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Comment by jonathaneunice | Hacker News Reader

Rocks? Enh... It's very good. It does a lot of things very well. For example, it has an amazingly strong underlying file format (ODF) which enables excellent integration into complex processes; its import/exports are improving all the time; and its drawing engine is increasingly smart about SVG. I like it and admire it. But the team is also trying to fix/improve/move forward what started as a massive code base with beaucoup legacy issues. As either the comments below or a few minutes' hands-on use demonstrate, numerous "fit and finish" issues remain. If recent incremental releases move it from "unusable" to "usable" for some folks, great! But there hasn't been a recent massive upgrade; just steady progress.

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Slow and steady wins the race. I would much rather see steady progress than a massive upgrade in just about any FOSS project. I take it as a sign of direction and dependability. It seems like any time a project undergoes an overhaul of sorts, it leads to forks and a fractured community (especially so in recent years).

Microsoft Office isn't exactly perfection. It's main selling point is the file format (OOXML) - which Microsoft managed to get standardized (read manipulated ISO by buying members) despite it's obvious tie-in to proprietary code in various versions of Office.

What are you talking about? The file format is most certainly not the "main selling point" of Office.

Yes it is because people expect their office suite to handle MS formats flawlessly as a basic requirement, and the best at that is naturally MS Office. Nobody cares how or if Word handles ODT files, but if another word processor doesn't handle DOCX for exporting and importing without issues then it will be treated as unusable by lots of users, no matter how wonderful it is in other respects. In this space UI and features are (for me, sadly) secondary and support for a specific file format is king.

Well, OK, fair. In that respect even the Mac versions of Office have some problems. But even setting that aside Office has more features.

I would say that the main selling point of MSO is Excel - because it's the program the people who sign the cheques live in all day every day. So they buy themselves and everyone MSO, not anything else.

Completely agreed. There isn't a credible competitor to Excel, because Excel isn't in the spreadsheets business--spreadsheets are in the Excel business, and nobody else is good at being Excel. (This is distinct from the file format, because we're talking about bug-for-bug compatibility at runtime too.) Even Mac Office isn't sufficiently good at being Excel to be Excel.

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.

That's questionable. Is Google Apps a friend? 'Cos a lot of offices are shifting to that, even if its spreadsheet is pitiful. With Excel for the few that seriously need it.

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 ...

No, I use word because I still think the UX is leagues ahead of LibreOffice.

Even Microsoft uses their evil proprietary format as a selling point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAUJa7Ng2xg&hd=1

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