LibreOffice 4.4 review – Finally, it rocks
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Still a great project and lots of great features (the docx importer updates are awesome, because opening documents other people send me is a large proportion of what I need it for), but I really wish I could find an option to make it look like it used to...
Go to Preferences > LibreOffice > View, choose "Sifr" as your icon style. That's the look they should have shipped it with by default.
How closely does NeoOffice track LibreOffice (or is it a fork of original OpenOffice and not LibreOffice at all?). For instance, are new features in the latest LibreOffice (like better MS Word import) present in the latest NeoOffice, or will they be soon?
That I can't really tell from their web page leaves me not optimistic.
So it looks more Maclike but in every other way LO is better.
Last time I tried NeoOffice was several years ago, after I got sick of OpenOffice always doing the wrong thing when I tried to word-skip/line-home/whatever and turning my efficient reflexes into frustration. Turned out NeoOffice did exactly the same wrong things. So much for OS X integration.
Until that changes--I'll check back in a decade or two--LibreOffice and friends, no matter how legitimately good, will be also-rans in the corporate world.
I do concur that Calc is the main issue for LO. They've finally got it to a state where serious improvement work can start ...
Calc: Insert -> Object -> Chart (near the bottom)
Gnumeric: Insert -> Chart (near the top)
There are hundreds of little things like this that have made me a dedicated Gnumeric user. Calc apes excel badly, while gnumeric has forged its own distinct user interface. It's a little different, but the differences make sense and work well once you get the hang of them. An additional nice feature of gnumeric is that it's a tiny stand-alone download as compared to the slow pain of installing LibreOffice. Whether on linux or windows, you can have Gnumeric up and running in ten seconds. I seem to recall from my last flirtation with OSX that it was pretty annoying to get gnumeric running there, but it was still possible.
Unfortunately, gnumeric has been gradually degenerating into a memory-hole riddled piece of crapware under linux, and the developers responsible for this slide have recently stopped development on the windows executable as well. The fact that the windows binary was working better than the linux version when they gave up on it is all manners of stupid. I honestly don't know what they're doing, but gnumeric is getting pretty much unusable under linux. Maybe running an old version of the windows executable under Wine would work better. If so, that's just sad.
I love it, it is the best spreadsheet I know, especially if you plot time series.
But, I haven't installed it or needed a local word processor in years. I use Google Docs for everything, because I don't have to keep up with where stuff is. I just login and there it is, no matter what device I'm on (though I should redo my Google Drive and Gmail backup setup...I used to have it automated, but haven't done a backup in years now; the cloud makes me lazy and too trusting).
Try pasting in the following:
€85.00
€56.00
€52.00
€44.00
'€85.00
'€56.00
'€52.00
'€44.00
(1) Select some _empty_ cells you wish to make euro currency
(2) Right click -> Format Cells
(3) Category should be "Currency"
(4) Format should be "EUR € English (Ireland)"
(5) Save and then enter numbers into the cells (the euro symbol should be appended)
It seems to work with things like sum() and you still get the euro symbol and them being the correct "currency" cell type.
Here's the "Format Code" which you can just paste into the Format Code box to save yourself time with the above procedure:
[$€-1809]#,##0.00;[RED]-[$€-1809]#,##0.00
Pasting remains completely broken. They need to fix that.
It's not. See: http://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-370303.htm
1. Word, if a lawyer sends me a critical document in review mode it's always Word and I want to be sure that he and the other party gets all my additions. Moreover, Word is performant and fully featured. I haven't seen any word processor handling a 600 pages document with over 1,500 footnotes on an 5 years old Macbook Air 11 with such an ease. The Windows version is smoother and faster though. Google Docs for collaboration stuff and really small things since it still doesn't support proper chapter numbering and many other details.
2. For big complex stuff Excel and smaller easy stuff always Google Spreadsheet b/c of the collaboration and great integration in Google Mail. BTW, the online version of Excel (Office 365) is quite nice too and very smooth and has collaboration too.
3. Presentations, clearly Keynote which is not much better than Powerpoint but the UI is more intuitive and everything looks crisper, then Powerpoint but the Windows version. Google Slides is living crap, yes you can do stuff and collaboration is great but it lacks so many features and feels often very cumbersome and tedious to work with.
I tried a few times Libre Office/Open Office but the problem is: if you do serious office stuff like important presentations for board, legal documents or the next lawsuit, larger bizcases for new investors—stuff HAS to work and there are too many smaller quirks with all Libre Office apps, if you just play around a bit, yes it is very impressive 'hey an full Office for free!' but the 'free' comes with a price and to get things done under time pressure or your life is in danger this software monolith is so the wrong thing and you instantly switch back to mentioned products. And frankly, always when I use office stuff it's about serious matters, I do not open Word for fun.
[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=58521
I don’t know what style requirement the DOJ had, but I do know that when the marketing team put a footnote on one page, and LibreOffice moved it on a separate page, they considered it a serious bug. If Word renders a .doc file a certain way, LibreOffice should also render it that way regardless of what the DOJ specifies.
WP was a great product. I miss those days of being able to fix most anything with reveal codes.
I was swiftly kicked off my laptop while she recreated her entire presentation in PowerPoint.
Doesn't instantly switching to Word/Excel require you to have it installed in the first place? In your case, you already have it bought and installed so it's easy, but that's not always the case.
True and it heavily depends on your profession. My office stack matches my profession, i.e. a designer rather cares about Adobe CS than MS Office and is happy with Google Docs. So, it depends really on what you do.
I had to go buy Office for Mac that day.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ufv7RZ3...
Google implementation of an office suite is very popular at middle, high school, and online universities (even though most of them offer the free Office365).
So, speaking for myself, I wouldn't trust these online office suites with my data or time. They also tend to lag more on lower-end hardware (I frequently use a netbook for notes, etc).
I had not had any problem, but that is not to say it is problem free.
For text documents though I agree with you.
I'm not a power user, but I'd say Google Sheets are good enough for almost all of us. Google Write, not so much.
The only real deal-breaker level annoyance I've found with any of the Drive apps so far is that whatever Javascript the writer one is using eats up enough CPU power to drop my Macbook's battery life to about a quarter of what it normally is.
As a handy collaborative text editor with some basic formatting, it's fine. For longer documents, technical documents, anything that needs professional levels of review and revision control, or basically any other "serious" work, it's not even entry-level.
Likewise if you want to share some tables with light formatting and maybe some simple calculations, the on-line spreadsheets are fine. However, anyone who does significant number crunching using a real spreadsheet isn't going to last five minutes.
In short, if you find the real-time collaboration useful and need only very simple formatting and manipulation, these on-line suites are fine (and of course this probably does cover a fair amount of useful work). If you need anything more sophisticated, they aren't really competing with the heavyweight desktop applications at all.
But then again, I'm the sort of user who runs LO on Linux compiled from git master just because I can ;-)
Btw, are there some features that you feel that you're missing?
Because the license cost savings are so small compared to the payroll costs of the people using the software that even a small hit in efficiency from existing staff (and new staff as rotation occurs) being less familiar will outweigh it quite easily.
Heck, its also why lots of firms give a pass to major version upgrades even when their license would allow the major version to be rolled out at no additional license cost until the version they are on is old enough that it is causing a drag because any new staff are having trouble converting back to the old version.
Although I definitely agree that Word and friends are good products.
One of the biggest reasons the company I was working with at the time made the switch was sheet size, we came up against the 65536 rows limit at least once. Formula calculation speed was another big one. In many ways the ribbon does feel like a step forward, perhaps the only thing 2003 still does better is keyboard shortcuts, but luckily you can still use Excel 2003 keyboard shortcuts in newer versions if you can remember them (Alt,d,f,f and Alt,d,f,s are probably the ones I use most frequently).
At which point you have a database and would be better served with a different product designed to work with large data sets or moving data to external ODBC sources that Excel can query.
Licensing costs are only a small fraction overall cost:
* Training and lost productivity as users learn the new software. It may seem simple to you, but many end users are easily confused by interface changes. Also, there is a serious learning curve for users doing complex tasks (e.g., complex spreadsheets; long, complex documents, etc.)
* IT labor costs: Configuration, deployment, administration and support; doing it on 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 desktops, local, remote, and at home, is expensive and challenging. Is LibreOffice fully integrated with Active Directory? With whatever deployment and patch mechanisms you use (think about that, how do you patch 10,000 desktops? Consider that an error could effectively shut down your entire company)? How available are support, labor and tools? How available are IT professionals with expertise in these areas (i.e., who will you hire? What happens to your existing staff)? Users tend to think of these things as peripheral, but they are the largest items on the IT budget. Microsoft Office passes meets all these needs with flying colors.
* Integration with other systems: Every other application and system is designed and supported for integration with and Microsoft Office. Every vendor has staff experienced in this integration.
* Data integrity: What happens when the total in the Excel spreadsheet is wrong because the formula didn't convert properly? Employees would have to check for formatting and other errors in every important file where data integrity matters. Consider that, because most people in business use Microsoft Office, many documents will be converted back and forth frequently. That means employees have to deal with these issues repeatedly, verifying conversion will be accurate before sending the presentation to the client; verifying the spreadsheets' values and formulas, in case someone on the other end decides to change some numbers; fixing these problems ... and explaining constantly to everyone outside the organization why you have these continual problems.
Much as I support FOSS, LibreOffice isn't a consideration for many businesses.
But most of it boils down to MS Office was there first (and made by the same company as the OS).
Each of your bullet points assumes a migration from Office to LO, and that there isn't already an infrastructure that supports it.
hackuser's points about the cost of labor and the enormous potential cost of mistakes are very well made. If you are paying knowledge workers $50,000 to $150,000 a year, then saving pennies on the cost of Office is not a smart move. When mistakes can cost your company a lot more than that, even more so....
But they weren't made by the same company as the OS was.
And I do agree that moving away from MS Office would be very foolish, if money saving is the reason behind it.
I don't think I'd ever give anyone an odt document; the rare doc I produce with LO is exported to PDF before sending, not the least because virtually no one has LO or even knows what it is. And if I export to some Word format, who the hell knows what version of Word is on the other end? It's just not worth it.
If someone insists on a Word doc, I'll write a plain text document, give it a .doc suffix, and when the other end double clicks on it, it will open in Word.
It is, but from experience, people will find a way to complain.
Should be, but when it comes down to it, it just isn't Microsoft Office. Kind of like GIMP isn't Photoshop.
> Btw, are there some features that you feel that you're missing?
As a Mac user - full integration into the desktop experience. We get the same from Microsoft Office, but, of course, it's Microsoft Office and we're used to it there.
Look, I'm not going to claim that it makes sense. However, if you're going to beat Microsoft Office, you have to be far, far better than it. No almost-there, not equal, but demonstrably better.
And not on moral grounds, either. Most users aren't going to give a damn about moral grounds.
Also bear in mind that Office is a moving target. Office 2016 is due out this year... http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/22/microsoft-announces-office...
They also just look uglier. I have not looked at this new LO version yet.
Though this is becoming less and less of an issue, I still keep Office 2007 in a virtual machine just to turn them at least into PDFs.
Would switching to Libre Office actually save me money or would it cost me money?
People using MS Office are knowledge workers. They make money from their knowledge and their ability to manipulate knowledge tools such as MS Office.
Without volume licensing, MS Office is $99 a year for each worker (and many companies pay a bit less than that). Let's say the average worker at your firm makes $50,000. If you have a full benefits package, that adds tens of thousands to their cost. Add in computers, office space, etc. and that worker could cost you upwards of $100,000 a year.
Now look at that $99 a year cost for that one employee. Sure saving $99 would be nice, but what if switching made that employee 5 percent less productive? What if that employee has to interface with outside clients who use other programs and this causes issues with interoperability?
For me, as a manager, $99 a year is nothing if it makes my employees more productive. On the other hand, saving $99 for something that makes my employees less productive costs me a ton of money.
Nickel and diming knowledge workers is not a good way to make them productive or to keep them happy. This is why I don't care what programs employees like to use or even what OS they use. I want them as productive and happy as possible.
At a previous job I was forced to use Windows, even though I've been an OS X users since 10.1. The reasoning was that a Windows machine was cheaper to purchase and maintain for the IT department. Let's say the difference was something like $250-500 over the course of that machine's life (which could be four years or so). Is the IT staff saving a few hundred bucks really worth a significant drop in productivity for an employee?
Because my old job put computer and software purchases under IT, instead of my department, the IT department got to make their budget smaller by making my department less productive. Had the budget rested with my manager, of course I would have gotten the machine I wanted because a few hundred dollars for a big productivity boost is a no brainer for him.
I know how to use Windows well and can get work done on it, but I am more productive with the OS of my choice (and the applications that go along with it). With knowledge work, five percent productivity gain here, five percent productivity gain there and you're talking about a lot of money.
Open Office: https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959
Libre Office: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38262
I have a half-hearted look for it every time I fire up a new version of Open/Libre office but I've stopped bothering to check for it actively.
Seems baffling to me that this wouldn't be a higher priority issue as this seems to be the commonest mode of use of Word for creating new documents - where the absolute commonest mode is using an existing document as a template and forgetting to change headers, metadata, and random boilerplate text throughout :)
Most people don't use Access.
Joe Marketing ain't going to jump through UI hoops and do complex bug work-arounds, when he can avoid this entirely by buying a MS office license for 200 USD or whatever the price is.
A couple of the senior people write queries and import routines, and the clerks/etc use them in their workflow. Works great.
Also, Calc has Python (and other language scripting) which puts it above Excel in my book. For built in functions yes Excel is better. As soon as you start venturing outside of Spreadsheets and into data analysis (where Macro's come into play) stop using Excel. Move to Matlab or Pandas. Excel Macro's should not be used as a selling point, they are rarely, if ever, the right tool for the job. At least with Calc you can take the business logic from your Macro's and move them into a real script. VBA isn't C# nor VB.Net compatable.
I see Excel users in 2 camps:
Those that don't know what functions are, and if the do, tread carefully with '=if(...,...)' and get intrigued. Though those that get intrigued are in a minority.
Those that know what functions are have Excel act as a full-fledged IDE, which it does pretty well. This second camp either write libraries to call from Excel, or have someone write them in C++ if the libraries are that important.
Excel is exceedingly good for hacking, or I should say, playing. It is not a spreadsheet, it is an extension of skin from keyboard to screen for visualizing data, from brain to 2D hackable multi-dimensional grid, that is as easy as playdough.
Vendors include SAS, Oracle, IBM, Predixion.
Also Excel is used as a self-service BI tool. It has ETL, OLAP and dynamic dashobarding.
Excel (and other spreadsheet packages like Calc) are good for non technical users it's useful for rapidly prototyping stuff but it is absolutely a pain for automation and any type of statistical heavy lifting. Once a spreadsheet reaches a certain level of complexity it becomes a pain to support and maintain much better to have a real database driving things.
I've heard a lot about R which is kind of an open-source version of SAS (at least the statistical parts) not sure what its automation and reporting support is like my limited understanding is it doesn't have the BI parts.
If Excel had a real scripting language as it's Macro language the problem wouldn't be nearly so bad. All that business code could just be copy/pasted, have some unit tests implemented then refactored so that the accountants code is now updated by the developer. As it is now the code has to completely rewritten in a new language.
As for the language choice, VB.Net or C# would be fine. I'm not saying it has to be Python. My complaint is that the code is non-transferrable. The apps cannot grow past Excel, and the email the most recent version to the next guy game gets you into versioning hell rather quickly.
He wants his pivot tables, KPIs and Solver and some macros. He wants point-and-click ETL. If it's a department/cross-department model, do it in SQL Server, or whatever else you use. You can use your IT kung-fu there. This is about what libre office lacks. Excel has power and flexibility and remains easy to use for non-programmers.
My issues with Excel come from the perspective of modifying these ad-hoc apps (many business run off these for a long time as they grow). Yes, there are other great features, but for me, for growth, Calc is taking a better approach.
There are some niche industries, like finance, where there are legacy spreadsheets (where, scarily, much of the business is run. Wall Street runs on Excel spreadsheets) that don't run, and with users who have a very unique knowledge and can't easily accommodate the change, but that is a small minority.
For new and growing companies that just need this sort of functionality, these apps are fantastic.
It is technically feasible for me to sit in a random coffee shop and do a drive-by infection of .exe files downloaded via HTTP by arbitrary other people on the same WLAN. The same is not true for HTTPS, because I am not able to forge arbitrary SSL certificates.
Yes, there are problems with SSL, but to claim that "it doesn't do any good" seems wrong.
However, validating the signature properly involves you being certain of using the correct public key. This is the tricky part. Being in the PGP strong set helps with this. Using HTTPS gives you some confidence, but no protection against server compromise.
Once you do have the correct public key, however, you can be protected against server compromise for all future releases, too.
Or, at the least, you can verify that future releases are coming unmodified from the same origin.
[1] https://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.h...
[2] http://blog.codinghorror.com/should-all-web-traffic-be-encry...
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I could easily live without MS Office. Heck, I use Wordpad to compose text. I use relatively few fancy features of PowerPoint, and could easily live without it. But Excel remains a killer app for me, even as I've mastered data manipulation and graphing in Python.
Personally, I love it too because it's quick (local and native) and and versatile (can work for both dashboarding and quick data analysis)[1]. I do think it falls short in some areas where it might step into the realm of doing database-y things (like how vlookup only returns the first match, so you have to build your own macro to do "vlookups").
[1] Excel on Windows to be specific, on Mac it sucks.
In my view, a spreadsheet is a programming environment, that combines user interface and report design (row and column headings, etc.) with data flow programming. It's easy to create a spreadsheet that I can share with others, and that they can modify on their own without coming back to me.
Edit: It's the only "visual" programming environment that I can stand.
1) I opened a few simple CSV files (20 rows tops), and for some (about half) wouldn't let me select the cells I wanted. E.g. I clicked on the left number row on 1,2,3 and instead of selecting the whole of 1,2,3 row it selected a few random columns within those 3 rows. No amount of fiddling would fix it. I had to scroll to the end of my columns and select the whole thing with the mouse.
2) On another new file I created (inside Calc) it behaved as if my mouse was pointing 5-6 cells above from where the pointer was actually drawn.
3) I created a file with about 50 rows, and made some of them bold (Cmd-B). They looked bold alright. I then saved the file in the Excel XML format, and opened the same document in Excel, and the bold formatting wasn't there...
By the way, why is their main site down? I can't open https://www.libreoffice.org
Except if you don't need all of that, in which case you could do the same work with 10 other small scale word processors even in 2000.
The best non MSOffice Outlook equivalent that I've found is Outlook web access IF you need Exchange connectivity.
Have you checked? AOO has basically had not a lot of work on the actual code since OOo days (and now has around 0 non-volunteer contributors, and no contributions on the .doc converter in the last several months).