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LibreOffice 6.0 released
- snowpanda 9y agoWish they would use this in schools instead of getting kids accustomed to MS office.
- orf 9y agoWhy? So kids can be even more unprepared when they enter the world of work, where nobody uses LibreOffice?
- Findus23 9y agoI don't think it's the school job to prepare how to use a specific software, but train skills that one can apply to every software.
- thibaultamartin 9y agoI agree, but still acknowledge that school has the power to shape habits, nonetheless
- thibaultamartin 9y agoActually, Linux became popular in the server world partly because students could toy with it for free. Sure, MS Office has a large user base in the professionnal world, but maybe students accustomed to LibreOffice can push the change. Still, I do agree with the comments stating how important the overall UX/UI of LibreOffice needs to be improved.
- orf 9y ago> but maybe students accustomed to LibreOffice can push the change But... why? For 99.9% of students Word is all they need. There are not many compelling reasons to not teach the software people will actually use in the real world. I mean, why not eschew the English language in schools and teach kids Swahili? Maybe students accustomed to Swahili can push the change. Or maybe not.
- thibaultamartin 9y ago> But... why? For 99.9% of students Word is all they need. MS Office is especially better than LibreOffice with Excel and PowerPoint. If all you use is Word, then the licence you have to pay to use it might not be worth the difference with Writer. > There are not many compelling reasons to not teach the software people will actually use in the real world. Well, I do use MS Office in "the real world", and LibreOffice at home. When I landed in my company, we got a mandatory session of "advanced" Excel and Powerpoint usage, because that's inexpensive for the company to spend a day or two to make sure we can use the tools adequately rather than betting high school taught us. Not everyone uses MS Office in "the real world", nor in "the business world". Most of the document we receive and send is in PDF format. > I mean, why not eschew the English language in schools and teach kids Swahili? Maybe students accustomed to Swahili can push the change. Or maybe not. Come on, I'm quite positive we can both be smarter than that :)
- michaelmrose 9y agoAre you really equating learning an entire language to learning the basics of an office suite? Most people use extremely basic functionality. They can probably learn a slightly different UI in an hour of experimentation.
- saint_fiasco 9y agoWell, for 99.8% of the world, Writer is as good as Word. And it's 100% cheaper.
- criddell 9y agoSure, but Word is cheap enough. Writer has to be better than Word to win because price really isn't an issue.
- saint_fiasco 9y agoIt doesn't have to be better, it just has to be the same. For most people, they pretty much are the same. Ideally they would switch around every few months, so they can raise users who actually know the general principles behind their tools and don't get completely lost by minor interface changes.
- dotancohen 9y agoQuite the opposite. The idea is that children learn concepts, not individual implementations. And since Writer is arguable better than MS Word I see lots of institutions moving to LibreOffice. Note, however, that Excel is better than Calc for anything non-trivial, and Powerpoint just blows the LibreOffice counterpart away completely. Praise to Writer is _not_ praise to the whole LibreOffice suite.
- alok-g 9y agoI would not want my child to learn Excel/Calc at all, so that doesn't bother me. :-) While spreadsheets have been very sticky, super-useful for quick calculations, they are often abused for a variety of cases where alternative tools would be better. If I could, I would ban installation of Excel and Calc at my workplace! Hope LibreOffice Impress improves over the time to catch up with PowerPoint.
- baq 9y agodigital spreadsheets - without macros - are arguably the simplest form of functional programming you could teach anyone, so i wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them.
- alok-g 9y agoSure. For that use-case. I would still like a mechanism in place to prevent use of spreadsheets wherever not suitable.
- addicted 9y agoSpreadsheets are immensely useful. In many situations they are more useful in specific tasks than software designed specifically for those tasks, because their general nature means that they can be used to do things beyond what the creator of the designed software intended. People don’t use Excel for everything because they are masochists. Excel very often really is the best solution available for a very wide variety of uses.
- orf 9y ago
- michaelmrose 9y agoDo you really feel that paying to teach someone a particular office suite prepares them for the working world? Anyone who has once learned the basics of computer use and has used an office suite can become accustomed to buttons being in a different menu and different shortcuts rather easily.
- ekianjo 9y agoWhy Office? So that everyone keeps paying the microsoft tax in the future for ever and ever?
- criddell 9y agoWhy call it a tax? Do you have a fundamental objection to commercial software?
- mixmastamyk 9y agoNo, but why lock yourself in when you don’t need to?
- ekianjo 9y agoEvery company out there is kind of forcing you to use Office, unless you are in the privileged few. So yes, it has become a tax in practice, since it's expected everywhere - even with government interaction which is particularly insidious.
- alok-g 9y agoIndeed. Here in India, I bet most homes are using pirated versions of MS office because of this. I am happy to see Ribbon UI improvements just so that my son (middle school) could still manage at school while using LibreOffice at home.
- j605 9y agoBut MS Office would still give your son scary warnings when he tries to open a ODF file in school.
- alok-g 9y agoThanks for bringing this up. I'll watch out for it. :-) As of now, he has to pass exams that use printed screenshots in quizzes! :-)
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago...as it would with older MS Office files. Why do people always try to frame this as some anticompetitive conspiracy?
- michaelmrose 9y agoPresumably because of the party involved. We are talking about the Microsoft here. Its like asking why people are trying to paint Roman Polanski as a pervert.
- addicted 9y agoNo it would be like suggesting that Polanski directed the Pianist so that he could sleep with the children cast in the movie. MS is a convicted monopoly abuser. But that doesn’t mean every action of theirs is an abuse of their monopoly (further being publicly convicted and penalized for it, odds are they are less likely to do things that abuse their monopoly position).
- 9y ago
- Johnnynator 9y agoWe have both in our school (Bavaria, Germany) MS Office and Libre Office. You are free to use what you want but you get thought Libre Office (or Open Office ~7y ago).
- JorgeGT 9y agoHere in my region in Spain (~5M people), all school computers come with a custom Linux distro, and only for some professional education courses they have Windows (for "real world" specialized software with no Linux alternative).
- criddell 9y agoMy kids mostly use Google Docs.
- tannhaeuser 9y agoI'm puzzled why kids have to do paper work using office suites and powerpoint presentations. For me these tools, especially MS Word, are from the 20th century where your intention was to prepare a document for printing out on paper, something I very rarely do in this decade. I know my now-17-yo had to learn MSO basics as part of "informatics" in 6th-8th grade, which made me furious as I found it time not spent well, and inappropriate for a high school curriculum.
- megaman22 9y agoWhy? Businesses run on Office docs, spreadsheets, and powerpoints, and conceivably will for the next 30 years, until everybody who came up under the current regime ages out of management positions. At which point the next generation will have been inculcated with Officisms, and so the cycle will repeat, perhaps losing a bit of steam in each cycle. Don't get me wrong, I would love to swap over almost everything that we currently use Word for to just be some combination of Markdown and HTML, but beating my head against the inertia and trying to get people to invest an hour or two of time in learning something they don't already know is demoralizing.
- linopolus 9y agoAnd still it has a UI like in the nineties. Thousands of buttons, adding more and more, without thinking about it, making it harder and harder with every version for new users to learn using it. Instead of adding more fonts by default, they should start thinking how they can improve their UI, make it clean, discoverable and easy to use. Microsoft has done it, and while initially it was hard for everyone familiar with the old concept, I know nobody who prefers that now, after familiarizing themselves with ribbons.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago3 new experimental, flexible UI's were the headline features of LibreOffice 5.3. https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/12/21/the-document-foundation-announces-the-muffin-a-new-tasty-user-interface-concept-for-libreoffice/ https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/12/21/the-docu...
- rwx------ 9y agoI have enabled Ribbon UI and it looks like ribbon ui build in nineties. There is no obvious way to revert the change.
- sympodius 9y agoI think you can restore the default from the main menu? View -> Toolbar Layout -> Default
- rwx------ 9y agoIt was not obvious as the main menu was hidden. There is a button (top-right corner) to show main menu.
- mksaunders 9y agoThis is why it's still an exerimental feature, and the more testing and feedback the design community gets, the better!
- wmccullough 9y agoThis is wonderful to see, big fan of LibreOffice. I am left questioning a few things based upon the feedback in this thread. I'll preface this that I'm trying to be cordial and tactful here. Why is it so bad that Microsoft charges for their product? I use Office in my professional life and Libre+Office in my personal life. I think if you make a decent product, it's perfectly okay to charge for it. Am I missing something ideological? I constantly read that Office is clunky and unstable, and I haven't experienced that in years at this point, probably since Office 2007 after they famously had to rip out CustomXML in a hurry. For me, both Office and LibreOffice perform well, and I often only use one over the other when I find support for one or the other is lacking because of some crazy scenario. P.S. To those barking about "scary" warning for ODF files. It does the same thing for Office 2003-2007 documents too...
- icebraining 9y agoWhere in this thread has anyone said that it's bad that Microsoft charges for their product?
- loudmax 9y agoAgreed, I don't see any posts in this thread arguing that MS charging for office is a bad thing. And I don't see any problem with charging money for productivity software either. But since the issue has been raised, I'll bite. I can articulate an ideological opposition to Microsoft Office's proprietary file formats which are a de-facto standard. The original Office file formats were entirely proprietary and MS explicitly used this to lock out competition. The OOXML formats in use since 2007 are technically an open spec, but one that is difficult to implement reliably. The only software product that is reliably compatible with MS Office is MS Office. For much of the HN crowd, Office documents isn't a big part of our job, but we're in the minority here. Most people are far more likely to open Word than any code editor. In my experience outside of the tech industry, document collaboration is primarily done through SharePoint, if not emailing Word and Excel docs. Scheduling is managed via Outlook/Exchange with their proprietary protocols. This isn't a problem as long as people are being productive on their own using MS Office. The problem is that files are widely distributed with the expectation that anyone can view and edit them. For example, my kids' school teachers regularly post homework assignments .doc or .docx format. I've also seen MS Office files from doctors' office and municipal governments. So there's free stuff like LibreOffice and Google Docs, which are mostly compatible with MS Office, and mostly sufficient for home or personal use. Usually .doc or .docx files open fine. Sometimes they come out looking like garbage. A typical business will want to be able to exchange documents with their customers and suppliers, to say nothing of years of legacy documents that they already have. Compatibility is important, and it is worth paying for. The notion that they're paying for software to make their employees more productive isn't a problem. The fact that they have no alternatives where to spend their money if they want to be compatible with their legacy docs and the rest of the world, that's a problem.
- pmontra 9y agoDid anybody here use LibreOffice online? How does it compare to Google Docs or Office 365?
- g105b 9y agoLibreOffice is worse in all ways.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoI downvoted your comment as it was too lazy. If you're going to provide feedback, at least try to give examples to back it up. For example, compare one similar feature available in all three applications.
- dang 9y agoMaybe so, but would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nxc18 9y agoI tried it. I generally liked it, but was super annoyed at the lack of auto save. Even office online does this. I lost work as a result.
- reacharavindh 9y agoIt is rather unfortunate that MS Office sets the bar for office suite of programs and so many people (not necessarily in CS/IT/Tech) can only think Office == MS Office. The only way for an Open Source equivalent to dethrone MS Office is to beat MS Office at its own game WHILE retaining compatibility to it. Perhaps, retain a MS Office compatible core, and invest mindshare in making an absurdly fast, intuitive, and productive UI that is not necessarily the same as MS Office. Show people why one would want to use LibreOffice instead of the only factor being that it's free (as in beer and as in speech). The day the suite of Libre Office impresses me enough to use it on my laptop inspite of having MS Office installed is when the tide changes.. Sort of like the Mozilla of Office programs.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoYou mean Google Docs / Sheets? (Which incidentally I use 90% of the time despite having an Office 365 subscription)
- nothis 9y agoNot a bad start.
- reacharavindh 9y agoHonestly, I really like Google docs. I use it for drafting my blog posts which will be public anyway on my website. But, Google is the reason I can't use it for private/ personal documents.
- dhimes 9y agoI use the draw program alot, so there's that.
- aklemm 9y agoSame. I've always found the Draw program the most useful.
- g105b 9y agoSoftware for peasants™
- yeukhon 9y agoI like LibreOffice but what made me switch back to MS was the compatibility problem. In particular in thr older version of LibreOffice thr fonts weren’t even compatible for me... I didn’t look back since going back, to save the overhead. FWIW, I did my thesis on LibreOffice but after that I switched away. Same happened to Thunderbird to Outlook, but mainly due to performance issue (handling tens of thousands of emails and searching through those emails), otherwise I would love to keep Thunderbird (its UI and functionality is just as good as Outlook by OSS standard). MS isn’t perfect. It’s slow to open files, occasionally Outlook’s data file will corrupt or too large to be usable, then I have to delete the file and force Outlook download the emails again. I miss one license for life time model, instead of subscription.
- addicted 9y agoI want to use Thunderbird, and for whatever reason even thunderbird performance is better on my computer. The problem I have is that its junk filtering is absolutely messed up. It ends up marking several important emails as junk. Also it’s not very clever in auto completing email addresses.
- rwx------ 9y agoname one software feature that is better in LibreOffice than MSOffice.
- mksaunders 9y agoWhy not research it for yourself? Here's a start: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_LibreOffice_-_Microsoft_Office https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr... Look at the "Major Feature Differences" and "Minor Feature Differences" sections.
- cpburns2009 9y ago1. It works on Linux. 2. It has the classic menu and tool-bars. Bonus: The price. Chances are, LibreOffice is more than sufficient for the layperson. Even if the feature disparity was that of GIMP and Photoshop, 99% of the professional features would be left unused by the average person.
- megaman22 9y agoI always had better luck running Word on Wine than I did using OO/LibreOffice on Linux, but that was a decade ago. Word 2003, as a self-contained package that could run off a flash drive, was the pinnacle of office productivity in my books.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoSaving CSV files. In Excel you have to do a bunch of tricks to get quotes around certain fields in the exported CSV (I end up using a custom field format to force quotes, then doing a find and replace in a text editor, as Excel likes to save "Text" as """Text"""), whereas in LibreOffice Calc there's an option to 'Quote all text cells' when exporting the CSV, which is much simpler.
- danmaz74 9y agoAlso importing CSV files works much better. I don't know how many times I had to suggest friends or customers to use openoffice for that, it was just easier than finding the right way to do it in Office.
- ilitirit 9y agoI like LibreOffice, but I really wish they would put more effort into their UI, even just basic things like standardisation of controls and simple text spacing and positioning. This is taken from their video summary of 6.0: https://imgur.com/a/LB1jt https://imgur.com/a/LB1jt
- dhimes 9y agoSo is your issue that the dropdown sizes and associated font sizes are different?
- ilitirit 9y agoNo, I'm referring to the UI in general. The images just basic examples of poor and inconsistent text spacing and positioning. I didn't even mention the more important issues like the crowded dropdowns, poor layouts and use of space in general. As I said, I like LibreOffice, but the UI needs work.
- dhimes 9y agoMy only issue is that it's hard sometimes to find how to do something I'm trying to do. But that's also a problem in MS Office.
- mksaunders 9y agoThose are two different Gtk themes...
- singularity2001 9y agorelease fail: sudo apt-get upgrade libreoffice libreoffice is already the newest version (1:5)
- cesarb 9y agoDistributions always lag a bit behind upstream releases, so don't expect a new release of any upstream software to be available instantly in Ubuntu/Debian/etc.
- dragonwriter 9y agoTo be fair, the LibreOffice Fresh PPA also doesn't (from it's website) have 6.0 yet. While OS vendor repositories naturally take time, I don't know that there is a good reason for the PPA to get debs slower than the website.
- Valmar 9y agoArch has 6.0 in testing at the moment. :)
- jprzybyl 9y agoBelieve it or not, Debian unstable just got it this morning. Boy, it's fast. I open a document, and it's there in less than a second. Very impressed. Like with Firefox, I'm starting to see the backend work.
- teilo 9y agoWhen I installed this on macOS 10.13, it wouldn't run at all. Crashed on every document it tried to open, including a new document based on the default template, and then got stuck in a recovery loop. I had to force-quit it. After deleting ~/Library/Application Support/LibreOffice it seems to be fine. So there must be an issue installing with old preferences in place.
- znpy 9y agoJust asking: did they, by any chance, fix or at least improve the usability of the LibreOffice API? Last time I tried live-updating a cell in a Calc worksheet it was a huge mess and a total pita.
- mixmastamyk 9y agoDid it get outline mode yet? That’s what always held back my colleagues that write documentation. I use it when I need an office suite, though not often.