How to affordably own your office software: LibreOffice | Hacker News Reader

How to affordably own your office software: LibreOffice

zdnet.com

42 pointsCrankyBear49 comments

I've actually tried to run a business on LibreOffice instead of MS Office, and it lasted about two days. If you're in a general business profession that relies on an office suite, not a developer or journalist where you're making simple unformatted documents or basic lists in Excel, LibreOffice doesn't even come close. The same goes for Google Apps, and even Microsoft's own Live Apps. The user interface in MS Office is so much more refined, there's a greater depth of time saving features, and it runs so much faster that spending money on MS Office paid for itself right away.

I've found that I personally have a great deal of cognitive dissonance when it comes to pricing for MS Office. On the one hand, I hate the idea that software that I used to pay for once and have forever I now rent for a potentially greater sum over time. On the other hand, I spend more time in MS Office than any other software I own, except for a web browser (which is usually productivity-detracting, not enhancing). People don't mind paying similar amounts for cloud CRM or project management systems that offer pretty basic functionality, but don't like the idea that Microsoft would move to that model with a much richer offering.

I agree that some users will have a need for MS Office over LibreOffice.

I'm not trying to convert you. But what, apart from the interface, did you find missing in LibreOffice?

I see people saying that the free Office suites don't do what they need, but I don't see what is missing. And I think that might be useful information for the free Office teams.

(Personally: I found search and replace for formatting characters much harder in LibreOffice than it needed to be.)

My employer at some point decided to save money by mandating openoffice instead of ms office for anyone who only made documents for internal use (documents, spreadsheets and presentations). I ended up using openoffice for a little over a year, until our team demanded ms office licenses, and it turned me off of the product. I even switched from openoffice to ms office at home, out of sheer frustration with the product.

Simply speaking, openoffice's problem was not a lack of features, it was a lack of quality. Using it was a constant exercise in working around bugs and poorly thought out user interface design. The lasting impression openoffice made on me was a feature-complete product handicapped by decades worth of technical debt. I am glad libreoffice are trying to reverse the trend, and I keep a regular eye on the progress they're making, but I really "get it" now why ms office has no competition.

Do you recall any examples of these bugs and poorly thought out user interface design?

Bullets constantly got confused when you were copy-pasting text (word is no champion here either, but it's a bit more sane). Image paste tended to minutely resize images to be just not a 1 to 1 pixel mapping at 100% zoom, which coupled with a poor image scaling algorithm produced horribly artifacted images on screen no matter what you did. Images were a pain in general, positioning them and putting borders around them never worked right and I opened many a document to find broken images. The change tracking and review tools were painful to use. There were many issues, too many to cover in a comment.

I'll be honest that 90% of it has to do with the user interface - it's not that LibreOffice can't do what I need to do, it's that it makes things that should be easy really hard. And considering the amount of time I spend in an office suite, if I save a few hours a year, it pays for itself.

There are probably a few features that are in MS Office that aren't in LibreOffice, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. They're edge cases, but they become important when they come up.

Exactly this... I've tried converting a lot of people over especially for home use... in almost all cases some small feature is missing that's greatly important to that one person, that they then fork over the cash for MS Office.

I won't/don't ... LO does what I need just fine. I also take offense to the suggestion that Evernote and OneNote are even in the same league... OneNote is probably the only MS application that I'd fork over a fair price for. I use Evernote because I'm on Mac, Windows, Linux and Android regularly... but loved OneNote a lot more...

I agree with that - I think OneNote is one of the most underestimated pieces of software ever made.

> The user interface in MS Office is so much more refined, there's a greater depth of time saving features, and it runs so much faster that spending money on MS Office paid for itself right away.

How much of that is it you wanting to use a familiar UI rather vs MS having "greater depth" ?

I don't think it has to do with familiarity at all - LibreOffice looks almost identical to what MS Office looked like prior to Office 2007, so it's definitely familiar, and if you look at 'percent of my life using a UI,' is even more familiar.

When the Ribbon was introduced, everyone complained because it was different, but I thought it was a great innovation. Common tasks that used to be buried in menus were brought to the forefront, and really useful actions that few people knew about got exposed so that you didn't need to be a power user to access them. Microsoft invested a lot of time to figure out how people actually used the software and streamline it for them, and it shows in the product.

As a quick example, look at what it takes to change a spreadsheet to print in landscape and fit to a page in Calc vs. Excel. It's a pretty common task for anyone who prints out a spreadsheet, so Excel made it easy. Calc still does it the same way Excel did ten years ago, based on where a programmer would put those options, but not where a user would look for them.

> LibreOffice doesn't even come close.

Your post was very, very light on details.

LibreOffice isn't as good as MS Office, especially for anything that ever needs to be touched by MS Office, ever. Sure, writer is great (if you don't expect the exact same formatting in Word), but God forbid you need to use the LibreOffice Powerpoint equivalent to do ANYTHING with a Powerpoint created slideshow. Or Calc to edit a large and complex Excel spreadsheet.

If the main problem you have with LibreOffice is "it sucks for editing MS Office files", that's a shortcoming of MS Office files.

Practically speaking, if you need to interchange files, you'd still need MS Office. But direct your grumbles at MS lock-in, not at LibreOffice.

What MS lock-in? Nobody's forcing the world to use MS Office. They just already do. And since sometimes people will give me MS Office files, I need programs that can edit them correctly. I don't see how it's MS Office's fault that LibreOffice incorrectly formats Office documents. Microsoft doesn't seem to be taking steps to lock others out from editing Office format files.

Whether they are actively trying to lock you in, I don't know. But neither are they making great efforts at interoperability.

I've had personal files becomes inaccessible before because they were in proprietary formats and the program no longer ran on my OS. That "lock-in" may or may not have been intentional by the software maker, but the effect on me was the same regardless. Now I use explicitly open formats and maintain my ability to change software.

    Microsoft doesn't seem to be taking steps to lock
    others out from editing Office format files.

Microsoft doesn't have to take such steps. It took them six full years (three versions of Office) to get Office to support the strict variant of the Office "Open" XML format that they created.

LibreOffice is useful in exclusion, or when no other software programs have to be used with it. When everyone who will consume your work will consume it with the same software.

Otherwise, pony up for Word so you can be on the standard as most business, or don't and just use a free online option like Google Docs. It'll do everything you actually need, anyway.

Though I don’t fully trust LibreOffice to be compatible with any Word document, I’ve been impressed with the progress in the last one or two years. Some Word documents with a tad advanced formatting that failed miserably two years ago render perfectly today in LibreOffice.

If you haven’t used LibreOffice for a while, you might be pleasantly surprised.

There are other (paid-for) office alternatives if you don't want to use MS Office or Libre Office. Corel's Wordperfect suite is one (http://www.corel.com). Or the very cheap Ability Office (http://www.ability.com) which brazenly copies the MS Office interface as closely as possible.

The German software company Ashampoo (http://www.ashampoo.com) has a cheap Office Suite too (in English, as well as other languages).

So if you're looking for an MS Office alternative, it's not a simply a case of Office vs the free or open-source alternatives. There are other paid-for options too, some of which are very cheap.

The outrage over Office's new licensing seems overblown, IMO. Don't most people voluntarily buy a new copy of Office with each PC anyway?

It's hard to buy the vendor lock-in arguments, either, because Office has used proprietary formats from the very beginning.

I don't use Office, though, so maybe I'm missing something.

"Don't most people voluntarily buy a new copy of Office with each PC anyway?"

Not true at all. For compatibility reasons, it's sometimes easier to keep an older version than to get the newest version (as an example, excel 2008 for mac dropped VBA support but it was brought back in 2011)

I buy a new Office when a new version gives me something I want. I buy new PC's on an entirely different schedule.

Yes, you do, but most people don't - they click the "Install Office for $200" checkbox when ordering a computer, then they never think about it again.

Do you have any data on that? Because I've seen a few (sample size ~4... so mine isn't useful data either) non-technical people doing this and in pretty much all of the cases what they wanted was to keep using the same software they'd been using for the past X years. Getting their "computer guy" (usually me, or some local teenager) to copy files over for them was their preferred way to move onto a new computer.

No hard data, but it's what I've seen the people I know doing. Lately they buy Macs, but when they buy Windows machines, they usually choose the pre-installed Office because it's easier than installing it later.

Big fan of libreoffice. The Solver in Calc is great. And Calc can do most of the complicated stuff MS Office can. But man is it uggo. They need to get some UX volunteers. On the other hand, there's Google Drive, which is a completely steaming pile of garbage for an analytics guy.

LibreOffice is a subpar replacement for Excel (it gets some things right, but can't do stuff like Bloomberg integration)

How is the reliability of it? This professor had a data loss issue with the last version: https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z135fbjhswilyzfui23...

Owning software is much less important to me than keeping my creative works safe.

I personally haven't used it in a few years. I do some writing in Google Docs, but have begun to do more writing in .txt file programs. They are lightweight and it's a format that will be around for a long time to come. Byword on OS X is just awesome btw.

On Linux or Windows, Google Docs and plain text editors. On a Chromebook, Google Docs works pretty well. I do wish there was s prettier version of Docs just for writing text ala Byword.

> Owning software is much less important to me than keeping my creative works safe.

I've lost so much time to MS Word version incompatibility issues, that I've stopped using it almost completely back in 1999. I've had to use Word occasionally at work, and had met some 2003<->2007 incompatibility issues as well.

If you care about keeping your creative works safe, then relying on any software you can't reinstall at will -- even if it is 10 years from now -- is the wrong answer. Seems like MS office falls under that "wrong answer" definition.

.txt, .html or latex files are the way to go. You'll be able to read them until the sun goes out (although perhaps the "blink" attribute won't be supported)

>How is the reliability of it? This professor had a data loss issue with the last version

I have experienced data loss with LibreOffice 3.5 on Linux several times when trying to save a freshly typed document as .rtf. I "solved" the problem by saving a blank document first and then adding more data to it. Oddly, that "fix" has worked with numerous programs through the years.

>keeping my creative works safe

I use LyX [1] and TiddlyWiki [2] for that. Uncompressed text formats are far easier to deal with in the long run and allow for better recovery of incomplete data in the case of a storage medium failure.

[1] A visual editor for LaTeX, see http://www.lyx.org/.

[2] A personal wiki, see http://tiddlywiki.com/.

Edit: expanded the post.

LibreOffice is great, so long as you do not plan on ever exporting styled documents back into MS Office. This of course means that you cannot use LibreOffice for documents that will be sent to customers in MS Office formats.

So long as no one needs to edit the original file, you could make a PDF out of it.

I agree, though, seems like LibreOffice has a way to go.

As much as I love open source and as far as LibreOffice has come, the UX/UI is just terrible. I'd rather pay to use the new Office or just Google docs just so my eyes aren't raped over and over.

>Call me old-fashioned, but I like "owning" my software. I like picking and choosing where I can install it and how I use it. And, also call me sensible. I can pay $150 a year for Office 365 Small Business Premium forever and a day or I can use LibreOffice for free forever and use it anyway and anywhere I want.

All that is fine, but I find it curious that SJVN likes Chromebooks a lot, which are the ultimate in forcing people into a rental model. The 100GB of free cloud storage that you get with Chromebooks is only free for two years.

From one of his previous articles:

>When you buy a Chromebook, you don't get just a standalone device with Chrome OS. You get cloud storage, the Google Docs office suite, Gmail, and on and on. In short, for one low price a Chromebook gives you everything you need from a basic computer.

Not just that, but one of this other articles reads like a PR release from CDW and Google. http://www.zdnet.com/cdw-to-offer-enterprise-chromebook-supp...

The only conclusion that I can gather from this is that SJVN likes to toe the anti-Microsoft line, perhaps for pageviews and is willing to dance on either side of the fence for it.

That's not the only conclusion, the average technophile user buys a new laptop every ~2 years anyway. When I heard about Chromebooks, I didn't worry about the 2 year limit on them at all. It's like saying "in 2 years you will still be able to use your Chromebook but you have to transfer most of your files to an external harddrive".

Chromebooks are hardly targeted at the technophile.

I mean, sure, they want technophiles to buy them too, but Chromebooks were not intended to be a technophile-only novelty.

Actually, I like renting the latest MS Office. I don't have to pony up $300 to have the best office software anymore. I just pay $10 a month and it runs seamless with Outlook, SkyDrive and Skype.

Would you still like to rent it for $50/month?

Because there is nothing stopping Microsoft from jacking up the price next month. And for the many reasons listed on this thread - if you actually depend on exact layout and functionality, you don't actually have much of a choice.

Renting it sounds like a poor choice in the long term. I think people usually keep one Office software for about a decade or so, or close to that. Paying $100 every year for 10 years is a lot more than paying $300 at once. Also for small businesses it's $150, and probably more for bigger companies.

What functionality are you missing from the free LibreOffice? Or are you willing to pay that much just because you're "used to it"?

> What functionality are you missing from the free LibreOffice?

I'm not sure if LibreOffice deals with this better than OpenOffice, but being able to open documents with "track changes" enabled, and not having them come out like garbage, would be nice. (I tried finding the specific document in question, but I guess I've erased it since then.)

> are you willing to pay that much just because you're "used to it"?

Depending on how much time it takes you to ramp up to your productivity in a paid version, it might make a lot of sense to pay that much "because you're used to it".

I haven't used LibreOffice since the true OS version was still OpenOffice, does it even have Track Changes itself, or is that part of why files w/track changes on look like garbage?

TT is probably the most useful feature for me in word, both for technical documents going out for review and my personal fiction writing things when it is time for me to deal with an editor (haven't yet, but EVERY writer I know says you need track changes to be able to effectively work with an editor).

As a coder who have used CVS, SVN and now Git to manage changes in my codebases, I honestly can't understand the appeal of Word change tracking.

I disable it with haste if I ever open a document with those ugly colors popping out.

I'm not sure, but I couldn't figure it out. In the end, I had a coworker print off a copy of the document from Word, and just kept that on my desk.

> What functionality are you missing from the free LibreOffice?

This had been discussed a lot lately. On one hand, for a lot of people Calc is not an alternative to Excel. And while features on Writer and Word can be comparable, a lot of people feel more comfortable using Word (I have experimented this with both general and power users), not to mention that in some platforms is really buggy (I got tired of attempting to make it work on my wife's macbook pro for instance)

It seems that LibreOffice is going under a major refactoring, which is good for the product but I wonder is that effort would result in lack of innovations in the short term.

> What functionality are you missing from the free LibreOffice?

Editing text in outline mode, with all the keyboard shortcuts to easily reorder headers, open and close paragraphs, etc...

This will be equivalent to buying every single Office version during those 10 years, not just once, because (hopefully) the subscription service will be regularly updated.

Missing functionality:

- An intuitive, responsive UI engineered around the most common use cases. It should hopefully eschew dropdowns and modals and instead attempt to provide what I need without any clicks or with only one click.

- No nonsense editing -- too often in LibreOffice I have to crack open the paragraph view (to see all symbols) and go line by line to figure out why a list didn't integrate properly, to re-indent a line that got wonky, to re-apply a setting that shifted. I want it to Just Work(tm) like Office is much closer to accomplishing in 2013.

- Attractive designs that I won't be embarrassed to apply. I can waste a few hours designing a custom theme (a requirement for any themeing in LibreOffice), by why waste the time? I want a simple one click design tool that applies an attractive, professional design. A quick click through LibreOffice colors and designs shows me that I would be mortified to use most of them professionally. They feel like they were done in the 1980's and haven't been updated since.

There's a few.

Funny, I have the first two issues with MS Office (or at least, had until and including 2007 - haven't tried 2010, and luckily I don't have to deal with Windows and .docx files anymore).

Office 2013 has a great look and feel I've really glommed on to. I spend enough time at the computer that I want to enjoy (as much as I can) my time on it. The tools I use matter. If I enjoy using the tools I stay productive longer.

I enjoy using 2013, and I've never been this enthusiastic about a Microsoft product since, well, ever.

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