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Comment by slacka | Hacker News Reader

I would be happy if LibreOffice didn't add a single feature for the next year and did the following:

* Improved MS Office Interoperability

* Fixed bugs

* Reduced memory usage/improved performance

In fact, those are the primary reasons my company abandoned our plans to migrate from MSO to LO. I have filed several bug reports with both the AO/LO teams on issues such with incorrectly importing NetSuite generated Excel documents for our sales team. Most of the bugs were validated, opened, and then ignored for the past year.

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If you look at the release notes for various versions you'll see that they've been doing this already.

Note that e.g. new volunteers working on build infrastructure things are not going to be happy that they aren't allowed to work on what they're good at. They're not going to switch to coding, they're not suddenly going to care about MS Office. Any company/project can do multiple things at once.

Anyway, just file bugs! In the release notes it said they fixed 3000 in this version.

> Improved MS Office Interoperability

The problem is that this is a moving target (and event more in motion due to Microsoft's need to port this to some mobile platform, so no matter how much is invested in this issue, they will never get close to acceptable.

Yes, it is a moving target, but you can still get it to a very solid good level. In the past it's always been a few years between updates, and they have version details in the files, so you can say "Supports Word 2007 files" and not worry about Word 2016.

I've written a bunch of Perl code (that I should open source.. maybe some day. anyone here'd find that useful?) for creating and editing docx files. It's not that hard -- it's all XML!

EDIT: I was using a LibreOffice daemon before, but I did this code just because Libre had so many bugs / missing features when converting a document to docx.

Agreed MS 97-2003 .doc is NOT a moving target. Back in 2008 when we were considering moving from MSO 2003 to OO or SoftMaker Office, SoftMaker had near perfect MSO import filters. 5 years later, and only 3 of the 14 .doc import bugs that I filed with OO (now on AOO tracker) have been fixed.

It's too bad the Oracle didn't take OO under their wings. With their resources they could have turned it into a true competitor to MSO. As it stands now, volunteers enjoy adding new features not bug fixing or scouring the 200 page OpenXML spec. sheet.

> Reduced memory usage/improved performance

This is (most likely) not going to happen, at least for a (very) long time - the cause is that StarOffice was originally structured as a single giant application instead of separate ones.

They are working on it one piece at a time. For instance, they refactored the way Calc store the cells in memory to avoid lots of pointer chasing.

Could you post the bug reports?

Here are a few of the bugs prevented us from migrating to OO. Note that the bug tracker DB has migrated from OOs servers to Apache.

https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121429 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=15379 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=95039 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=119268 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121430 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=69633

Note the last one was fixed in AOO 4.0. Yay :) After 5 years, but better late than never! Unfortunately they only fixed the .doc import filter and it still exists in the .docx import filter. Asked them if I should post a new report.

Interesting... It appears that a few of these were fixed in LO!

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