> there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
Are you sure? Does it not strike you as odd that OpenOffice/LibreOffice still haven't managed to replace Word?
Are you sure? Does it not strike you as odd that OpenOffice/LibreOffice still haven't managed to replace Word?
That it has not for everyone or as a whole doesn't strike me as odd in the slightest. There are plenty of reasons to use Word. Aside from the fact that it's solid itself, it also has a metric ton of inertia. Those using it already have the license or pirated copy, already know it, have legacy documents using it, and are generally otherwise are left with very little reason to switch to something merely because it's a "solid alternative."
I haven't yet met a single person who is happier with OOo/LO than with Word; if that's true for you you're the first such person I've heard of.
The point is not that they are better but that they are a suitable replacement for all but a very small niche of power users. But people tend to compare the limit cases even if all they'll ever use are the day-to-day functions.
> The point is not that they are better but that they are a suitable replacement...
Well then you're just confirming what I already said...
Could you explain what it is that scared you so much? I am the one to scream whenever I'm forced into using anything from the post 2003 MS office suites, which is thankfully extremely rare.
- LibreOffice can't even show the simplest documents correctly on the same computer: http://i.imgur.com/0glr43F.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/g3a1332.png
- Word takes < 200 ms to start up on my (blazing fast) laptop. LibreOffice takes > 2 seconds. It's outright irritating to say the least.
- Everything else has lags too. File->Save takes > 2 seconds to show me the dialog. In Word it's instantaneous.
- No smooth scroll?? My eyes!!! >___<
- No "Styles"??
- The UI just screams "LINUX", feels freaking hacky, and doesn't feel the way it should. For example:
1. Word highlights text word-by-word; LO does it letter-by-letter. Selections never work the way you intend them the first time.
2. Highlight a piece of text from left to right and then press Left. The cursor is now still on the left-hand side of the previously-highlighted text in Word, but still on the right-hand side in LibreOffice. What the hell???
3. A million other things about the UI doesn't feel normal, e.g. http://i.imgur.com/HM52E9A.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/zTK1zoi.png
I could go on and on, these are just what I found/remembered in a couple minutes of using it again.
Add a nonlinear solver to calc? Sure.
Add a fill function into draw? _Maybe_ a two-month after-hours project.
It took me around 3 months, full-time, to write an import filter for LibreOffice that still only kinda-sorta works. And it depended very little on the rest of the codebase.
I think you underestimate how complicated a modern office suite is, and how much years-old technical debt there is floating around in LibreOffice.
So, I have this project in which I need to fill an area in a drawing in a proposal for a client. So my options are:
a) Spend $200 (about an hours worth of billable time, or 2 hours during dry spells) on MS Office.
b) Spend 2 x 4 x 10 = 80 hours (which is no where near enough, but let's go with your number) on this feature, then spend again that on finding and convincing the right people to include my patch, on a half-assed implementation which does just enough what I need, and tell my client 'yeah get back to me in 2 months when I have patched my word processor to deliver the functionality I need'.
Choices choices, which one should I choose?
Just that time alone on a single tiny feature would pay for a lifetime worth of MS Office software!
For the smooth scrolling, you need to enable it under:
Tools->Options->Writer->View
Unfortunately, it is disabled by default.
I love the idea of Free software, use LO at home, and pushed for it at work. After a pilot LO rollout, we ended up going with MSO 2010 because of LO's poor interoperability with our old Word docs.
2. Ah, I think you're right about the missing font, I didn't realize that. I'll get back to you if I find another example, there are a million things I've noticed over time that don't render correctly other than fonts. (EDIT: See my other comment.)
3. Actually, I do have smooth scrolling "enabled", but it doesn't have any effect whatsoever (as of version 4.0.0.3).
http://www40.zippyshare.com/v/24126556/file.html
Try opening it in MS Word and compare it with LibreOffice and you'll see why I ran away screaming:
http://i.imgur.com/4tSWXsn.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/3tBLuff.png
That's a .doc file, an un-/poorly-documented format. As noted in the article, it's not simple at all. It is a good argument in favor of Libre and OpenOffice, though: other word processors will be able to open your documents if you decide to switch from them. Just that alone is a big win for anyone thinking long term.
All of your other criticisms other than the speed stuff boil down to "I'm used to MS Word". Which is fine.
I find Word's attempt to highlight word at a time to be extremely frustrating and distracting. Very often in my documents it simply will not properly recognize the boundaries of what I want to select, and small increments of the mouse produce jumps in the selection that were not intended. I think OO's behavior is a lot better in this respect.
Use the keyboard if you want to highlight character-by-character.
Word is simply optimizing for the most-common case: copying-and-pasting whole words, sentences, or paragraphs. It's a lot faster when you don't have to hit the exact character boundary of the word -- especially if you're using a touchpad instead of a mouse.
Except this is the common case, so it makes sense to have it on by default.
If you need/want to insert various objects in various documents (eg: graphs from spreadsheets in documents that dynamically update when the data source update) -- not so much. I could argue that you'd be better off using literate R/LyX -- but unfortunately there's a bit of an UX gap).
I much prefer LibreOffice to MS Office -- but mostly because I don't feel quite as a afraid that my documents are going to go randomly get corrupted at the worst possible moment without any reasonable hope of recovery (documented formats ftw!).
Much was due to the ribbon interface, which I liked, which LO doesn't have. My mind reverted to menus via Office 2000 which I cut my teeth on as a new graduate years back.
There are some things I still find odd / bewildering:
Right clicking on a block of text I have the options of both 'Text' and 'Character' which have different options. Neither of the contained options contain vertical alignment choices. Tables just feel a pain, zooming in and out as different cells / borders are clicked. Blah blah blah other small things. For my sins, I like VBA (familiar with, rather than romance).
Familiar is the key. It took a small learning curve, and I'm as productive in it as a modern version of MS Office. Much of the learning curve is having been so familiar with MS Office, sometimes things are just done differently, mainly at the UX Level. Integration for a personal and work based workflow is where Linux leaves Windows in the standing-gates was the game changer for me, and why I put myself through the learning curve.
I do feel LO's UI simply doesn't look beautiful, indeed, I feel it looks ugly. Everything is gray, some icons have shadow, some not. I have the feeling a few hundreds of hours on grouping icons, highlighting contrast in dialogue boxes, would make it a lot less 'tired' looking. Mozilla did it, I am sure LO will, and that may be a small but important tipping point.
Hi, I'm one such person. Reason: the ribbon. In the rest, yes, Word is better. But I like standard menubar interfaces and hate the programs that don't let me use them.
Office/Word is what they learn in school (lock-in strategy) and Office/Word is what corporate apathy and only "knowing" MS software leads to in the workplace. You work somewhere, you use Office. Period.