LibreOffice hits 4.0
libreoffice.org
libreoffice.org
LibreOffice does not look nice but it is functional. What is its main function? For many people, it has completely replaced Microsoft Office.
Of course MS Office has an even larger feature set, but few people max it out. Likewise, there are people who will prefer LaTeX but that's a small group. The advocates of web based office systems tend to ignore that desktop systems provide much more privacy. LibreOffice sits right in between those groups and is useful to many.
Sure, not many people use this, but its nearly impossible to create some math in a word document that doesn’t look horrible.
Great project in my opinion. It has its quirks, but I've yet to find one that I could work-around with a few seconds of Googling.
I want to be able to install Google Docs-like application on my own server.
They have video[2] and a wiki page[3] which at least shows how to enable it (custom build required):
[1] http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/10/14/libreoffice-co...
[2] http://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2011-10-10-lool-demo.w...
[3] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Using_LibreOffice_in_a_W...
Hosting your own network-based office web-app solution would be convenient for many...especially for the security.
Having to revert back to emailing saved word documents for a week or two is far better than losing everything for a week or two.
I want to share docs with the internet, or with a small team, have integrated history, have instant editing, have the possibility of more people editing it. I want to have instant access to it from any computer with a browser.
Etherpad sort of does that, but not 100%.
You could probably extend wikis like mediawiki to have live visibility of edits, at the cost of performance. Separate db or redis storage for in-progress edits, and query that before retrieving the last static version of the page...
I certainly have some aversion against Libre Office because it does not look nice.
It has been many years since I stopped installing pirated MS Office suites on friends' computers and used OpenOffice and now LibreOffice instead. No complaints so far.
Deviations from Mac OS style:
- application menu stays highlighted when preferences dialog is open.
- Does not use standard font and style dialogs => unnecessary learning curve; sharing styles with other applications does not seem possible.
- Does not use standard color dialogs => unnecessary learning curve; sharing palettes with other applications does not seem possible.
- Focus rectangles in dialogs even if that is disabled in system settings.
- OK button on the left, Cancel on the right.
- A setting for not aliasing screen fonts that are too small? Why not follow the system setting?
- Non-standard "Save changes before closing" dialogs: - weird shape (wide and very low) - incorrect order of buttons - non-standard button texts - non-standard 'Question' icon - extremely little room between button texts and button borders
- I expect 'Spell check' in the Edit menu, not in the Tools menu.
- "Page Setup" is missing. Instead, we have "Printer Settings"
General
- Focus rectangles look ugly (should not use dotted lines; dotted line is too close to the text)
- Spacing of lines in tree view in Preferences looks too small to me.
- Way too many settings (examples: a toggle for graphics antialiasing?)
- Why is this still combined as a single application?
- In the Tools-Customize dialog, menu separator lines are drawn using hyphens, not by drawing a line.
- Striped dialog backgrounds in a Mac App released in 2013?
- Help menu's "What's this?" item does not appear to do anything (its feedback is a pointer change, but that change does not happen if there is no window below the mouse. With large screens, it is easy to get there (say when having a HN reply window side by side with a LibreOffice window)
- Help menu has 5 menu items and 3 separator lines.
- Try spell-checking an empty document. Dialog opens, immediately an alert pops up "The spellcheck of this sheet has been completed." If you click OK, both the alert and the spell check dialog close.
- When you make row height lower, row numbers should, at some stage, start using a smaller font. They don't.
I don't know how it compares to iWork, but when I compare LibreOffice to Microsoft Office on the basis of internal consistency, parsimony (for lack of a better term), and even adherence to established platform conventions (on Windows), LibreOffice wins on all counts. With each new version of Office, Microsoft adds yet more UI novelties to its haphazard collection of product-specific menu styles, dialog boxes, and toolbars.
I mean, this is a program, of which a lot of people put a lot of effort and which works pretty well. These people are making the program available for free no strings attached for anyone who wants to download it.
I understand that your personal tastes are too refined for the software, but for a lot of people, having this fully functional and free office suite is a great help.
Or as they say around here "A caballo dado, no se le ve colmillo".
This is a big problem that quite a few people seem to have. Just because a program is free, does not mean the userbase should have low expectations. It's great that it's accomplished so much, but it needs more work, and design is one of the areas which needs the most work right now. Especially if they are looking to get people to replace Office with it.
And I do agree, it looks okay. It's functional, and the UI gets the job done. But becoming complacent with it because it's free is not the right way to go about it.
That's an entirely subjective judgment. I happen to think that LibreOffice looks much better than MS Office 2010, especially when considering visual design as a functional rather than a merely decorative quality. Full-screen file menus are ugly and disorienting.
> Of course MS Office has an even larger feature set, but few people max it out.
OTOH, there are features in MS Office that really are useful and aren't well-represented by equivalent features in LibreOffice. Pivot tables in Excel, for example; not everyone may use them, but for those who do, Excel unfortunately has no credible competition.
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[1] Yes, LibreOffice forumals can manipulate and return vectors and matrices, not just single values -- see https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Array_Functions#What_is_an...
Does LibreOffice have similar limts?
If not you will be losing time every minute you spend in the spreadsheet.
On the other hand, LibreOffice is a very helpful piece of software to edit the occasional .doc attachment.
For my own purposes, the only office application I really find myself reaching for is the spreadsheet. I'm a big supporter of free/open source software and I run Linux on all my personal computers, so it pains me to write this - but LibreOffice Calc just doesn't come anywhere close to comparing with the functionality, stability and polish of Excel.
Using it is a steady aggravation, and I'm persuaded that the problem is not due to it being different from Excel - after all, other open source applications are different from their proprietary counterparts and I find them as good or better.
The problem with Calc is that it just doesn't work very well. Everything seems to take one or two more steps than the equivalent action on Excel, the defaults aren't as helpful, and the application is far more prone to freeze/crash.
Data manipulation is a domain in which lean never works and Excel is the opposite of lean. Decades of development in a corporate culture that encourages adding features has made Excel excel.
Trimming math functions doesn't make sense because 10,000 more functions never clutter up the user experience. Excel is a programming environment - an IDE which includes drag and drop, a REPL, and macros (with respect to the data layer). It's syntax is simple [yes, I know it wasn't invented by Microsoft] and it's power significant.
It's really the crown jewel in Microsoft's portfolio. It just works.
My conclusion in most of these cases was that said ERP systems must suck (and that it's really hard to get someone, especially execs so switch IT habits) :D
All things that can be done better with other tools, but for many people, it's easier to just work with a tool that they know rather than trying to learn a new tool (witness the groans every time a new $PROCESS Management Tool is introduced).
Not saying it's a good or bad thing, just what I've observed.
My first engineering manager wrote letters in Lotus123. And often I had to edit them.
I use Writer for basic writing, nothing fancy. Same for Calc and I hold my lecture using Impress. I use Draw every now and then for quick and dirty stuff.
Never used Base or Math explicitly.
Keep up the good work it is appreciated.
Edit: I have Googled for this a couple of times but never find anything. Is there an "Advanced LibreOffice" type book that anyone could recommend? I always make resolutions to use my office suite more efficient but never get around to it.
Problem not solved.
Whilst you might want a single clean look, you definition and someone elses might differ.
Separation of concerns is always a good thing.
edit: seems they have no real theme engine, just a method to replace background image for header and footer. duh.
I completely agree. This is a stereotypical open-source software web site, and it shouldn't be. This goes to show the lack of attention to design detail that is no doubt influencing their whole product, and surely part of the reason it's not as successful as it should be.
Deny it all you want, but webwanderings speaks the truth, and the truth needs to be heard if open source projects such as Libre are to be taken seriously—as they should be. Design is important, marketing is important, and they need to treat it that way.
Ironically, HN doesn't have the greatest web design, yet it is extremely usable, and very popular.
The way I see it, the LibreOffice devs are focussing on cleaning up the OpenOffice codebase, when they get the resources and time they can update the website.
I'll give you an example of where "clean design" causes lots of problems. Go to the Gnome website. They used to have a lot of documentation for developers. And I mean highly meaty tutorials, discussion papers, usability studies, etc. There is documentation now, but it's appallingly awful.
Did a clean design help Gnome? No. They cleaned it up all right - by removing anything of any use to anyone.
The libreoffice website, on the other hand, has a lot of visual elements (icons, colors) that don't really fit well with each other.
Visual-heavy websites can be quite nice, but they need to be really thought through.
Do they? A few times a year we get a "I made a better UI for HN" article and almost without fail everyone seems to respond "This is unneeded and worse. This reduces usability".
With so many awesome people in this world, I'd like to think there is at least 1 great designer and front end guy who would donate time to completely scrap the current design and give it a facelift.
Who wouldn't want that on their resume, "I designed the website for LIBREOFFICE." That's deserving of major kudos, at least in my book.
It is also significantly more usable than many of those.
More than that it's very usable to, to each their own I guess.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffic...
Then Oracle discontinued support because of the fork. That was in April, 2012. So, it wasn't 2 years - more like 6 or 7 months.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Initial_release
IMO, had the Libre Office crowd played their cards right, they could have saved a ton of work and had a better name.
It was discontinued and folded into LibreOffice only later. That Oracle discontinued support is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it was that they never provided ready support or accepted enhancements or patches in the first place.
For example, my company lives and breathes through its internal wiki -- which is quite an accomplishment since we are owned by a company that still lives in the dark ages: mailing Office attachments to each other.
Sure, the wiki software could have been a lot better. For one it needs an order of magnitude better performance. And it would be nice if the install wasn't such a messy affair. But it beats the alternative hands down. It beats mailing documents. It beats juggling multiple versions of documents. It beats overflowing mailserver quotas.
Most of all it beats not having to run Windows XP because the people who came before you were stupid fuckups who decided to tie everything so closely to a single platform that they can only afford to move the company to a new OS version every 10 years. And then only after a herculean effort. Inbetween everyone runs on outdated software. For a whole decade.
Real change doesn't come from offering marginal compatibility. Real change comes from not having stupid problems.
LibreOffice is a solution to a problem you should not be having.
Writing paper formatted documents is bad on many levels. It uses dead tree as a medium. It does not have the web of links that exist in a wiki, nor the tags and classifications that exist in a blog or on twitter. Documents can't be live updated for everyone. There is no versioning and no easy way for a whole group of people to edit on the same project.
Information needs to be connected, searchable, instantly accessible and social.
Then again, if you're a hardcore Word user, then the professional office suites still offer more functionality.
(Additionally, not everybody is lucky enough to "work in the cloud" due to various constraints or restrictions).
e.g. see this Python spreadsheet (which I only just discovered myself) here http://manns.github.com/pyspread/
Python expressions in your grid cells, integrated with numpy and matplotlib, and (if you want) a 3D data grid! In any case, Excel is in many ways crufty and busy when a much more minimalist data-grid-view with powerful scripting (e.g. from Python) would probably be much better for power users.
Any viable alternative to Excel has to overcome ingrained user familiarity, inertia, and be simple enough that your average Joe can use it. It would also need to be demonstrably better than Excel, which might look like crap but has quite a lot of power under the hood. It's the only Microsoft program I'd actually consider `good'.
I agree with what you're saying if you want one program to do all these things, but I'm not sure that's the way to go. Can you imagine any other industry where the same program serves both the "average Joe" and the power user?
One program can't be all things to all people. In the same way we both have iMovie and Final Cut, I think there's room for two types of spreadsheet program. Excel trying to cater to both types of people seems like a folly; it'll never make everyone happy. Why not replace Excel with a web-app on the low end, and make something more powerful that puts scripting front-and-center for people who need it?
As an example, even though I'm not a designer, I use Photoshop to create assets for my software. That would the same tool that my father, an ex-lithographer, uses for DTP and digital retouching.
A counter-example to my idiot-using-rocket-scientists'-tools is my girlfriend. She's an economist at a rather large central bank, and uses Excel to model what economists model when they're defining monetary policy. Those models are huge, and many run overnight. She comes home and Excel is the thing she uses for anything even vaguely resembling a list.
Another benefit is that one program being used by all levels makes it easier for advanced users to help less advanced users. Can you imagine trying to help a less advanced user in their paddling pool spreadsheet when you're used to something much more powerful that probably bears only superficial resemblance to it?
For the most part, even if you load 1 GB worth of numbers to do some processing with them, you'd probably only look at a summary of those numbers or some sort of aggregation. So your browser technically wouldn't have to load that information in JS, a server could do it and crunch those numbers presumably faster than a desktop would, and with a lot of these new client-app-like frameworks nowadays giving you near instant feedback, at this point we'd be arguing whether the "calculation engine" underlying the spreadsheet interface is on your local machine or on a remote machine.
My wife uses MS Excel and Word almost everyday.
I think the world is not yet moving away from desktop-based office software :)
- "Reduce Java code:" good, an unnecessary dependency, please continue.
- "Themes" ? I don't understand why anyone would want their office suite to look different than other desktop apps? I sort of understand with a music player, but a word processor?
Every time I see the blue gradient toolbars on MS Office clashing with my other apps I cringe. Reminds me of Myspace.
- Where is outline mode? I have quite a few colleagues who won't use it until it arrives.
The bug's still open: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38262
Grandfathered in from: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959
It seems crazy to me that such a common usage mode doesn't seem to be driving any development work.
I'm one of a large number of people who won't be using LibreOffice until that RFE's addressed properly (nope, Navigator view is not an equivalent thing).
That said, in my spare time, I've been looking through the code base, and my impressions are that it's too large. For instance, looking at the vcl module, which handles widgets, windows, etc. when I look at the number of classes my mind begins to boggle.
I possibly (read: probably) speak from ignorance, but I use the function SVMain() [1] as an example. Instead of defining a purely abstract class with architecture specific classes derived from this, they have defined an extern hook function, then they run it, test to see if it returns false, and if so run the standard ImplSVMain function. This seems inelegant for two reasons: the code is somewhat unclear, and there seems to be two functions with lightly different names, one is an SVMain function that does something, the other is an implementation of a function... Yet both implement a functional part of the code base. There is even a comment that reads "the real SVMain.".
Then there are the names... There is a "desktop" object that runs the main loop, the desktop being the application. [2] But there is an Application class [3], yet at the same time there's a DesktopEnvironmentContext class [4]. This seems to be some sort of misguided attempt at reimplementing a "desktop" metaphor, which is a legacy of early versions StarOffice. It was one of the first things ripped out when work started on OpenOffice.org, yet the class name still remains, making its purpose most unclear.
Furthermore, for some reason they force the Application class to be subclassed. Which they do only once, via Application_Impl. But I have noticed that the base class has lots of empty non-pure functions, and only forces Main() to be a pure virtual function. What is the point of this?
Another thing that I find makes the code harder to read is it uses a lot of Hungarian notation.
This is a legacy code base, and I wasn't being sarcastic when I said I love LibreOffice. I think people like Michael Meeks and Kohei are amazing. But I see the code base as having been slapped together somewhat pver many years. And there are code smells and, frankly, code rot, throughout the source.
It needs to be rearchitected (not rewritten). There is code in the code base that nobody dares touch (the legacy filters). The code is organised strangely, for example there are multiple places to find filters. At the same time, they have a system abstraction layer (sal), which has specific architectural and generic classes, but then I see that http://docs.libreoffice.org has modules like "android" and "iOS".
There are literally thousands of classes in there. Go-oo sometime ago refactored away dozens of classes, I would think they could refactor away a lot more.
I'm truly sorry if this seems harsh or ignorant by the way. It's not intended to be that way. It's just this code base is massive, so massive that its hard to understand how it all works. This in turn, IMO, may cause issues getting more volunteers. Not to mention too much refactoring might break things.
1. http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/svmain_8cxx_source.html...
2. http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Architecture/Process_Flow
3. http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classApplication.html
4. http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classDesktopEnvironment...
Writer is good enough for education up through undergrad for many majors, and good enough for some nonprofits. It is certainly good enough for my needs. I don't use the other applications so I can't say about them.
Ideally, I'd turn vcl into a framework. Currently this module is tightly coupled with the execution of the main application. Consider that if this was its own framework, then wouldn't it be easier to port it to more architectures? And consider how much easier it would be for app developers to extend the core of LibreOffice.
I'd be abstracting all the OS specific constructs into the osl modules (which is its intended purpose), and keep a strict coding guideline that anything OS specific must be implemented there.
Id also abstract all the graphics primitives to its own module. I'm specifically thinking of the Gtk+ idea here, you can see the fruits of this design decision because gtk+ apps now literally will run on almost anything.
I've not looked at UNO much, but is it possible that there is duplication between this module and other modules? As an example, but surely cppu is duplicating work that the sal module should be taking care of?
Then there is the filter, hwpfilter, lotuswordpro, oox, writer filter and writerperfect filters. Surely one filter interface would be better and make document expor animport fidelity better? Perhaps I talk from ignorance, bu I'd have thought that shortens development time and reduces bugs. This could be abstracted out and othe projects could use it also, cross pollinating with other OSS efforts. It would also make correcting or implementing filters for more obscure formats easier.
(2) Then read Caolan's presentation http://conference.libreoffice.org/talks/content/sessions/015...
(3) Then come join us on the libreoffice-dev mailing list and ask questions. We're happy to help newcomers get acquainted.
:-)
Although I use the Excel copy quite a lot (for grading), I have yet to see the Word copy function properly in a professional document of any realistic complexity.
I know, I should report the bug, but the material I'm looking at is under submission to a scientific journal, and will therefore be private until it may be published.
The star office applications all played well with each other in this shell of an application that looked like windows 95.
This is back when KDE was a new thing and many people were using FVWM ... it just looked so wonderfully sophisticated up against the desktop applications available for linux at the time.
PS: http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soui-1.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soint-4.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-6.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-5.gif ... I don't know how it's taken them 15 years to start to be awesome again.
As an aside, just found out that you can use the perl module DBI:CSV: to treat a CSV as a DB and use SQL with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsoft_Office
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cn.wps.moffice...
Office 2012 Free Suite: http://www.kingsoftstore.com/software/kingsoft-office-freewa...
I've used it. Mostly opens Office documents without too much formatting problems.
It uses the Qt framework, so the UI looks neat. Hope it helps.
I've been testing LO 4 for a few weeks now, and it seems that the problem has gone. Apart from this, LO does the job, we use it for automatically generating API doc in HTML from specs we write with it, and this is great. Not that there is any other viable option on Linux (that I know of).
I wish I could have a Keynote-like on Linux. In the meantime, beamer does the job for quick & safe slide decks.
That rather old and tired joke (one of Isaac Asimov's, I believe) says how I feel about Libre Office. I use Ubuntu, so it's the only game in town if I want to edit documents and spreadsheets. But it may be unique in the world as the only software that's actively worse than Microsoft Office.
"Johnson," he said, "came home unexpectedly from a business trip to find his wife in the arms of his best friend. He staggered back and said, 'Max! I'm married to the lady so I have to. But why you?'"
The reason is simply OS X' default configuration:
'LibreOffice.app can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer.
Your security preferences allow installation of only apps from the Mac Ap Store or identified developers.'
I know, using the Ctrl key lets me confirm that I really want to run LibreOffice.app, however, how many Mac users know that?
Reason #2: open source, so lock-in is (in theory) a non-problem so long as there are people who find it useful.