11 ms·

LibreOffice hits 4.0

149 points by endijs 14y ago

nextparadigms 14y ago
I still think this should've arrived with a more modern interface. At least I hope they get to that by the time port it to Android devices.
webwanderings 14y ago
The website looks terrible for 2013.
- grakic 14y ago
  Please send a mockup, improve copy text following the comunity goals or a better proposal for the site information flow. It will not be ignored.
- testimoney2 14y ago
  Software looks terrible for 2013
- vacipr 14y ago
  Come to hacker news,which is arguably the most ugly site I visit everyday.See this.
  - testimoney2 14y ago
    Yes but hacker news is very minimalistic, I think minimalistic and ugly is ok. But on their website its hard to understand what is happening.
    - vacipr 14y ago
      It's actually pretty straight forward.A featured selection of new stuff and then new features categorized, some with screenshots.
  - jre 14y ago
    I love the design and usability of hacker news. It's minimal, efficient, non-distracting, consistent and puts content first. I wish more news website would be like that. The libreoffice website, on the other hand, has a lot of visual elements (icons, colors) that don't really fit well with each other. Visual-heavy websites can be quite nice, but they need to be really thought through.
    - vacipr 14y ago
      I'm not going to get into the whole hacker news is magnificent debate.We all know most users are screaming for improvement. As for the libreofice site the only color I see is green which is what they usually use and the libreoffice icons. What am I missing ?
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        > We all know most users are screaming for improvement. Do they? A few times a year we get a "I made a better UI for HN" article and almost without fail everyone seems to respond "This is unneeded and worse. This reduces usability".
  - sergiotapia 14y ago
    Two horrible abortions of a design don't make a right. :P With so many awesome people in this world, I'd like to think there is at least 1 great designer and front end guy who would donate time to completely scrap the current design and give it a facelift. Who wouldn't want that on their resume, "I designed the website for LIBREOFFICE." That's deserving of major kudos, at least in my book.
- calinet6 14y ago
  This is, in much harsher terms, basically what I came here to say. I completely agree. This is a stereotypical open-source software web site, and it shouldn't be. This goes to show the lack of attention to design detail that is no doubt influencing their whole product, and surely part of the reason it's not as successful as it should be. Deny it all you want, but webwanderings speaks the truth, and the truth needs to be heard if open source projects such as Libre are to be taken seriously—as they should be. Design is important, marketing is important, and they need to treat it that way.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    Ironically, you chose to talk about ugly design and how it prevents anyone from taking a technology seriously on Hacker News.
    - mkr-hn 14y ago
      HN isn't trying to appeal to the average news site user.
    - calinet6 14y ago
      Utterly irrelevant.
      - chris_wot 14y ago
        As irrelevant as the criticism of the LibreOffice website design.
        BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
        Widespread usage and accessibility is specifically a goal of LibreOffice. That is assuredly not the case for HN.
        chris_wot 14y ago
        I didn't say that the website was fantastic. I merely said that it hasn't and won't prevent widespread usage and accessibility of LibreOffice. Ironically, HN doesn't have the greatest web design, yet it is extremely usable, and very popular. The way I see it, the LibreOffice devs are focussing on cleaning up the OpenOffice codebase, when they get the resources and time they can update the website. I'll give you an example of where "clean design" causes lots of problems. Go to the Gnome website. They used to have a lot of documentation for developers. And I mean highly meaty tutorials, discussion papers, usability studies, etc. There is documentation now, but it's appallingly awful. Did a clean design help Gnome? No. They cleaned it up all right - by removing anything of any use to anyone.
- MattDL 14y ago
  I actually really like their website; I don't like that it has such a small fixed width, but I'm quite drawn to the simple design. More than that it's very usable to, to each their own I guess.
- dhimes 14y ago
  You may not like the looks, but I am pleased that they are not throwing my donations at making the website pretty. I much prefer they make the program work better.
  - r00fus 14y ago
    Thing is, these days it would probably only take a small outlay of cash (or finding the right, desperate pro-bono designer) to get a fairly good landing page. Nat Friedman of Xamarin laid this out pretty clearly in a blog post [1]. Just a damn themeforest template would do wonders. [1] http://nat.org/blog/2011/06/instant-company/ http://nat.org/blog/2011/06/instant-company/
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  At least it loads fast and is navigable. It looks like it was designed by a programmer which probably makes sense. Would it make sense for libreoffice to devote funds and resources to hiring designers that could be used to improve the office suite itself?
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    That depends on whether or not the site is repelling the sort of users LibreOffice wants to attract.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      Difficult to say without an A/B test or similar. The site certainly doesn't look any worse than a great many fortune 500 websites that continue to do billions of dollars of business. It is also significantly more usable than many of those.
- crististm 14y ago
  Compared to what? It looks decent enough and it's even functional.
- WayneDB 14y ago
  Along similar lines - the name is terrible. Open Office was so much better.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    They wanted the name, but Oracle wouldn't give it to them.
    - WayneDB 14y ago
      I could be wrong, but - I thought Oracle did release the entire project, but they didn't move quick enough for the Libre Office devs who wanted it right away. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffice-to-apache/9035 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffic...
      - soperj 14y ago
        Yah didn't move quick enough. It took 2 years. Would you wait?
        WayneDB 14y ago
        First of all, these people preemptively forked Open Office on September 28, 2011 after Oracle purchased Sun "over concerns that Oracle would either discontinue OpenOffice.org". They didn't wait until Oracle announced a discontinuation. Then Oracle discontinued support because of the fork. That was in April, 2012. So, it wasn't 2 years - more like 6 or 7 months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Initial_release http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Initial_release IMO, had the Libre Office crowd played their cards right, they could have saved a ton of work and had a better name.
        chris_wot 14y ago
        Wrong. "These people" had been having a lot of issues for many, many years with Sun. They actually created their fork in 2007 as part of Go-OO, due to an increasing frustration with not being able to contribute patches and enhancements back to OpenOffice.org. It was discontinued and folded into LibreOffice only later. That Oracle discontinued support is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it was that they never provided ready support or accepted enhancements or patches in the first place.
sgt 14y ago
While I think LibreOffice has its uses, I think the world is sort of moving away from desktop-based office software. I can't even remember the last time I used Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, it's probably more than 2-3 years ago. Then again, if you're a hardcore Word user, then the professional office suites still offer more functionality. (Additionally, not everybody is lucky enough to "work in the cloud" due to various constraints or restrictions).
- Mahn 14y ago
  I use spreadsheets practically every day, I highly doubt office desktop software is going away anytime soon.
- edwinnathaniel 14y ago
  I used it yesterday. My wife uses MS Excel and Word almost everyday. I think the world is not yet moving away from desktop-based office software :)
- skittles 14y ago
  Spreadsheets will be heavily used forever. Excel alone will keep Microsoft relevant in the business world. JavaScript gives us 1 numeric datatype, and there's no good way to load a gigabyte of numeric data into a web application.
  - Osmium 14y ago
    "Forever" is a long time. Personally, even though there isn't a viable alternative right now, I'm optimistic there's one just around a corner. e.g. see this Python spreadsheet (which I only just discovered myself) here http://manns.github.com/pyspread/ http://manns.github.com/pyspread/ Python expressions in your grid cells, integrated with numpy and matplotlib, and (if you want) a 3D data grid! In any case, Excel is in many ways crufty and busy when a much more minimalist data-grid-view with powerful scripting (e.g. from Python) would probably be much better for power users.
    - koralatov 14y ago
jre 14y ago
I try to stay away from *Office suites as much as possible. It seems that whenever I use them to do anything more complicated than typing a short letter, everything starts to fall apart and I wish I had used Latex/R/python instead. On the other hand, LibreOffice is a very helpful piece of software to edit the occasional .doc attachment.
- RyanMcGreal 14y ago
  Writer is Good Enough to open a Word document I've gotten from someone else, and for what I mainly do with such documents, I actually prefer Writer to Word. For my own purposes, the only office application I really find myself reaching for is the spreadsheet. I'm a big supporter of free/open source software and I run Linux on all my personal computers, so it pains me to write this - but LibreOffice Calc just doesn't come anywhere close to comparing with the functionality, stability and polish of Excel. Using it is a steady aggravation, and I'm persuaded that the problem is not due to it being different from Excel - after all, other open source applications are different from their proprietary counterparts and I find them as good or better. The problem with Calc is that it just doesn't work very well. Everything seems to take one or two more steps than the equivalent action on Excel, the defaults aren't as helpful, and the application is far more prone to freeze/crash.
  - brudgers 14y ago
    Office is Excel. It trumps consideration of any other suite for many businesses because it facilitates their running. It matters on the sixth floor where the executive offices are. Data manipulation is a domain in which lean never works and Excel is the opposite of lean. Decades of development in a corporate culture that encourages adding features has made Excel excel. Trimming math functions doesn't make sense because 10,000 more functions never clutter up the user experience. Excel is a programming environment - an IDE which includes drag and drop, a REPL, and macros (with respect to the data layer). It's syntax is simple [yes, I know it wasn't invented by Microsoft] and it's power significant. It's really the crown jewel in Microsoft's portfolio. It just works.
    - 14y ago
gavinlynch 14y ago
minor observation regarding the website's example images and their lightbox: really strange placement for the close "X" in the bottom right corner, right?
franze 14y ago
question: is still has some java dependencies, right?
- edwinnathaniel 14y ago
  So?
- chris_wot 14y ago
  It's baked in, but not strictly required.
Mahn 14y ago
Not sure why everyone sees LibreOffice as a Word replacement. Personally I use LibreOffice Calc all the time, I find it generally faster than excel. I also dislike the ribbon interface but I guess that's just personal preference.
- alttab 14y ago
  Anything outside home budgeting or double entry booking has infuriated me outside excel.
stroboskop 14y ago
You have to keep things in perspective. LibreOffice does not look nice but it is functional. What is its main function? For many people, it has completely replaced Microsoft Office. Of course MS Office has an even larger feature set, but few people max it out. Likewise, there are people who will prefer LaTeX but that's a small group. The advocates of web based office systems tend to ignore that desktop systems provide much more privacy. LibreOffice sits right in between those groups and is useful to many.
- glazskunrukitis 14y ago
  I think that there is a huge market for simplified office tools. Why don't we have standalone Google Docs for desktop? And I am not talking about a web app but a fully functional desktop one.
  - runn1ng 14y ago
    I would much prefer 100% free (as-in-speech) Google Docs alternative. I want to be able to install Google Docs-like application on my own server.
    - pekk 14y ago
      Why not just run an office suite locally if that is your requirement?
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - Piskvorrr 14y ago
        Not locally: I've seen many organizations admire the synchronization and collaboration features of GDocs, with a major caveat: the data is centralized in the cloud provider's hands, not the organization's. "Oh look, you don't own your data anymore" is a very theoretical scenario, but "oh look, you suddenly can't access your data anymore, we're not bringing them back, and you have no recourse" has happened with many cloud storage services, for various reasons. Hosting your own network-based office web-app solution would be convenient for many...especially for the security.
milkbikis 14y ago
I've been using SkyDrive for a while now, and it generally feels more usable to me. Is there a reason people prefer LibreOffice over that? I haven't used it as much, but it feels like I can't be sure what the document will look like back in Microsoft Office once I'm done editing it.
- elehack 14y ago
  Reason #1: it runs on my platform. Reason #2: open source, so lock-in is (in theory) a non-problem so long as there are people who find it useful.
replax 14y ago
I am really surprised that no one mentioned the lack of OneNote, yet. Although it might not actually apply to libreoffice, if their ultimate goal is to replace ms office though then some really really good OneNote alternative has to be developed. OneNote and esp. Excel have to have an extremely good alternative for MS Office to become somewhat less important.
peapicker 14y ago
I can't believe they wasted time on "themes" for an office suite instead of coming up with a standard, clean look.
- calinet6 14y ago
  Classic programmer's solution to a design problem. "Oh they want it to look different? Here, make it look however you want! Problem solved." Problem not solved.
- nextw33k 14y ago
  One of the largest complains to LibreOffice has been its dated look. Given that time will always make something look dated, the developers probably thought that they should abstract the look to CSS or something and then make their lives easier down the line. The added benefit is now they can tell people that don't like the "dated" look to pick one of many. Whilst you might want a single clean look, you definition and someone elses might differ.
  - BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
    Given how lofty office software generally is (especially when working on a big/dense document), I'd rather not have theme engine code dragging down performance for no reason.
  - drchaos 14y ago
    Also, it's probably easier to get a designer to improve the default theme (or make a new default theme), than to patch possible improvements into the core (when there is no theme engine). Separation of concerns is always a good thing. edit: seems they have no real theme engine, just a method to replace background image for header and footer. duh.
kriro 14y ago
Not much to say other than "I love LibreOffice" I'm by no means a power user but it gets the job done. For everything I do it is a 100% viable MS-Office replacement. Converting people to Linux would be a lot harder without it as well :) I use Writer for basic writing, nothing fancy. Same for Calc and I hold my lecture using Impress. I use Draw every now and then for quick and dirty stuff. Never used Base or Math explicitly. Keep up the good work it is appreciated. Edit: I have Googled for this a couple of times but never find anything. Is there an "Advanced LibreOffice" type book that anyone could recommend? I always make resolutions to use my office suite more efficient but never get around to it.
cs702 14y ago
LibreOffice has now left OpenOffice in the dust, and is a viable replacement of Microsoft Office for all but a tiny minority of users. LibreOffice Calc may not yet be as shiny as Microsoft Excel, but it works well and reliably -- I use it regularly with fairly large spreadsheets chock-full of array functions that manipulate vectors and matrices.[1] -- [1] Yes, LibreOffice forumals can manipulate and return vectors and matrices, not just single values -- see https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Array_Functions#What_is_an_Array.3F https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Array_Functions#What_is_an...
- r00fus 14y ago
  My major frustration with Office products (Excel specifically) was the cell limits (size, #cols, #rows) that prevented me from managing large quantities of data (e.g.: Excel 2003 could only manage 65k rows - IIRC, in 2007 that increased to 2M, but even that's too little for some heavy applications). Does LibreOffice have similar limts?
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    1 million rows as of v3.3 http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-3-new-features-and-fixes/ http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-3-new-features-and-fix...
  - TorKlingberg 14y ago
    If you have that much data it may be time to look into an other solution. Matlab, Octave or Python+NumPy are popular in science.
  - ganders 14y ago
    Have you seen powerpivot for excel? Bit off topic for this thread but allows you to work with biggish (>2m row) data sets through excel pivot tables
  - forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
    If you use so much data, forget about spreadsheets, learn numeric python and or R. If not you will be losing time every minute you spend in the spreadsheet.
chris_wot 14y ago
I love LibreOffice. That said, in my spare time, I've been looking through the code base, and my impressions are that it's too large. For instance, looking at the vcl module, which handles widgets, windows, etc. when I look at the number of classes my mind begins to boggle. I possibly (read: probably) speak from ignorance, but I use the function SVMain() [1] as an example. Instead of defining a purely abstract class with architecture specific classes derived from this, they have defined an extern hook function, then they run it, test to see if it returns false, and if so run the standard ImplSVMain function. This seems inelegant for two reasons: the code is somewhat unclear, and there seems to be two functions with lightly different names, one is an SVMain function that does something, the other is an implementation of a function... Yet both implement a functional part of the code base. There is even a comment that reads "the real SVMain.". Then there are the names... There is a "desktop" object that runs the main loop, the desktop being the application. [2] But there is an Application class [3], yet at the same time there's a DesktopEnvironmentContext class [4]. This seems to be some sort of misguided attempt at reimplementing a "desktop" metaphor, which is a legacy of early versions StarOffice. It was one of the first things ripped out when work started on OpenOffice.org, yet the class name still remains, making its purpose most unclear. Furthermore, for some reason they force the Application class to be subclassed. Which they do only once, via Application_Impl. But I have noticed that the base class has lots of empty non-pure functions, and only forces Main() to be a pure virtual function. What is the point of this? Another thing that I find makes the code harder to read is it uses a lot of Hungarian notation. This is a legacy code base, and I wasn't being sarcastic when I said I love LibreOffice. I think people like Michael Meeks and Kohei are amazing. But I see the code base as having been slapped together somewhat pver many years. And there are code smells and, frankly, code rot, throughout the source. It needs to be rearchitected (not rewritten). There is code in the code base that nobody dares touch (the legacy filters). The code is organised strangely, for example there are multiple places to find filters. At the same time, they have a system abstraction layer (sal), which has specific architectural and generic classes, but then I see that http://docs.libreoffice.org http://docs.libreoffice.org has modules like "android" and "iOS". There are literally thousands of classes in there. Go-oo sometime ago refactored away dozens of classes, I would think they could refactor away a lot more. I'm truly sorry if this seems harsh or ignorant by the way. It's not intended to be that way. It's just this code base is massive, so massive that its hard to understand how it all works. This in turn, IMO, may cause issues getting more volunteers. Not to mention too much refactoring might break things. 1. http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/svmain_8cxx_source.html#l00211 http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/svmain_8cxx_source.html... 2. http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Architecture/Process_Flow http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Architecture/Process_Flow 3. http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classApplication.html http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classApplication.html 4. http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classDesktopEnvironmentContext.html http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classDesktopEnvironment...
SeanDav 14y ago
How powerful/useful is the LibreOffice macro system, especially compared to VBA?
- fleetfox 14y ago
  You can use python.
- grandinj 14y ago
  It implements most of VBA and also has its own language called StarBasic.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Surio 14y ago
FWIW, another alternative to OpenOffice/LibreOffice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsoft_Office http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsoft_Office Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cn.wps.moffice_eng&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cn.wps.moffice... Office 2012 Free Suite: http://www.kingsoftstore.com/software/kingsoft-office-freeware http://www.kingsoftstore.com/software/kingsoft-office-freewa... I've used it. Mostly opens Office documents without too much formatting problems. It uses the Qt framework, so the UI looks neat. Hope it helps.
vamur 14y ago
Biggest issue with LibreOffice is how slow it is compared to Office. Even in Linux, Office running under Wine is faster than LibreOffice.
- grandinj 14y ago
  try the new release. It has been getting steadily faster.
sparx 14y ago
I am waiting for MS Office on Linux.
sparx 14y ago
I am waiting for MS Office on Linux.
mixmastamyk 14y ago
Nice work. - "Reduce Java code:" good, an unnecessary dependency, please continue. - "Themes" ? I don't understand why anyone would want their office suite to look different than other desktop apps? I sort of understand with a music player, but a word processor? Every time I see the blue gradient toolbars on MS Office clashing with my other apps I cringe. Reminds me of Myspace. - Where is outline mode? I have quite a few colleagues who won't use it until it arrives.
- dcminter 14y ago
  "Where is outline mode?" The bug's still open: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38262 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38262 Grandfathered in from: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959 It seems crazy to me that such a common usage mode doesn't seem to be driving any development work. I'm one of a large number of people who won't be using LibreOffice until that RFE's addressed properly (nope, Navigator view is not an equivalent thing).
  - mixmastamyk 14y ago
    Yep, I'm lucky in that I don't use large documents or office docs in general so it doesn't affect me, but I can't see how it will ever gain traction in pro circles without it.
xioxox 14y ago
I'll try it again, but OO/LO Impress PowerPoint replacement is particularly buggy. I often have to give scientific talks, and I'm always running into bugs. For example, various elements become fixed and uneditable, and figures often get mangled. The import filters occasionally mess up powerpoint documents, too. I wish I could avoid PowerPoint - I hate the ribbon and it can't cope with PDF figures.
elchief 14y ago
I wish to god they would make Calc work with Mondrian OLAP server.
rnadna 14y ago
I downloaded the new version, and tried it on a docx file that a colleague had sent me. In MSword, the file has 24 pages. In LibreOffice, it seems to have a bit over 5 pages. No error message, no dialog box ... it just gets to a certain string ($O_2$, expressed in latex format) and stops. If not for the fact that I have MSword, I'd email back to my colleague and ask her what the heck kind of a draft manuscript she was sending. Although I use the Excel copy quite a lot (for grading), I have yet to see the Word copy function properly in a professional document of any realistic complexity. I know, I should report the bug, but the material I'm looking at is under submission to a scientific journal, and will therefore be private until it may be published.
etfb 14y ago
Ted comes home early from work to discover his best friend in bed with his wife. "Frank," he cries. "I married her, so I have to! But why did you?" That rather old and tired joke (one of Isaac Asimov's, I believe) says how I feel about Libre Office. I use Ubuntu, so it's the only game in town if I want to edit documents and spreadsheets. But it may be unique in the world as the only software that's actively worse than Microsoft Office.
- etfb 14y ago
  Found the actual joke in Asimov's The Jokester at http://www.ippt.gov.pl/~vkoval/fantasy.html http://www.ippt.gov.pl/~vkoval/fantasy.html: "Johnson," he said, "came home unexpectedly from a business trip to find his wife in the arms of his best friend. He staggered back and said, 'Max! I'm married to the lady so I have to. But why you?'"
kristopolous 14y ago
I remember staroffice 5 (its ancient predecessor) in the late 90s. The interface was amazing to my eyes, for the time: http://linuxbook.orbdesigns.com/ch11/images/btlb1114.jpg http://linuxbook.orbdesigns.com/ch11/images/btlb1114.jpg and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/sointr-1.gif http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/sointr-1.gif The star office applications all played well with each other in this shell of an application that looked like windows 95. This is back when KDE was a new thing and many people were using FVWM ... it just looked so wonderfully sophisticated up against the desktop applications available for linux at the time. PS: http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soui-1.gif http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soui-1.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soint-4.gif http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soint-4.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-6.gif http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-6.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-5.gif http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-5.gif ... I don't know how it's taken them 15 years to start to be awesome again.
pilooch 14y ago
LO Impress has been a pain recently. Saving a presentation and re-opening it would yield garbage. I've been testing LO 4 for a few weeks now, and it seems that the problem has gone. Apart from this, LO does the job, we use it for automatically generating API doc in HTML from specs we write with it, and this is great. Not that there is any other viable option on Linux (that I know of). I wish I could have a Keynote-like on Linux. In the meantime, beamer does the job for quick & safe slide decks.
bborud 14y ago
For the past 23 years I have only very occasionally had the need to use Office-type applications. Today the typical uses of Office applications implies an outdated way of working. For example, my company lives and breathes through its internal wiki -- which is quite an accomplishment since we are owned by a company that still lives in the dark ages: mailing Office attachments to each other. Sure, the wiki software could have been a lot better. For one it needs an order of magnitude better performance. And it would be nice if the install wasn't such a messy affair. But it beats the alternative hands down. It beats mailing documents. It beats juggling multiple versions of documents. It beats overflowing mailserver quotas. Most of all it beats not having to run Windows XP because the people who came before you were stupid fuckups who decided to tie everything so closely to a single platform that they can only afford to move the company to a new OS version every 10 years. And then only after a herculean effort. Inbetween everyone runs on outdated software. For a whole decade. Real change doesn't come from offering marginal compatibility. Real change comes from not having stupid problems. LibreOffice is a solution to a problem you should not be having.
- visarga 14y ago
  I agree. Office apps are modeled after paper workflow. We live in a day of wikis, github, world-wide social networks and cloud storage with universal accessibility over all devices. Writing paper formatted documents is bad on many levels. It uses dead tree as a medium. It does not have the web of links that exist in a wiki, nor the tags and classifications that exist in a blog or on twitter. Documents can't be live updated for everyone. There is no versioning and no easy way for a whole group of people to edit on the same project. Information needs to be connected, searchable, instantly accessible and social.
lsiebert 14y ago
I like LibreOffice Calc, though I have issues on occasion. It feels... bulky I guess, but it certainly seems to be more complete then good docs spreadsheets. As an aside, just found out that you can use the perl module DBI:CSV: to treat a CSV as a DB and use SQL with it.
chmars 14y ago
Are the LibreOffice developers aware that most Mac users will not be able to start their application? The reason is simply OS X' default configuration: 'LibreOffice.app can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer. Your security preferences allow installation of only apps from the Mac Ap Store or identified developers.' I know, using the Ctrl key lets me confirm that I really want to run LibreOffice.app, however, how many Mac users know that?

149 points by endijs 14y ago

I still think this should've arrived with a more modern interface. At least I hope they get to that by the time port it to Android devices.

webwanderings 14y ago

The website looks terrible for 2013.

grakic 14y ago
Please send a mockup, improve copy text following the comunity goals or a better proposal for the site information flow. It will not be ignored.
testimoney2 14y ago
Software looks terrible for 2013
vacipr 14y ago
Come to hacker news,which is arguably the most ugly site I visit everyday.See this.
- testimoney2 14y ago
  Yes but hacker news is very minimalistic, I think minimalistic and ugly is ok. But on their website its hard to understand what is happening.
  - vacipr 14y ago
    It's actually pretty straight forward.A featured selection of new stuff and then new features categorized, some with screenshots.
- jre 14y ago
  I love the design and usability of hacker news. It's minimal, efficient, non-distracting, consistent and puts content first. I wish more news website would be like that. The libreoffice website, on the other hand, has a lot of visual elements (icons, colors) that don't really fit well with each other. Visual-heavy websites can be quite nice, but they need to be really thought through.
  - vacipr 14y ago
    I'm not going to get into the whole hacker news is magnificent debate.We all know most users are screaming for improvement. As for the libreofice site the only color I see is green which is what they usually use and the libreoffice icons. What am I missing ?
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      > We all know most users are screaming for improvement. Do they? A few times a year we get a "I made a better UI for HN" article and almost without fail everyone seems to respond "This is unneeded and worse. This reduces usability".
- sergiotapia 14y ago
  Two horrible abortions of a design don't make a right. :P With so many awesome people in this world, I'd like to think there is at least 1 great designer and front end guy who would donate time to completely scrap the current design and give it a facelift. Who wouldn't want that on their resume, "I designed the website for LIBREOFFICE." That's deserving of major kudos, at least in my book.
calinet6 14y ago
This is, in much harsher terms, basically what I came here to say. I completely agree. This is a stereotypical open-source software web site, and it shouldn't be. This goes to show the lack of attention to design detail that is no doubt influencing their whole product, and surely part of the reason it's not as successful as it should be. Deny it all you want, but webwanderings speaks the truth, and the truth needs to be heard if open source projects such as Libre are to be taken seriously—as they should be. Design is important, marketing is important, and they need to treat it that way.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  Ironically, you chose to talk about ugly design and how it prevents anyone from taking a technology seriously on Hacker News.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    HN isn't trying to appeal to the average news site user.
  - calinet6 14y ago
    Utterly irrelevant.
    - chris_wot 14y ago
      As irrelevant as the criticism of the LibreOffice website design.
      - BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
        Widespread usage and accessibility is specifically a goal of LibreOffice. That is assuredly not the case for HN.
        chris_wot 14y ago
        I didn't say that the website was fantastic. I merely said that it hasn't and won't prevent widespread usage and accessibility of LibreOffice. Ironically, HN doesn't have the greatest web design, yet it is extremely usable, and very popular. The way I see it, the LibreOffice devs are focussing on cleaning up the OpenOffice codebase, when they get the resources and time they can update the website. I'll give you an example of where "clean design" causes lots of problems. Go to the Gnome website. They used to have a lot of documentation for developers. And I mean highly meaty tutorials, discussion papers, usability studies, etc. There is documentation now, but it's appallingly awful. Did a clean design help Gnome? No. They cleaned it up all right - by removing anything of any use to anyone.
MattDL 14y ago
I actually really like their website; I don't like that it has such a small fixed width, but I'm quite drawn to the simple design. More than that it's very usable to, to each their own I guess.
dhimes 14y ago
You may not like the looks, but I am pleased that they are not throwing my donations at making the website pretty. I much prefer they make the program work better.
- r00fus 14y ago
  Thing is, these days it would probably only take a small outlay of cash (or finding the right, desperate pro-bono designer) to get a fairly good landing page. Nat Friedman of Xamarin laid this out pretty clearly in a blog post [1]. Just a damn themeforest template would do wonders. [1] http://nat.org/blog/2011/06/instant-company/ http://nat.org/blog/2011/06/instant-company/
jiggy2011 14y ago
At least it loads fast and is navigable. It looks like it was designed by a programmer which probably makes sense. Would it make sense for libreoffice to devote funds and resources to hiring designers that could be used to improve the office suite itself?
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  That depends on whether or not the site is repelling the sort of users LibreOffice wants to attract.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Difficult to say without an A/B test or similar. The site certainly doesn't look any worse than a great many fortune 500 websites that continue to do billions of dollars of business. It is also significantly more usable than many of those.
crististm 14y ago
Compared to what? It looks decent enough and it's even functional.
WayneDB 14y ago
Along similar lines - the name is terrible. Open Office was so much better.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  They wanted the name, but Oracle wouldn't give it to them.
  - WayneDB 14y ago
    I could be wrong, but - I thought Oracle did release the entire project, but they didn't move quick enough for the Libre Office devs who wanted it right away. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffice-to-apache/9035 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/oracle-gives-openoffic...
    - soperj 14y ago
      Yah didn't move quick enough. It took 2 years. Would you wait?
      - WayneDB 14y ago
        First of all, these people preemptively forked Open Office on September 28, 2011 after Oracle purchased Sun "over concerns that Oracle would either discontinue OpenOffice.org". They didn't wait until Oracle announced a discontinuation. Then Oracle discontinued support because of the fork. That was in April, 2012. So, it wasn't 2 years - more like 6 or 7 months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Initial_release http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Initial_release IMO, had the Libre Office crowd played their cards right, they could have saved a ton of work and had a better name.
        chris_wot 14y ago
        Wrong. "These people" had been having a lot of issues for many, many years with Sun. They actually created their fork in 2007 as part of Go-OO, due to an increasing frustration with not being able to contribute patches and enhancements back to OpenOffice.org. It was discontinued and folded into LibreOffice only later. That Oracle discontinued support is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it was that they never provided ready support or accepted enhancements or patches in the first place.

sgt 14y ago

While I think LibreOffice has its uses, I think the world is sort of moving away from desktop-based office software. I can't even remember the last time I used Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, it's probably more than 2-3 years ago. Then again, if you're a hardcore Word user, then the professional office suites still offer more functionality. (Additionally, not everybody is lucky enough to "work in the cloud" due to various constraints or restrictions).

Mahn 14y ago
I use spreadsheets practically every day, I highly doubt office desktop software is going away anytime soon.
edwinnathaniel 14y ago
I used it yesterday. My wife uses MS Excel and Word almost everyday. I think the world is not yet moving away from desktop-based office software :)
skittles 14y ago
Spreadsheets will be heavily used forever. Excel alone will keep Microsoft relevant in the business world. JavaScript gives us 1 numeric datatype, and there's no good way to load a gigabyte of numeric data into a web application.
- Osmium 14y ago
  "Forever" is a long time. Personally, even though there isn't a viable alternative right now, I'm optimistic there's one just around a corner. e.g. see this Python spreadsheet (which I only just discovered myself) here http://manns.github.com/pyspread/ http://manns.github.com/pyspread/ Python expressions in your grid cells, integrated with numpy and matplotlib, and (if you want) a 3D data grid! In any case, Excel is in many ways crufty and busy when a much more minimalist data-grid-view with powerful scripting (e.g. from Python) would probably be much better for power users.
  - koralatov 14y ago

jre 14y ago

I try to stay away from *Office suites as much as possible. It seems that whenever I use them to do anything more complicated than typing a short letter, everything starts to fall apart and I wish I had used Latex/R/python instead. On the other hand, LibreOffice is a very helpful piece of software to edit the occasional .doc attachment.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago
Writer is Good Enough to open a Word document I've gotten from someone else, and for what I mainly do with such documents, I actually prefer Writer to Word. For my own purposes, the only office application I really find myself reaching for is the spreadsheet. I'm a big supporter of free/open source software and I run Linux on all my personal computers, so it pains me to write this - but LibreOffice Calc just doesn't come anywhere close to comparing with the functionality, stability and polish of Excel. Using it is a steady aggravation, and I'm persuaded that the problem is not due to it being different from Excel - after all, other open source applications are different from their proprietary counterparts and I find them as good or better. The problem with Calc is that it just doesn't work very well. Everything seems to take one or two more steps than the equivalent action on Excel, the defaults aren't as helpful, and the application is far more prone to freeze/crash.
- brudgers 14y ago
  Office is Excel. It trumps consideration of any other suite for many businesses because it facilitates their running. It matters on the sixth floor where the executive offices are. Data manipulation is a domain in which lean never works and Excel is the opposite of lean. Decades of development in a corporate culture that encourages adding features has made Excel excel. Trimming math functions doesn't make sense because 10,000 more functions never clutter up the user experience. Excel is a programming environment - an IDE which includes drag and drop, a REPL, and macros (with respect to the data layer). It's syntax is simple [yes, I know it wasn't invented by Microsoft] and it's power significant. It's really the crown jewel in Microsoft's portfolio. It just works.
  - 14y ago

gavinlynch 14y ago

minor observation regarding the website's example images and their lightbox: really strange placement for the close "X" in the bottom right corner, right?

franze 14y ago

question: is still has some java dependencies, right?

edwinnathaniel 14y ago
So?
chris_wot 14y ago
It's baked in, but not strictly required.

Mahn 14y ago

Not sure why everyone sees LibreOffice as a Word replacement. Personally I use LibreOffice Calc all the time, I find it generally faster than excel. I also dislike the ribbon interface but I guess that's just personal preference.

alttab 14y ago
Anything outside home budgeting or double entry booking has infuriated me outside excel.

stroboskop 14y ago

You have to keep things in perspective. LibreOffice does not look nice but it is functional. What is its main function? For many people, it has completely replaced Microsoft Office. Of course MS Office has an even larger feature set, but few people max it out. Likewise, there are people who will prefer LaTeX but that's a small group. The advocates of web based office systems tend to ignore that desktop systems provide much more privacy. LibreOffice sits right in between those groups and is useful to many.

glazskunrukitis 14y ago
I think that there is a huge market for simplified office tools. Why don't we have standalone Google Docs for desktop? And I am not talking about a web app but a fully functional desktop one.
- runn1ng 14y ago
  I would much prefer 100% free (as-in-speech) Google Docs alternative. I want to be able to install Google Docs-like application on my own server.
  - pekk 14y ago
    Why not just run an office suite locally if that is your requirement?
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - Piskvorrr 14y ago
      Not locally: I've seen many organizations admire the synchronization and collaboration features of GDocs, with a major caveat: the data is centralized in the cloud provider's hands, not the organization's. "Oh look, you don't own your data anymore" is a very theoretical scenario, but "oh look, you suddenly can't access your data anymore, we're not bringing them back, and you have no recourse" has happened with many cloud storage services, for various reasons. Hosting your own network-based office web-app solution would be convenient for many...especially for the security.

milkbikis 14y ago

I've been using SkyDrive for a while now, and it generally feels more usable to me. Is there a reason people prefer LibreOffice over that? I haven't used it as much, but it feels like I can't be sure what the document will look like back in Microsoft Office once I'm done editing it.

elehack 14y ago
Reason #1: it runs on my platform. Reason #2: open source, so lock-in is (in theory) a non-problem so long as there are people who find it useful.

replax 14y ago

I am really surprised that no one mentioned the lack of OneNote, yet. Although it might not actually apply to libreoffice, if their ultimate goal is to replace ms office though then some really really good OneNote alternative has to be developed. OneNote and esp. Excel have to have an extremely good alternative for MS Office to become somewhat less important.

peapicker 14y ago

I can't believe they wasted time on "themes" for an office suite instead of coming up with a standard, clean look.

calinet6 14y ago
Classic programmer's solution to a design problem. "Oh they want it to look different? Here, make it look however you want! Problem solved." Problem not solved.
nextw33k 14y ago
One of the largest complains to LibreOffice has been its dated look. Given that time will always make something look dated, the developers probably thought that they should abstract the look to CSS or something and then make their lives easier down the line. The added benefit is now they can tell people that don't like the "dated" look to pick one of many. Whilst you might want a single clean look, you definition and someone elses might differ.
- BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
  Given how lofty office software generally is (especially when working on a big/dense document), I'd rather not have theme engine code dragging down performance for no reason.
- drchaos 14y ago
  Also, it's probably easier to get a designer to improve the default theme (or make a new default theme), than to patch possible improvements into the core (when there is no theme engine). Separation of concerns is always a good thing. edit: seems they have no real theme engine, just a method to replace background image for header and footer. duh.

kriro 14y ago

Not much to say other than "I love LibreOffice" I'm by no means a power user but it gets the job done. For everything I do it is a 100% viable MS-Office replacement. Converting people to Linux would be a lot harder without it as well :) I use Writer for basic writing, nothing fancy. Same for Calc and I hold my lecture using Impress. I use Draw every now and then for quick and dirty stuff. Never used Base or Math explicitly. Keep up the good work it is appreciated. Edit: I have Googled for this a couple of times but never find anything. Is there an "Advanced LibreOffice" type book that anyone could recommend? I always make resolutions to use my office suite more efficient but never get around to it.

cs702 14y ago

LibreOffice has now left OpenOffice in the dust, and is a viable replacement of Microsoft Office for all but a tiny minority of users. LibreOffice Calc may not yet be as shiny as Microsoft Excel, but it works well and reliably -- I use it regularly with fairly large spreadsheets chock-full of array functions that manipulate vectors and matrices.[1] -- [1] Yes, LibreOffice forumals can manipulate and return vectors and matrices, not just single values -- see https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Array_Functions#What_is_an_Array.3F https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Array_Functions#What_is_an...

r00fus 14y ago
My major frustration with Office products (Excel specifically) was the cell limits (size, #cols, #rows) that prevented me from managing large quantities of data (e.g.: Excel 2003 could only manage 65k rows - IIRC, in 2007 that increased to 2M, but even that's too little for some heavy applications). Does LibreOffice have similar limts?
- chris_wot 14y ago
  1 million rows as of v3.3 http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-3-new-features-and-fixes/ http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-3-new-features-and-fix...
- TorKlingberg 14y ago
  If you have that much data it may be time to look into an other solution. Matlab, Octave or Python+NumPy are popular in science.
- ganders 14y ago
  Have you seen powerpivot for excel? Bit off topic for this thread but allows you to work with biggish (>2m row) data sets through excel pivot tables
- forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
  If you use so much data, forget about spreadsheets, learn numeric python and or R. If not you will be losing time every minute you spend in the spreadsheet.

chris_wot 14y ago

I love LibreOffice. That said, in my spare time, I've been looking through the code base, and my impressions are that it's too large. For instance, looking at the vcl module, which handles widgets, windows, etc. when I look at the number of classes my mind begins to boggle. I possibly (read: probably) speak from ignorance, but I use the function SVMain() [1] as an example. Instead of defining a purely abstract class with architecture specific classes derived from this, they have defined an extern hook function, then they run it, test to see if it returns false, and if so run the standard ImplSVMain function. This seems inelegant for two reasons: the code is somewhat unclear, and there seems to be two functions with lightly different names, one is an SVMain function that does something, the other is an implementation of a function... Yet both implement a functional part of the code base. There is even a comment that reads "the real SVMain.". Then there are the names... There is a "desktop" object that runs the main loop, the desktop being the application. [2] But there is an Application class [3], yet at the same time there's a DesktopEnvironmentContext class [4]. This seems to be some sort of misguided attempt at reimplementing a "desktop" metaphor, which is a legacy of early versions StarOffice. It was one of the first things ripped out when work started on OpenOffice.org, yet the class name still remains, making its purpose most unclear. Furthermore, for some reason they force the Application class to be subclassed. Which they do only once, via Application_Impl. But I have noticed that the base class has lots of empty non-pure functions, and only forces Main() to be a pure virtual function. What is the point of this? Another thing that I find makes the code harder to read is it uses a lot of Hungarian notation. This is a legacy code base, and I wasn't being sarcastic when I said I love LibreOffice. I think people like Michael Meeks and Kohei are amazing. But I see the code base as having been slapped together somewhat pver many years. And there are code smells and, frankly, code rot, throughout the source. It needs to be rearchitected (not rewritten). There is code in the code base that nobody dares touch (the legacy filters). The code is organised strangely, for example there are multiple places to find filters. At the same time, they have a system abstraction layer (sal), which has specific architectural and generic classes, but then I see that http://docs.libreoffice.org http://docs.libreoffice.org has modules like "android" and "iOS". There are literally thousands of classes in there. Go-oo sometime ago refactored away dozens of classes, I would think they could refactor away a lot more. I'm truly sorry if this seems harsh or ignorant by the way. It's not intended to be that way. It's just this code base is massive, so massive that its hard to understand how it all works. This in turn, IMO, may cause issues getting more volunteers. Not to mention too much refactoring might break things. 1. http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/svmain_8cxx_source.html#l00211 http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/svmain_8cxx_source.html... 2. http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Architecture/Process_Flow http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Architecture/Process_Flow 3. http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classApplication.html http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classApplication.html 4. http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classDesktopEnvironmentContext.html http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classDesktopEnvironment...

SeanDav 14y ago

How powerful/useful is the LibreOffice macro system, especially compared to VBA?

fleetfox 14y ago
You can use python.
grandinj 14y ago
It implements most of VBA and also has its own language called StarBasic.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Surio 14y ago

FWIW, another alternative to OpenOffice/LibreOffice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsoft_Office http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsoft_Office Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cn.wps.moffice_eng&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cn.wps.moffice... Office 2012 Free Suite: http://www.kingsoftstore.com/software/kingsoft-office-freeware http://www.kingsoftstore.com/software/kingsoft-office-freewa... I've used it. Mostly opens Office documents without too much formatting problems. It uses the Qt framework, so the UI looks neat. Hope it helps.

vamur 14y ago

Biggest issue with LibreOffice is how slow it is compared to Office. Even in Linux, Office running under Wine is faster than LibreOffice.

grandinj 14y ago
try the new release. It has been getting steadily faster.

sparx 14y ago

I am waiting for MS Office on Linux.

sparx 14y ago

I am waiting for MS Office on Linux.

mixmastamyk 14y ago

Nice work. - "Reduce Java code:" good, an unnecessary dependency, please continue. - "Themes" ? I don't understand why anyone would want their office suite to look different than other desktop apps? I sort of understand with a music player, but a word processor? Every time I see the blue gradient toolbars on MS Office clashing with my other apps I cringe. Reminds me of Myspace. - Where is outline mode? I have quite a few colleagues who won't use it until it arrives.

dcminter 14y ago
"Where is outline mode?" The bug's still open: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38262 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38262 Grandfathered in from: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959 It seems crazy to me that such a common usage mode doesn't seem to be driving any development work. I'm one of a large number of people who won't be using LibreOffice until that RFE's addressed properly (nope, Navigator view is not an equivalent thing).
- mixmastamyk 14y ago
  Yep, I'm lucky in that I don't use large documents or office docs in general so it doesn't affect me, but I can't see how it will ever gain traction in pro circles without it.

xioxox 14y ago

I'll try it again, but OO/LO Impress PowerPoint replacement is particularly buggy. I often have to give scientific talks, and I'm always running into bugs. For example, various elements become fixed and uneditable, and figures often get mangled. The import filters occasionally mess up powerpoint documents, too. I wish I could avoid PowerPoint - I hate the ribbon and it can't cope with PDF figures.

elchief 14y ago

I wish to god they would make Calc work with Mondrian OLAP server.

rnadna 14y ago

I downloaded the new version, and tried it on a docx file that a colleague had sent me. In MSword, the file has 24 pages. In LibreOffice, it seems to have a bit over 5 pages. No error message, no dialog box ... it just gets to a certain string ($O_2$, expressed in latex format) and stops. If not for the fact that I have MSword, I'd email back to my colleague and ask her what the heck kind of a draft manuscript she was sending. Although I use the Excel copy quite a lot (for grading), I have yet to see the Word copy function properly in a professional document of any realistic complexity. I know, I should report the bug, but the material I'm looking at is under submission to a scientific journal, and will therefore be private until it may be published.

etfb 14y ago

Ted comes home early from work to discover his best friend in bed with his wife. "Frank," he cries. "I married her, so I have to! But why did you?" That rather old and tired joke (one of Isaac Asimov's, I believe) says how I feel about Libre Office. I use Ubuntu, so it's the only game in town if I want to edit documents and spreadsheets. But it may be unique in the world as the only software that's actively worse than Microsoft Office.

etfb 14y ago
Found the actual joke in Asimov's The Jokester at http://www.ippt.gov.pl/~vkoval/fantasy.html http://www.ippt.gov.pl/~vkoval/fantasy.html: "Johnson," he said, "came home unexpectedly from a business trip to find his wife in the arms of his best friend. He staggered back and said, 'Max! I'm married to the lady so I have to. But why you?'"

kristopolous 14y ago

I remember staroffice 5 (its ancient predecessor) in the late 90s. The interface was amazing to my eyes, for the time: http://linuxbook.orbdesigns.com/ch11/images/btlb1114.jpg http://linuxbook.orbdesigns.com/ch11/images/btlb1114.jpg and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/sointr-1.gif http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/sointr-1.gif The star office applications all played well with each other in this shell of an application that looked like windows 95. This is back when KDE was a new thing and many people were using FVWM ... it just looked so wonderfully sophisticated up against the desktop applications available for linux at the time. PS: http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soui-1.gif http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soui-1.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soint-4.gif http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soint-4.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-6.gif http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-6.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-5.gif http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-5.gif ... I don't know how it's taken them 15 years to start to be awesome again.

pilooch 14y ago

LO Impress has been a pain recently. Saving a presentation and re-opening it would yield garbage. I've been testing LO 4 for a few weeks now, and it seems that the problem has gone. Apart from this, LO does the job, we use it for automatically generating API doc in HTML from specs we write with it, and this is great. Not that there is any other viable option on Linux (that I know of). I wish I could have a Keynote-like on Linux. In the meantime, beamer does the job for quick & safe slide decks.

bborud 14y ago

For the past 23 years I have only very occasionally had the need to use Office-type applications. Today the typical uses of Office applications implies an outdated way of working. For example, my company lives and breathes through its internal wiki -- which is quite an accomplishment since we are owned by a company that still lives in the dark ages: mailing Office attachments to each other. Sure, the wiki software could have been a lot better. For one it needs an order of magnitude better performance. And it would be nice if the install wasn't such a messy affair. But it beats the alternative hands down. It beats mailing documents. It beats juggling multiple versions of documents. It beats overflowing mailserver quotas. Most of all it beats not having to run Windows XP because the people who came before you were stupid fuckups who decided to tie everything so closely to a single platform that they can only afford to move the company to a new OS version every 10 years. And then only after a herculean effort. Inbetween everyone runs on outdated software. For a whole decade. Real change doesn't come from offering marginal compatibility. Real change comes from not having stupid problems. LibreOffice is a solution to a problem you should not be having.

visarga 14y ago
I agree. Office apps are modeled after paper workflow. We live in a day of wikis, github, world-wide social networks and cloud storage with universal accessibility over all devices. Writing paper formatted documents is bad on many levels. It uses dead tree as a medium. It does not have the web of links that exist in a wiki, nor the tags and classifications that exist in a blog or on twitter. Documents can't be live updated for everyone. There is no versioning and no easy way for a whole group of people to edit on the same project. Information needs to be connected, searchable, instantly accessible and social.

lsiebert 14y ago

I like LibreOffice Calc, though I have issues on occasion. It feels... bulky I guess, but it certainly seems to be more complete then good docs spreadsheets. As an aside, just found out that you can use the perl module DBI:CSV: to treat a CSV as a DB and use SQL with it.

chmars 14y ago

Are the LibreOffice developers aware that most Mac users will not be able to start their application? The reason is simply OS X' default configuration: 'LibreOffice.app can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer. Your security preferences allow installation of only apps from the Mac Ap Store or identified developers.' I know, using the Ctrl key lets me confirm that I really want to run LibreOffice.app, however, how many Mac users know that?