comment on how it is compared to Libre/MS Office.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors

It has better compatibility with MS Office OOXML format.

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