Why I ditched Microsoft Word for LibreOffice and couldn't be happier
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Us: That's really strange. We were using a different word processor, but you're still seeing the same problems even after we went back to Word.
Them: Um, what word processor would that be?
Us: You probably haven't heard of it, but OpenOffice.
Them: Us too! Can we just send you ODT files directly?
The workflow on both ends had been to work natively in Writer, then export to .doc for passing files around. All problems immediately went away once we dropped the middle step.
So you haven't ditched it at all.
That said, LibreOffice is still too buggy for a 10-year-old product. The article says "Writer has a couple of instabilities under Windows, such as locking up if a new document isn't saved within a few minutes." That's pathetic.
LibreOffice .doc import/export almost works now. You can usually import a Microsoft Word document, although the margins are often wrong.
Do you have recommendations for a word processor which
- Focuses on writing text documents, doesn't attempt to do everything
- Is visual, because sometimes it's painful to go through cycle of compilation with LaTeX
- Has a minimalistic UI that focuses on semantics; which lets you mark things as sections, titles, emphasis, etc. Fonts, colors, are handled separately within a template editor
- Ideally, allows for real-time collaborative editing
That's obviously not an option for everything, but I've used it for everything from internal documentation to slides to blog posts.
I've found that successful use of LaTeX requires you to avoid compiling on a regular basis. When I write something in LaTeX, I chunk the time I spend on formatting/compiling, so that it doesn't interfere with writing. I also find it helpful to construct multi-file templates that enable modularity and reuse.
The only time I really use a GUI is for formatting equations, since being able to see the change right away is very helpful.
It will auto compile your changes, as well as hide the messy intermediate files in the compilation from your directory which I appreciate.
Has anyone heard of professional use of LaTeX outside of the scientific fields?
I've seen a lot of good examples of the power of LaTeX but all seems ot have been made by scientists. And I tried to convince my girlfriend who is in the edition/layout field (not sure of the correct name). she already knew LaTeX (at my surprise) and she thought the examples were unimpressives. She doesn't anybody in her field using it professionally.
So I was wondering if her experience was specific or it was really unused outsite science. Any feedback on this one?
Using LaTeX effectively requires the same ways of thinking needed in order to write code. For people who aren't used to doing this, adjusting from Word to LaTeX is not going to be easy.
In the professional publishing fields, editors have overcome the shortcomings of Word in a completely different way - using advanced GUI tools that have hundreds of options and settings that you have to learn, but that let you have instant feedback on your decisions. Admittedly, programs such as InDesign can actually make prettier documents than LaTeX, but the comparative amount of effort you need to invest makes it rather a bad tradeoff for someone who already knows LaTeX.
LaTeX is good at making consistently beautiful documents fast, while professional publishing tools let you invest lots of effort into getting something even more beautiful, or downright ugly. For the scientist, LaTeX wins easily, but for someone whose primary job is to make things as pretty as they can be, it is not so.
The biggest caveat I've seen to its use are ballooning file sizes (meh), and (more importantly) leaking information. But I also thought recent versions of Word made it more prominent to discard tracking information when doing a Save/As.
"what you see is what you mean" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM
My only complaint is the lack of recent builds of Abiword/Gnumeric.
Abiword is on 3.0.0. in mingw64 in OBS. Gnumeric is even older.
These problems have to be fixed. Does anyone know where I can find recent builds for windows 7? x86/x64 makes no difference to me.
The main problems I see with this would be automating the Linux VM startup, and configuring the local icons (they would have to launch a script that ssh's into the Linux VM after checking if a local X server and the Linux VM is running, forwarding X connections).
Trying to convince people to use something because »I consider it better« rarely works out, I guess.
0_0 You need some new colleagues, then. LaTeX is the de-facto standard for scientific and mathematical literature.
As for Excel, as tumultuous a relationship as I have had with that software over my working career, I never really appreciated its features and stability until I tried to use the alternatives. That said, I haven't tried 4.4 but look forward to giving it another shot.
That's awesome. I wish I could. I'm a technical writing consultant who does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (www.seliger.com if you're curious), and everything we get from clients and public agencies is a Word or Excel file. Everything we send out has to be in the same formats.
We're in a situation similar to the graphic designers and photographers and so on who say that everything they take in and send out has to be Photoshop / InDesign / etc. compatible. The industry has standardized around these programs and formats and perfect compatibility is mandatory.
LibreOffice is great. I've mentioned it in class (I adjunct on the side), but I can't use it.
I do think that there is a window opened for a competitor to disrupt this monopoly.
Meanwhile LibreOffice is fighting the last war, with a thick desktop client using some custom cross-platform GUI toolkit that looks native on exactly nothing, no web app version and no real effort on mobile[1]. And it's fighting the last war badly at that -- not even people who write articles about switching to LibreOffice can actually switch to LibreOffice because they keep Word around for compatibility with everyone else in the world. Calc versus Excel is in even worse shape than Writer versus Word.
1) There IS an Android version of OpenOffice:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.collabora....
It's read-only and the UI is... subpar, however.
[1] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58521
If you don't want to learn a new programming language to create documents then something wysiwyg is better.
I don't even want to think about the amount of time I spent trying to select some text I want to edit, buried under other transparent layers or empty, invisible boxes. It would make it also very easy to introduce dynamic references in the text of a textbox in powerpoint (something currently impossible!).
It wouldn't hurt the basic experience for normal users and would make PowerPoint infinitely more powerful for advanced users.
Word is less visual but this side by side approach would also be very useful. Particularly since a lot of the visual formatting is "invisible" in a WYSIWYG editor.
If you can reproduce this with a given document on a different PC, you have a reportable bug.
Is there a list of these features anywhere? And are the competitors to MS Office working on them? Or are they focussed on different things? EG a spreadsheet that focuses on correctness and auditing could probably be useful.
If something like that is key to an organization's workflow, competitors will probably be locked out even if they do add support, because it's like using "non-genuine parts". It will probably work 99% of the time, but it's probably less reliable than the general part, and hard to get support for the cases where it does cause problems. Reliability & consistency is often more important than cheaper upfront cost.
(I say this as a long time NeoOffice fan & paid supporter of the project.)
For example if I put 1, 2, 4, 8 and I highlight that and drag it to continue the series I get different results.
Excel gets it right and provides 16, 32, 64, etc
LibreOffice provides 2, 3, 5, 9, etc
OpenOffice doesn't do any better.
I haven't tried gnumeric in the last 10 years so I can't remember what it does but I'm not optimistic.
There are a lot of these kinds of things where Excel really has polish and the others don't and probably never will because the code to make it work right is excruciatingly boring to write.
What it'll take for LO Calc to compete with MSO is someone wanting to knock Excel off its perch and spend money on the drudge work. LO finally has decent data structures in Calc and the GPU calculation, now there's all the drudge to do to literally beat the best spreadsheet available. If you got the sort of serious spreadsheet that takes Excel 24 hours to run, and Calc ran it in 20 hours, people would pay any amount of money for such a thing.
(I think Excel is the hook, because it's the one bit of MSO that the people who sign the cheques use personally. Maybe Powerpoint too.)
As a word processor, Writer is every bit as good as MS Word, though of course slightly different. DOCX compatibility is improving noticeably every release; I haven't had any problems myself in several years.
Compatibility quirks are important to someone when they bite them, but look at Google Docs - it's hugely popular (basically for non-sucky email) even though its word processor and spreadsheet are terrible. We use GApps in the day job and I keep LO to hand for when I need something not terrible. Or that offers non-terrible DOCX rendering.
So I think what LO needs is something killer. Not sure what though.
How so? They seem extremely productive and reliable for the org I volunteer at as treasurer.
I've never seen a financial report with an incorrect addition, or hear anyone complain about the word processor.
My kids use google apps at school for things like writing essays and homework submission. Again, "just works".
What I really want is LO to read/write to Google Drive transparently, but that's still an experimental feature (though it works well in TDF builds, but only for password authentication, not for two-factor). Again, it awaits someone spending money on it.
For work we MS Office or LO for MS docs from elsewhere. LO is much better at correctly reading in MS-generated docs than Google Docs, and of course MS Office for people who spend most of their time dealing with documents from outside (not me, thankfully).
We use Google Docs for all of our internally-generated stuff, though -- the concurrent editing in particular is quite useful. We sometimes collaborate on docs, and each person can add their section at the same time. You can review someone else's work on a spreadsheet while they're doing it.
I recently went through an important (and politically complex) meeting where the CEO and I shared a Google doc for taking notes. It was awfully convenient; I could provide him constant feedback on technical issues but let him decide what to actually say, and how to say it.
I'm less happy with how Google Drive is integrated with Google Docs (not well), and I'd like to see concurrent editing in Sites, but maybe someday...
gnumeric does simply replicate the series, you get 1, 2, 4, 8, 1, 2, 4, 8, 1, etc. It does offer a tool to fill series though.
http://oeis.org/search?q=1%2C2%2C4%2C8&sort=&language=&go=Se...
They're probably not unreasonable fall-back strategies if something isn't strictly linear, but just because I understand why the programmer might have done that doesn't mean it makes sense in general.
No—it boils down to network effects and coordination. As I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9069761 , in my business we use MS Office, our clients do, and funding agencies do. There is no easy or simple way to move everyone from MS Office to an alternative simultaneously. So it doesn't happen.
People who never or very rarely need to do document interchange may be okay with Google Docs or LibreOffice, but people who interchange complex documents on a regular basis must use MS Office.