11 ms·
LibreOffice 7.1 Community Edition
- ACAVJW4H 6y agoI am also quite fond of Onlyoffice. We deployed the community edition alongside our nextcloud and I think we don't miss the Large Corporation Office suite much
- smitty1e 6y ago> ScriptForge libraries: an extensible and robust collection of macro scripting resources for LibreOffice to be invoked from user Basic or Python scripts The Python integration is the thing that should make LO go high.
- nsajko 6y agoPretty sure LuaTeX or ConTeXt LMTX (an experimental LuaTeX fork) is a better choice for programmability. LuaTeX is the most recent TeX engine, and it is very programmable using Lua (as in no TeX code required). I know, Lua sucks very much, but nonetheless the power that LuaTeX (and/or ConTeXt) offers is probably currently unmatched. (And don't forget that Lua has a C API, so it is possible to drive the TeX engine with C++ or Go or Rust or whatever.)
- buovjaga 6y agoThe Help has received a lot more content thanks to Alain Romedenne and others: https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/sbasic/python/main0000.html?DbPAR=BASIC https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/sbasic/python... Also, keep an eye on the upcoming integrated dev tools: https://tomazvajngerl.blogspot.com/2021/01/built-in-xray-like-uno-object-inspector.html https://tomazvajngerl.blogspot.com/2021/01/built-in-xray-lik...
- shp0ngle 6y agoThe Community/Enterprise language is confusing, if you don't know the backstory. A big chunk of actual development of LibreOffice is done by a company called Collabora, that is also selling LibreOffice-based products for mobile and for cloud. https://www.collaboraoffice.com https://www.collaboraoffice.com They seem to be the major contributor to LibreOffice Online (even still have their logo there?). Which is actually including the iOS and Android apps. https://github.com/LibreOffice/online https://github.com/LibreOffice/online On actual LibreOffice proper, which they call "LibreOffice Core", they seem to have 30% of commits, with RedHat also 30%.
- jrochkind1 6y agoyeah, my reaction is, wait, there's a product with "Libre" in the very name that is not actually open source, only the "Community" version is, is that what's going on? I thought the whole point of LibreOffice was to be open source, it's in the name! Is it actually "open core" or something?
- shp0ngle 6y agoSort of? It seems the naming is just for branding. Collabora seems to be putting all their code for online and mobile back upstream. https://github.com/LibreOffice/online/tree/master/ios https://github.com/LibreOffice/online/tree/master/ios it is updated often. edit also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26013601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26013601
- davidgerard 6y agoIt's confusing, but no, it's not open core. That thing is a genuine full LO.
- buovjaga 6y agoCollabora no longer uses TDF infra to develop Online, the new repo is https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online
- shp0ngle 6y agoAh, I missed that. Again it is a bit confusing. LibreOffice Online is actually the same as Collabora, and it includes the mobile releases.
- asicsp 6y agoExplanation from Mike (The Document Foundation) [0] >Why are we doing this? Well, please read the blog announcement to find out. But TL;DR: The majority of code commits in LibreOffice come from companies in the ecosystem around it. Many of them are finding it difficult to justify investments into LibreOffice, paying developers etc., while other companies/organisations/governments that use LibreOffice simply download it from the TDF website, install it and never contribute anything back. >That's their right, of course, but it's not great for long-term development of LibreOffice. So by calling the version from TDF "Community", we're stressing that it only has community support, and businesses/large organisations should get LO-based products from the ecosystem. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lblnfn/libreoffice_71_released_with_new_community_label/glumzbe/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lblnfn/libreoffice_7...
- the_duke 6y agoI'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a professional setting. In my experience everyone uses MS Office or Google Docs, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users. I'm sure the situation is different in other parts of the world, where saving on license cost is more important. It's a bit of a shame that eg governments aren't switching en masse. But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, and the incompatabilities of Writer with Word make it problematic.
- taylodl 6y agoYes - LibreOffice Draw. Microsoft has made quite a mess of Visio and Draw is much, much easier to use. My organization is an MS Office shop but that really just means we use Word, Excel, and Power Point. Us techies? We use LibreOffice Draw. Now that GDocs has become more popular and so people more and more are distributing presentations as PDFs I've also seen more people starting to use Impress. It's usage isn't widespread, but it's trending up. Word and Excel? I don't see their dominance fading in my organization anytime in the foreseeable future.
- ta988 6y agoI have switched almost fully to diagrams.net, using a local version. I found it much more practical than Draw.
- franga2000 6y agoThat's Draw.io, for those that haven't heard of their new name, and I definitely agree that it's brilliant piece of software. Pretty much the one and only web-based productivity software I enjoy using.
- throwawaybutwhy 6y agoWeb-based? It's also available in VS Code as a plugin. Integrated workflow at its finest, IMO.
- tifadg1 6y agoI keep looking at the changelog as the versions come and go and am generally disappointed that there's no concentrated effort to improve eye candy/defaults, especially in calc, but writer as well. I use writer heavily at home, mostly for strict structured technical data and it serves my needs, though everything still looks awful in word. Given up on using calc though - still no tables, pivot tables are fugly and inintuitive - end up booting a VM 2-3 times a week to edit in excel for years now. That said, I'm thankful for the contributors and everyone involved doing the best they can.
- narush 6y agoCongrats on the release! LibreOffice was one of the first large applications I looked at, mostly due to my interest in spreadsheets generally. I generally have massive respect for anyone / anything that can parse a legacy Microsoft file format. [1] My interest in spreadsheets lead to me making https://trymito.io https://trymito.io. Check it. We’re a spreadsheet that sits inside a Jupyer notebook, allowing you to write spreadsheet formulas and generate equivalent Python code. Feedback greatly appreciated! [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
- indymike 6y agoI've been using LibreOffice and before that OpenOffice for as long as it's been open source. Writer, Impress and Calc are fantastic products and as capable as anything else on the market. That said, I fear the market for non-web based office software is going to slowly shrink. The real competition is web based office suites like Google Docs, Zoho and Microsoft Office. The web based suites are missing lots of features, but they make up for it two ways: auto revisions/save and real-time collaboration. It's hard to go back to old-style local single-access files once you've had a team of four working on a document at the same time. Finally, most of us have been frog-potted one too many times by software that switches to a community / paid enterprise license model. The name "community edition" tends to signal a bleak future. I've had to switch from SugarCRM, ElasticSearch and a few others because in the rush to create value in the "enterprise" version, eventually they just make the community one suck instead of making the enterprise one that much better. Also, the truth is I wouldn't have even bothered using Sugar or Elastic if the only option was to pay for it.
- tssva 6y agoPeople have mentioned features which LibreOffice lacks and the poor state of the UI but what I haven't seen mentioned here is the reason I don't use LibreOffice anymore. It is slow. Whenever I used it I felt like I was stuck in molasses. Even the basic stuff like launching the applications, opening documents and scrolling through them always felt extremely slow.
- analog31 6y agoThis was my experience too. Graphing a column of a couple thousand numbers took forever in LO, and is almost instant in Excel. There were other things like the "smoothness" of the user interface for lack of a better word. Excel seems more forgiving of not clicking in precisely the right place, and stuff like that. LO is more physically laborious to use, and the speed problem seems to compound this issue. That was when I used Excel. Today I use mostly Python, and my few uses of a spreadsheet are handled by a crusty old Office 2010 license. My impression is that Microsoft sweats the details of Excel the way that Apple sweats the details of iOS, and doing this is just a very big costly effort. I consider Excel to be the flagship of Microsoft. Oddly enough I'm seeing Word vanishing. People just write in the chat or e-mail editors, and insert bitmap screen captures. Word processing is being relegated to stuff that nobody reads, such as business procedures and dissertations. ;-)
- jonnycomputer 6y agoMac version of Excel can be frustratingly slow, in my experience. And while multi-threaded computation of column formula, it can also be a real annoyance for small to mid-sized Excel sheets where the performance gain seems to be outweighed by whatever overhead is involved.
- pentagrama 6y agoI have LibreOffice 7.0 installed, is not mentioned in the article what will happen to me, I guess I will be updated to 7.1 "Community" edition? "LibreOffice" sans edition will not exist anymore? The editions will be "LibreOffice Community" and "LibreOffice Enterprise" from now one?
- asicsp 6y ago>no, "Community" doesn't mean that TDF is going commercial (it is and always will be a non-profit). No, we're not going to offer "Professional" or "Enterprise" versions. No, no features will be removed/limited. see https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lblnfn/libreoffice_71_released_with_new_community_label/glumzbe/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lblnfn/libreoffice_7... for more details
- pentagrama 6y agoThanks for the info!
- Fiveplus 6y agoWhy should I switch from Google Docs/Sheets to LibreOffice? What makes it stand out? Genuinely interested as a potential new user :)
- lights0123 6y agoGoogle Docs is intentionally pretty bare-bones. You get features in LibreOffice like: - text boxes in Writer - vector graphics support (pdf, svg, ...) - LibreOffice Draw, which there really isn't any equivalent to anywhere (it focuses on both drawing and text, while most vector drawing apps generally suck at text while Draw doesn't) - higher performance with very big spreadsheets ("this should have been a SQLite file") - Self-installed fonts However, I do typically just use Google Docs when I don't need any of those. The recently added autocomplete feature finally did it for me.
- npteljes 6y agoIt's a comprehensive and capable offline office suit, that is also open source. For a better matching alternative check out ONLYOFFICE's private offering. They have nice online editors, a small free storage and everything is free software.
- II2II 6y agoIt all depends upon your needs. If you were originally an Excel/Word user who switched to Docs/Sheets, for reasons other than cost, you would probably be better off sticking with Google's product. This is particularly true if you use Google's products for collaboration. LibreOffice is better for people who are looking for a powerful office suite and primarily deal with printed documents (or handle electronic documents much like printed ones). It is best compared to Microsoft Office: Writer is very similar to Word, though Writer is better thought out in my opinion; Calc is very similar to Excel, though Excel seems to have better options for data visualization.
- davidgerard 6y agoVastly better DOCX handling. A word processor and a spreadsheet that do their jobs thoroughly when you need that sort of thing.
- 6y ago
- SignalNotSecure 6y agoLibreoffice is an amazing piece of software for writing and spreadsheets. However, it's inability to display written text beautifully has pushed me to Microsoft Word. Libreoffice made zero progress on this in over a decade.
- illuminated 6y agoI have personally found that OnlyOffice [0] has much better MS Word file compatibility than any other open source document editor. Files created and saved in Word are being handled by OpenOffice without an issue and vice versa. Haven't tried the spreadsheets, though. [0] https://www.onlyoffice.com/en/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/en/
- andrewshadura 6y agoWell, that is provably untrue.
- illuminated 6y agoWhat is?
- 74d-fe6-2c6 6y agoI just can't fathom why you barely hear about OnlyOffice while it is exceptionally useful and compatible with Microsoft Office.
- longtom 6y agoBecause it isn't open source.
- 74d-fe6-2c6 6y agodidn't know that ... interesting
- krylon 6y agoAccording to Wikipedia, the server and desktop parts are AGPLv3, am I missing something?
- JohnTHaller 6y agoFor folks using it on PCs without admin rights or wanting it installed to a synced cloud folder, I'm packaging up the portable version for PortableApps.com now.
- krylon 6y agoThank you!
- ratiolat 6y agoLong time user here. But not anymore, because it's veeeery slow on Retina Macbook Pro. That also prevents promoting it at work because it is so slow. Microsoft Office is a faster, sad to say. In general, everyone has access to Google Workspace and if functionality lacks, then Microsoft Office it is.
- nice__two 6y ago7.0 switched to Skia for drawing. Maybe give it another shot and see if it’s faster now?
- aero-glide2 6y agoI just use Google Docs these days. I don't use most of the features of MS Office/LibreOffice anyways.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoI use Softmaker FreeOffice, which I find to be better than LibreOffice. LibreOffice is a good faith project, but the legacy from Sun StarOffice is still there. Namely, a non-polished UI that in many aspects looks less-polished than other major office suites. The project roadmaps also do not give me any hope that will be better in the future. There are shapes with physics simulation, but the most user facing aspect of the product, the UI, looks highly neglected. I tried cloning the LibreOffice repo to tweak the UI to my satisfaction, but after witnessing the escheresque 4D spaghetti code that implements it I simply deleted the repo and continued doing something else. Adding features will not change the fact the UI still looks like Sun StarOffice.
- nice__two 6y agoLO has its own platform abstraction layer (called SAL), which only supported pixel-precise layout of elements. That meant that the longest string in any of the supported languages dictated the element layout. Caolán McNamara (of RedHat) added support for automatic layouts a few years ago. Since then, LO has been cleaning up its dialogs and has innovated a lot (e.g. by introducing the notebook bar). This simply wouldn’t have been possible previously. Compare it with Apache OpenOffice and you’ll see why.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoSure. An amazing engineering feat... but the UI still looks the same as it did years ago. Compare the UI to MS Office, WPS Office, Softmaker Office, etc and rank the UIs by level of polish.
- newscracker 6y agoI use LibreOffice Calc a couple of times a year for personal use. At work I have to use Excel. I donate a small sum to The Document Foundation (which develops and publishes LibreOffice) every year. I have a few longstanding disagreements with the state of the application and its development approach over the years. The first is that the application loads slowly, but that's not quite as bad as the other gripes I have. The UI is quite ugly with poor fonts, cluttered (and ugly) menubar icons, not a well designed layout, etc. (on Windows and macOS). The fact that Calc uses keyboard shortcuts that aren't anywhere close to what Excel uses (even the Excel/Office 2003 version that's before the Ribbon Menu days) makes using Excel knowledge and Excel muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts quite useless when switching to Calc. For years, I've encountered some strange copy paste bugs in Calc where it doesn't seem to get the clipboard contents from the OS. If these were resolved, I'd be very thrilled to recommend it to others.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoHah! My friend has been asking for "outline mode" for 15 years before he'd consider using it! https://www.debugpoint.com/2020/11/libreoffice-7-1/ https://www.debugpoint.com/2020/11/libreoffice-7-1/ Probably too late but I'll bring it up with him. :-D
- fatboy93 6y agoThe biggest thing that I have an issue with in Writer is basically the performance. Drop in an image or two, that particular page becomes slow as molasses. This is yet to be fixed and it causes massive headache, when you're just trying to zoom through the content for quick edits.
- lothrowaway 6y agoThis monday I had to review and extend a proposal in a docx format, which is one of the rare cases I need an office suite for the job. After hours of writing and commenting, I sent out the proposal to the project partner, who said he could not open the document at all. Turns out, libreoffice failed to properly save the document.xml, so that even libreoffice couldn't re-open the file itself. I had to put in extra hours and fix the document until late in the night by copy pasting parts of the broken XML or rewriting small bits. That was the last time I will use libreoffice.