11 ms·

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

178 points by mksaunders 9y ago

themodelplumber 9y ago
I love seeing plain-text-related features appear every once in a while. Stuff like this[0] makes it much easier to use LO with my home-grown notetaking system which is kept in plain text. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNWOWJul4w&t=1m9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNWOWJul4w&t=1m9s
vedranm 9y ago
>Thanks to the efforts of developers, the XML description of a new document written by LibreOffice is 50% smaller in the case of ODF (ODT), and around 90% smaller in the case of OOXML (DOCX), in comparison with the same document generated by the leading proprietary office suite. Given Microsoft's record in implemeting OpenDocument, this shouldn't be too hard to do.
- phonon 9y ago
  I think they're saying they do .docx better (or at least smaller) than MS Word does .docx
  - italovignoli 9y ago
    DOCX files created by LibreOffice are not only smaller but simpler in term of XML structure, and easier to interoperate. A two-page file created from scratch is 1100 XML lines if written by LibreOffice and 11500 XML lines if written by Microsoft Office. The 10400 redundant XML lines are there to make it difficult to properly read the file. Also, they may contain non-standard elements which have been deprecated before the approval of the standard itself but are still there after 12 years.
    - tialaramex 9y ago
      I'm not sure that "to make it difficult" is true. MS Office is very old, from their point of view compatibility will always have to mean it works as much as possible like the previous version. So suppose you have a three-way condition clause in some code, each paragraph has either "Straight", "Fast" or "Thom Hopkins" formatting. Hmm. During XML standard writing you ask engineers to explain these options so you can write them up for the standard. "Straight" and "Fast" turn out to each have six paragraph definitions. Great! Write those in the XML standard. The guy you asked to work out "Thom Hopkins" has gone on sick leave due to a mental breakdown, he has left a forty page document, which includes excerpts from several multi-page C++ classes, one of which seems to be a partial implementation of a bin packing solver and another involves regular expressions. You find the supervisor of the guy who last worked on the original "Thom Hopkins" code. He explains it was developed over 15 years by a large team and was originally a core part of the document engine before the invention of the faster "Straight" paragraph mode sidelined it. Now, you _could_ add all this crap to an appendix of the proposed XML document standard, and watch a committee vomit when they try to read it OR you could say "Thom Hopkins" is a special mode and shouldn't be used in standards compliant documents, even though it's actually used in millions of templates for your own popular office suite. And then people will say you did it just to spite them...
      - chuckdries 9y ago
        I mostly agree with you, I subscribe to "don't attribute malice where you could attribute incompetence or unforseen factors" but I keep wondering in the back of my head why they would keep all this cruft in the docx format. They hard forked their document format in 2007 and caused a LOT of headache back then, why not take the opportunity to streamline all this stuff, you know? Why not remove "Thom Hopkins" in the case of your story?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Freak_NL 9y ago
I'm looking forward to giving LibreOffice Online a test drive. Perhaps it can replace Google Docs for us with a nice self-hosted solution. Are there any public demo instances available?
- phonon 9y ago
  https://demo.nextcloud.com/#short-term https://demo.nextcloud.com/#short-term
  - Freak_NL 9y ago
    Still looks more than a little rough around the edges. It doesn't like the styles can be edited at this stage?
  - frik 9y ago
    Great. It works fine even on a tablet with touch. Sure, GoogleDocs is still better, but the power of the underlying LibreOffice will a lot more, and it's on-pare with iCloud and better than MS Word WebApp
0x0 9y ago
I'm getting the macOS gatekeeper alert about "unidentified developer". Obviously this can be bypassed by right-clicking and choosing open, but don't the libreoffice developers code-sign LibreOffice.app (anymore) ?
- amake 9y ago
  I was confused by this, too. I could have sworn they were signing previous releases, but I'm not sure. I did check the SHA-1 of my download, and it was correct.
  - 0x0 9y ago
    Yep, the SHA-1 matched the one listed on the website for me too.
  - cowsandmilk 9y ago
    previous one was definitely code signed. I installed the previous one yesterday and it was signed. So, surprised when today's wasn't.
- eklavya 9y ago
  I just use the libreoffice in App Store. It's older but for my needs it suffices.
bbayles 9y ago
Love LibreOffice - I've used it and OpenOffice for over 15 years. I've been heartbroken by recent releases, however - the keyboard shortcuts in Calc (and other components) have changed. This is like breaking my fingers - I'm so much slower now. It's not just that there's a difference - I can adapt to that. It's that they've re-labeled menu entries with duplicate index keys. You can't do some things quickly now (e.g. optimize column widths with Alt-O-M-O, which worked for years). There's a reason why MS Excel has keyboard shortcuts that make no sense - they match to menu entries from old versions, and they've kept them in so people who have been using it for decades don't have a reason to switch. Please, LibreOffice developers, make your menu shortcuts sensible again!
- EvanAnderson 9y ago
  It's nice to hear that somebody else feels this way, too. I'm running an older LibreOffice release simply because I won't put up with the hit on my productivity in Calc. I'm not going to waste my effort learning new keyboard shortcuts, particularly when they're key shortcuts that also work in Excel and have kept working there from Excel 2003 - 2016. An idealistic part of me would love to spend the time to figure out how to stand up a build environment for LibreOffice to fix this myself, but I've got a lot better stuff to do.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Why not use the in application customization to set the shortcuts? Obviously in general not wanting to bother is a perfectly valid reason, I'm asking in comparison to setting up a build environment.
    - jefurii 9y ago
      They could offer keyboard shortcut sets/bundles/profiles/themes that you could switch and revert all at once.
      - mercer 9y ago
        That strikes me as so obvious that I don't understand why this is the case. Could anyone with more knowledge on the matter elaborate?
phkahler 9y ago
How is the native Wayland support these days?
- jhasse 9y ago
  5.3 already runs perfectly for me on Wayland (native, not through Xwayland). So I guess 5.4 will be the same :)
  - phkahler 9y ago
    That pleases me. Now if Firefox could catch up....
cwyers 9y ago
> Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, LibreOffce developers have focused on fle simplicity as the ultimate document interoperability sophistication. This makes ODF and OOXML fles written by the free offce suite more robust and easier to exchange with other users than the same documents generated by other offce suites. So, two notes here: 1) Microsoft Office and Google Docs at least have figured out how to make their web versions so that when I copy-and-paste from them, any i following an f doesn't disappear because of whatever they're doing to kern letters. 2) "Shorter XML output" is about 978th on the list of things that LibreOffice needs to do to improve interoperability, and the fact that it's a focus is deeply weird.
- italovignoli 9y ago
  You are probably not aware of the issues related to Microsoft Office files, which are intentionally bloated with useless XML contents to make interoperability almost impossible. A cleaner XML improves interoperability, even if you do not think it helps. The reality is that until people will consider Microsoft Office files as a reference, anything else will fail WRT interoperability because those files are developed to kill interoperability.
  - cwyers 9y ago
    > which are intentionally bloated with useless XML contents to make interoperability almost impossible. That's just a conspiracy theory. The reason they're "bloated" is because Microsoft Office is optimizing for interoperability with its largest competitor: older versions of Microsoft Office. Maybe Microsoft Office having "cleaner" XML would improve interoperability. But as long as Office is the standard, the ability to consume messy XML is worth more than the ability to emit clean XML.
    - rvern 9y ago
      You are mistaken. The tricks they used to get OOXML standardized[1] leave no room for doubt that they have been intentionally making interoperability harder. [1]: Wikipedia has an article about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open....
FatAmericanDev 9y ago
Libreoffice is too slow with large documents.
- vram22 9y ago
  At what size (in MB) of document have you noticed that it gets too slow? asking because I am planning to use it for a writing project.
  - keithpeter 9y ago
    I do course guides and question sets to support teaching in LibreOffice Writer (at home) and OpenOffice (at work). In the 60 page range, with lots of formulas, diagrams (drawn with drawing tools) and some bitmap images (scans of hand drawn graphs). I also copy in charts and graphs and more complex drawings from Calc/Impress as needed. No complex 'section' schemes or restyling though just writing straight through. The size in Mb varies according to the number of scans - the drawings and diagrams themselves take little file space. A 100 page course guide comes in around 2Mb as an .odt with half a dozen scanned plots. Seems sprightly enough on a core-duo laptop with 2Gb ram and KDE at home and the usual 'office PC' at work.
    - vram22 9y ago
      Interesting. Thanks for the info. Don't know a lot about the sizes of word processing docs, but slightly surprised that a 100 page doc would come in at as little as 2 MB. I would have thought it should be more. Maybe it is due to ODT format being compressed text/XML, which I think I read somewhere - need to look up the format spec.
- dwheeler 9y ago
  Works for me. I have a 750-page .odt document which I just edited today with no speed problems.
blablabla123 9y ago
I like LibreOffice as well. I find the whole suite useful: Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw. No heavy office person but I I use Calc several times a week. It's funny that after so many years the tools still struggles getting traction even among Linux users. The built-in PDF was there years before MS Office which is why I wrote all my Resumes in the past with LibreOffice/OpenOffice. Google Docs might be more intuitive but it has less features than MS Works and I have little control over my privacy.
izzard 9y ago
Warning to Windows users. I've just performed a clean install of the latest version, and I'm experiencing this problem: https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/113122/menu-bar-vanished-cursor-registration-wrong/ https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/113122/menu-bar-vani... Looks like others are having this problem, too.
- izzard 9y ago
  Just found a solution, disabling OpenGL rendering. Not sure why this works, but it does: https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/112724/all-the-words-in-menu-bar-and-drop-down-lists-are-replaced-with-dots/ https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/112724/all-the-words...
SubiculumCode 9y ago
I use calc all the time, and it does just fine, but one thing I'd like to know how to fix is the poor performance when having a filter applied on a long column...it crawls...
- chtfn 9y ago
  Have you submitted a bug report or looked for an existing one? https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=LibreOffice;bug_status=UNCONFIRMED;version= https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Li...?
xixor2 9y ago
I try to get into LibreOffice, but I just can't: on windows the ui is quite laggy, and the fonts just look... strange. It's like both the kerning and AA are off.
ComputerGuru 9y ago
I remember using OpenOffice torrents back in 2004 as the equivalent of `:CheckHealth` to see if users had problems with their network configuration, throttling, connection speed, etc because of how perpetually well-seeded they were. I tried the torrent download just for kicks, and I was pleasantly surprised that was still the case: it downloaded at over 40MiB/s. (yes, MiB/s, not mbps). Here's a magnet link if anyone wants: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:40836b52d32f79dbb90f2453ab3ee6e6da825880&dn=LibreOffice_5.4.0_Win_x64.msi
ta33444 9y ago
I havent checked in a while, but have they given up on the pathetic attempt at an Access clone? It looked like someones weekend project accidentally got turned into a product.
cutler 9y ago
Forget features. Just make LO usable again. I had to revert to OpenOffice recently in the middle of pitching a client for a desktop db conversion from MS Access. On OS X Sierra LO has regressed.
heypete 9y ago
As much as I love LibreOffice -- and I prefer to use it whenever I can for several reasons -- the UI is just painfully awful. My university and one of the journals I publish in require Word (docx) files for papers and other documents, so I'm required to use Office. No alternatives are allowed, not even LaTeX or sending in PDFs: their whole internal editing and typesetting system is based around Word. Still, while I disliked the ribbon in 2007, I've found the Word UI to have improved significantly over the years, with 2016 being remarkably decent and producing quite presentable documents. I would not object to there being a similar UI them in Writer. I wanted to use Writer for several papers and my PhD thesis, but it has some difficulty importing my otherwise-not-very-complex Word 2016 files. While the text is imported more or less correctly, table widths and alignments get all screwy (which is a big deal), Word's internal cross-references (e.g. "See Figure X", where X is a number representing a specific figure and if that figure is re-ordered in the document, the number changes) get horribly broken, among other issues. Having Word export as ODT and opening that in Writer fixes some issues but creates more issues to the point where there's no real alternative for me than Word, at least for papers and other academic documents. It really bugs me, and I blame Word for the interoperability issues. Even so, I have no alternatives due to the requirements of the journal. Bah.

178 points by mksaunders 9y ago

I love seeing plain-text-related features appear every once in a while. Stuff like this[0] makes it much easier to use LO with my home-grown notetaking system which is kept in plain text. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNWOWJul4w&t=1m9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNWOWJul4w&t=1m9s

vedranm 9y ago

>Thanks to the efforts of developers, the XML description of a new document written by LibreOffice is 50% smaller in the case of ODF (ODT), and around 90% smaller in the case of OOXML (DOCX), in comparison with the same document generated by the leading proprietary office suite. Given Microsoft's record in implemeting OpenDocument, this shouldn't be too hard to do.

phonon 9y ago
I think they're saying they do .docx better (or at least smaller) than MS Word does .docx
- italovignoli 9y ago
  DOCX files created by LibreOffice are not only smaller but simpler in term of XML structure, and easier to interoperate. A two-page file created from scratch is 1100 XML lines if written by LibreOffice and 11500 XML lines if written by Microsoft Office. The 10400 redundant XML lines are there to make it difficult to properly read the file. Also, they may contain non-standard elements which have been deprecated before the approval of the standard itself but are still there after 12 years.
  - tialaramex 9y ago
    I'm not sure that "to make it difficult" is true. MS Office is very old, from their point of view compatibility will always have to mean it works as much as possible like the previous version. So suppose you have a three-way condition clause in some code, each paragraph has either "Straight", "Fast" or "Thom Hopkins" formatting. Hmm. During XML standard writing you ask engineers to explain these options so you can write them up for the standard. "Straight" and "Fast" turn out to each have six paragraph definitions. Great! Write those in the XML standard. The guy you asked to work out "Thom Hopkins" has gone on sick leave due to a mental breakdown, he has left a forty page document, which includes excerpts from several multi-page C++ classes, one of which seems to be a partial implementation of a bin packing solver and another involves regular expressions. You find the supervisor of the guy who last worked on the original "Thom Hopkins" code. He explains it was developed over 15 years by a large team and was originally a core part of the document engine before the invention of the faster "Straight" paragraph mode sidelined it. Now, you _could_ add all this crap to an appendix of the proposed XML document standard, and watch a committee vomit when they try to read it OR you could say "Thom Hopkins" is a special mode and shouldn't be used in standards compliant documents, even though it's actually used in millions of templates for your own popular office suite. And then people will say you did it just to spite them...
    - chuckdries 9y ago
      I mostly agree with you, I subscribe to "don't attribute malice where you could attribute incompetence or unforseen factors" but I keep wondering in the back of my head why they would keep all this cruft in the docx format. They hard forked their document format in 2007 and caused a LOT of headache back then, why not take the opportunity to streamline all this stuff, you know? Why not remove "Thom Hopkins" in the case of your story?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Freak_NL 9y ago

I'm looking forward to giving LibreOffice Online a test drive. Perhaps it can replace Google Docs for us with a nice self-hosted solution. Are there any public demo instances available?

phonon 9y ago
https://demo.nextcloud.com/#short-term https://demo.nextcloud.com/#short-term
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  Still looks more than a little rough around the edges. It doesn't like the styles can be edited at this stage?
- frik 9y ago
  Great. It works fine even on a tablet with touch. Sure, GoogleDocs is still better, but the power of the underlying LibreOffice will a lot more, and it's on-pare with iCloud and better than MS Word WebApp

0x0 9y ago

I'm getting the macOS gatekeeper alert about "unidentified developer". Obviously this can be bypassed by right-clicking and choosing open, but don't the libreoffice developers code-sign LibreOffice.app (anymore) ?

amake 9y ago
I was confused by this, too. I could have sworn they were signing previous releases, but I'm not sure. I did check the SHA-1 of my download, and it was correct.
- 0x0 9y ago
  Yep, the SHA-1 matched the one listed on the website for me too.
- cowsandmilk 9y ago
  previous one was definitely code signed. I installed the previous one yesterday and it was signed. So, surprised when today's wasn't.
eklavya 9y ago
I just use the libreoffice in App Store. It's older but for my needs it suffices.

bbayles 9y ago

Love LibreOffice - I've used it and OpenOffice for over 15 years. I've been heartbroken by recent releases, however - the keyboard shortcuts in Calc (and other components) have changed. This is like breaking my fingers - I'm so much slower now. It's not just that there's a difference - I can adapt to that. It's that they've re-labeled menu entries with duplicate index keys. You can't do some things quickly now (e.g. optimize column widths with Alt-O-M-O, which worked for years). There's a reason why MS Excel has keyboard shortcuts that make no sense - they match to menu entries from old versions, and they've kept them in so people who have been using it for decades don't have a reason to switch. Please, LibreOffice developers, make your menu shortcuts sensible again!

EvanAnderson 9y ago
It's nice to hear that somebody else feels this way, too. I'm running an older LibreOffice release simply because I won't put up with the hit on my productivity in Calc. I'm not going to waste my effort learning new keyboard shortcuts, particularly when they're key shortcuts that also work in Excel and have kept working there from Excel 2003 - 2016. An idealistic part of me would love to spend the time to figure out how to stand up a build environment for LibreOffice to fix this myself, but I've got a lot better stuff to do.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Why not use the in application customization to set the shortcuts? Obviously in general not wanting to bother is a perfectly valid reason, I'm asking in comparison to setting up a build environment.
  - jefurii 9y ago
    They could offer keyboard shortcut sets/bundles/profiles/themes that you could switch and revert all at once.
    - mercer 9y ago
      That strikes me as so obvious that I don't understand why this is the case. Could anyone with more knowledge on the matter elaborate?

phkahler 9y ago

How is the native Wayland support these days?

jhasse 9y ago
5.3 already runs perfectly for me on Wayland (native, not through Xwayland). So I guess 5.4 will be the same :)
- phkahler 9y ago
  That pleases me. Now if Firefox could catch up....

cwyers 9y ago

> Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, LibreOffce developers have focused on fle simplicity as the ultimate document interoperability sophistication. This makes ODF and OOXML fles written by the free offce suite more robust and easier to exchange with other users than the same documents generated by other offce suites. So, two notes here: 1) Microsoft Office and Google Docs at least have figured out how to make their web versions so that when I copy-and-paste from them, any i following an f doesn't disappear because of whatever they're doing to kern letters. 2) "Shorter XML output" is about 978th on the list of things that LibreOffice needs to do to improve interoperability, and the fact that it's a focus is deeply weird.

italovignoli 9y ago
You are probably not aware of the issues related to Microsoft Office files, which are intentionally bloated with useless XML contents to make interoperability almost impossible. A cleaner XML improves interoperability, even if you do not think it helps. The reality is that until people will consider Microsoft Office files as a reference, anything else will fail WRT interoperability because those files are developed to kill interoperability.
- cwyers 9y ago
  > which are intentionally bloated with useless XML contents to make interoperability almost impossible. That's just a conspiracy theory. The reason they're "bloated" is because Microsoft Office is optimizing for interoperability with its largest competitor: older versions of Microsoft Office. Maybe Microsoft Office having "cleaner" XML would improve interoperability. But as long as Office is the standard, the ability to consume messy XML is worth more than the ability to emit clean XML.
  - rvern 9y ago
    You are mistaken. The tricks they used to get OOXML standardized[1] leave no room for doubt that they have been intentionally making interoperability harder. [1]: Wikipedia has an article about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open....

FatAmericanDev 9y ago

Libreoffice is too slow with large documents.

vram22 9y ago
At what size (in MB) of document have you noticed that it gets too slow? asking because I am planning to use it for a writing project.
- keithpeter 9y ago
  I do course guides and question sets to support teaching in LibreOffice Writer (at home) and OpenOffice (at work). In the 60 page range, with lots of formulas, diagrams (drawn with drawing tools) and some bitmap images (scans of hand drawn graphs). I also copy in charts and graphs and more complex drawings from Calc/Impress as needed. No complex 'section' schemes or restyling though just writing straight through. The size in Mb varies according to the number of scans - the drawings and diagrams themselves take little file space. A 100 page course guide comes in around 2Mb as an .odt with half a dozen scanned plots. Seems sprightly enough on a core-duo laptop with 2Gb ram and KDE at home and the usual 'office PC' at work.
  - vram22 9y ago
    Interesting. Thanks for the info. Don't know a lot about the sizes of word processing docs, but slightly surprised that a 100 page doc would come in at as little as 2 MB. I would have thought it should be more. Maybe it is due to ODT format being compressed text/XML, which I think I read somewhere - need to look up the format spec.
dwheeler 9y ago
Works for me. I have a 750-page .odt document which I just edited today with no speed problems.

blablabla123 9y ago

I like LibreOffice as well. I find the whole suite useful: Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw. No heavy office person but I I use Calc several times a week. It's funny that after so many years the tools still struggles getting traction even among Linux users. The built-in PDF was there years before MS Office which is why I wrote all my Resumes in the past with LibreOffice/OpenOffice. Google Docs might be more intuitive but it has less features than MS Works and I have little control over my privacy.

izzard 9y ago

Warning to Windows users. I've just performed a clean install of the latest version, and I'm experiencing this problem: https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/113122/menu-bar-vanished-cursor-registration-wrong/ https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/113122/menu-bar-vani... Looks like others are having this problem, too.

izzard 9y ago
Just found a solution, disabling OpenGL rendering. Not sure why this works, but it does: https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/112724/all-the-words-in-menu-bar-and-drop-down-lists-are-replaced-with-dots/ https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/112724/all-the-words...

SubiculumCode 9y ago

I use calc all the time, and it does just fine, but one thing I'd like to know how to fix is the poor performance when having a filter applied on a long column...it crawls...

chtfn 9y ago
Have you submitted a bug report or looked for an existing one? https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=LibreOffice;bug_status=UNCONFIRMED;version= https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Li...?

xixor2 9y ago

I try to get into LibreOffice, but I just can't: on windows the ui is quite laggy, and the fonts just look... strange. It's like both the kerning and AA are off.

ComputerGuru 9y ago

I remember using OpenOffice torrents back in 2004 as the equivalent of `:CheckHealth` to see if users had problems with their network configuration, throttling, connection speed, etc because of how perpetually well-seeded they were. I tried the torrent download just for kicks, and I was pleasantly surprised that was still the case: it downloaded at over 40MiB/s. (yes, MiB/s, not mbps). Here's a magnet link if anyone wants: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:40836b52d32f79dbb90f2453ab3ee6e6da825880&dn=LibreOffice_5.4.0_Win_x64.msi

ta33444 9y ago

I havent checked in a while, but have they given up on the pathetic attempt at an Access clone? It looked like someones weekend project accidentally got turned into a product.

cutler 9y ago

Forget features. Just make LO usable again. I had to revert to OpenOffice recently in the middle of pitching a client for a desktop db conversion from MS Access. On OS X Sierra LO has regressed.

heypete 9y ago

As much as I love LibreOffice -- and I prefer to use it whenever I can for several reasons -- the UI is just painfully awful. My university and one of the journals I publish in require Word (docx) files for papers and other documents, so I'm required to use Office. No alternatives are allowed, not even LaTeX or sending in PDFs: their whole internal editing and typesetting system is based around Word. Still, while I disliked the ribbon in 2007, I've found the Word UI to have improved significantly over the years, with 2016 being remarkably decent and producing quite presentable documents. I would not object to there being a similar UI them in Writer. I wanted to use Writer for several papers and my PhD thesis, but it has some difficulty importing my otherwise-not-very-complex Word 2016 files. While the text is imported more or less correctly, table widths and alignments get all screwy (which is a big deal), Word's internal cross-references (e.g. "See Figure X", where X is a number representing a specific figure and if that figure is re-ordered in the document, the number changes) get horribly broken, among other issues. Having Word export as ODT and opening that in Writer fixes some issues but creates more issues to the point where there's no real alternative for me than Word, at least for papers and other academic documents. It really bugs me, and I blame Word for the interoperability issues. Even so, I have no alternatives due to the requirements of the journal. Bah.