10 ms·

LibreOffice 4.1 New Features and Fixes

112 points by tlongren 13y ago

nonchalance 13y ago
What is the state of the relationship between OpenOffice and LibreOffice? I remember that there were some licensing issues that caused the fork in the first place. Are they at feature parity? Any chance the two projects will merge ?
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- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  LibreOffice has had more development time (both features and bugs) than OpenOffice. OpenOffice was entirely dead for over a year and then Apache put the effort into redeveloping features so they could be relicensed under the Apache license instead of the L/GPL. The one big addition to OpenOffice was the contribution of IBM's Lotus Symphony sidebar properties dialogs. LibreOffice 4.1.0 adds these as well but considers them 'experimental' as they are new and largely untested. LibreOffice has a larger and more active development team and can pull bug-fixes and features from OpenOffice as the L/GPL 3.0 is Apache compatible. OpenOffice can not pull features and bug fixes from LibreOffice unless they re-license as L/GPL. The projects are unlikely to merge. Every major Linux/Debian/BSD distro now ships with LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. OpenOffice may still be more popular on Windows, though, due to name recognition. I don't know what the public numbers are in terms of downloads for the same period to compare.
- ExpiredLink 13y ago
  > What is the state of the relationship between OpenOffice and LibreOffice? LibreOffice won, Oracle lost. Game over.
  - synchronise 13y ago
    Apache is still in the game, and they're doing a pretty good job.
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  - mariuz 13y ago
    OpenOffice download daily count is going down so yes LibreOffice has won in long term http://www.openoffice.org/stats/downloads.html http://www.openoffice.org/stats/downloads.html also the number of contributions is insane for libo http://documentfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/developers2.jpg http://documentfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/develo...
interpol_p 13y ago
Maybe I'm being overly fussy. But I think they should polish their UI. For example https://www.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/EN-Project_images/4.1NewFeatures/Calc/ChartWizardSteppedLine.png https://www.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/EN-Project_images... — the "Properties" button and "Line Type" drop down are completely misaligned. These design issues add up and end up giving a poor impression of the software, regardless of its features.
- davidw 13y ago
  > I think they should polish their UI. Probably. They may need help though - it's a big project with a lot of code that runs on various platforms. Did you file a bug report, or, if nothing else, drop them an email?
  - interpol_p 13y ago
    This image was selected and highlighted on their new features page. They must be aware of the layout issues, surely? I'm not suggesting that this is horrible software, just that it gives a bad first impression. I am suggesting that these sorts of screenshots shouldn't be used in advertising material until they are polished.
- JulianMorrison 13y ago
  Looking through the change log, clearly they are doing, and clearly it's a big job of work which isn't finished yet.
- PhearTheCeal 13y ago
  Why don't you help do something about it then? At least a bug report? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/bug/ https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/bug/
  - interpol_p 13y ago
    The main reason I referred to this image is because they are using it to advertise a new feature. This was an image that was selected for marketing purposes. My point is that doing such a thing can make a bad impression. Show only the polished parts of the app.
Jakob 13y ago
Wow, much faster startup than 4.0. I liked > don't parse fourteen thousand lines of label descriptions on every startup, defer them until a sheet of labels is used
mrng 13y ago
Anyone use it along with Apache's OpenOffice? Which one is (in your experience) less buggy/more stable in its current incarnation?
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  I much prefer LibreOffice. OpenOffice fell behind during the hiatus when a majority of their development team quit to form LibreOffice. LibreOffice has a big headstart on OO and a more active development team. Plus, they can pull features and bug fixes from OpenOffice while the OpenOffice team can't pull from LibreOffice due to licensing.
- bkor 13y ago
  LibreOffice works on multiple versions at the same time. So 4.1.0 is just out, that'll be advertised as "potentially buggy" (forgot what name they gave it). Then they will still continue to release new updates for 4.0.x and IIRC also the version before that. So suggest LibreOffice, as you can choose what kind of stability guarantee is good for you.
- synchronise 13y ago
  I've used both, but I stuck with Apache Openoffice because it's usually given me less grief than Libreoffice, it also integrates better with OSX than Libreoffice does.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  As you can see from the earlier child posts, opinions differ! Using yum localinstall, I installed LO4.1 and oOo4.0 on a CentOS based desktop last night along with the native LO3.4 install. At present, I'm finding oOo has scrolling issues (nvidia graphics, proprietary drivers) and the 'use hardware acceleration' option is un-ticked and greyed out on installation. LO4.1 has the option ticked and editable on installation.
artagnon 13y ago
Dinosaur. We're moving towards minimal formatting, and web-based solutions (like Google Docs). The ones who need typesetting are stuck with LaTeX anyway.
- Silhouette 13y ago
  We're moving towards minimal formatting, and web-based solutions (like Google Docs). You might be. Some of us have been moving back the other way, after discovering that doing real work using children's toys instead of grown-up tools is inefficient and frequently produces substandard results. People have written entire books specifically on how to present information effectively, on top of a vast body of knowledge about graphic design, typography, and the like. The fact that a typical web-based word processor today offers only trivial formatting tools doesn't invalidate all of that previous experience and understanding; it just means that a typical web-based word processor today isn't very good at producing well-presented documents.
  - dctoedt 13y ago
    > The fact that a typical web-based word processor today offers only trivial formatting tools doesn't invalidate all of that previous experience and understanding; it just means that a typical web-based word processor today isn't very good at producing well-presented documents. Or it could be that for many people, "good enough" is good enough; they simply don't care about the incremental benefits of "well-presented documents" enough to abandon the convenience of Web-based word processors. It's sort of like the audiophiles who love vinyl record albums and vacuum-tube amplifiers but can only listen in their sound rooms, versus the iPhone users who can take their 10,000 songs everywhere they go.
    - Silhouette 13y ago
      Or it could be that for many people, "good enough" is good enough I don't think there's any "could" about it. What you said is certainly true, and a huge proportion of the most successful web apps have been built on that premise, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, that doesn't mean those who still need or want something of higher quality are dinosaurs who are somehow being left behind the times. While I understand your music analogy, I don't think the relative differences in quality and flexibility are very similar at all in the two cases.
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benatkin 13y ago
When will Apache's OpenOffice be ready? I hate it when mean corporations like Oracle set out to crush community projects, but I hate the GPL more.
- bkor 13y ago
  If you Google or visit the website you'll notice that AOO released 4.0 a few days ago.
  - benatkin 13y ago
    I meant when will it be good enough. I'm looking for anecdotes, not particulars. Several people in this thread have expressed that at present LibreOffice is much better than OpenOffice. I'm wondering how much better and if enough work is being done on AOO that its expected to catch up anytime soon.
    - takluyver 13y ago
      'Good enough' really depends what you need it for. I understand that LO has more people working on it than AOO, so I wouldn't expect the latter to catch up unless there's some big shift in the landscape.
      - brokenparser 13y ago
        StarOffice was already good enough over a decade ago for me to buy it. Back then, WordPerfect was still around. Today, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are the last of their kind but the latter has a much quicker development pace. They could just box it up and ship it like OpenBSD does, 10/10 would buy again regardless of how they call it.
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      I think you will find the current (4.0) oOo 'good enough'. The differences between oOo 4.0 and LO 4.1 seem to be minor but noticeable. I used oOo for years through the 2.x and 3.0x incarnations and produced a lot of work with it.
mikemoka 13y ago
I appreciate the effort of everyone involved in this complex project but I think that we should see something like an opensource replacement to google docs in our future
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  The problem with that is the issue of storage and functionality (aka, you have to host it). No one is really going to pay to host it or roll their own when there's a 'free' version already available. And the fact that while the word processor in Google Docs is moderately functional, everything else in the suite is nowhere near a replacement for the actual applications.
- krmboya 13y ago
  I believe it was their plan to create both an Android and a web version. Just can't find the link to the video..
mililani 13y ago
I would forgo all of these new features if LibreOffice would create more compatible MS Office docs. As it stands, I can no longer use LibreOffice in my current work environment. Everyone complains my MS converted docs do not open correctly, AND VICE VERSA, on their MS Office apps.
- bkor 13y ago
  If not confidential, could you please file bugs regarding bad conversions? LibreOffice actually has various test cases to make sure they do not regress such bugs.
- stephen_g 13y ago
  MS Office support has been coming a long way over the last few releases - some massive improvements in this release and 4.1. You can see come examples of what's been fixed in this version here - http://vmiklos.hu/blog/lo-41-ooxml-improvements.html http://vmiklos.hu/blog/lo-41-ooxml-improvements.html (and there's a link there to what was fixed in the last version). If you are having issues with it on work documents, you could really help out in having them fixed by trying to replicate each problem you find in a sample document, and attaching that to a bug report. Far better than just hoping someone notices it and fixes it.
  - slacka 13y ago
    I've filed almost 40 MSO interop bugs with LO and 20 with AO over the past as 5 years. Far as I can tell only about 3 or 4 of them have been fixed. This is a personal issue with me, because I lost some face with the owner. I had pushed for OO instead of MSO 2007/2010, but after a partial migration, it was clear OO was not up to the task.
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shirederby 13y ago
> Port Agenda Wizard from Java to python. Removed 11 files, 5345 lines of java code (Xisco Faulí) > Port Web Wizard from Java to python. 140 files changed, 5076 (+), 11416 (-). Removed 55 files, 10426 lines of java code (Javier Fernandez) So it looks like they're trying to scrub out the Java parts (except perhaps in Base). Does anyone know if this is the case?
- bkor 13y ago
  Michael Meeks once said they want to get rid of as much of Java as possible. Not sure of all the reasons. Just having Java enabled in OO.org used to be a major cause of OO.org starting up slowly. I haven't checked if that is still the case in LibreOffice, but not needing Java is quite nice. IIRC the Java dependency was not really made on technical reasons, more that either the developers (Sun) knew+liked it or that they wanted to push it. I really appreciate that they're reducing the amount of languages in the project, makes it easier for new developers to join. There are loads of things that they're doing just to make it easier for developers. Pretty weird reason to prefer LibreOffice because of this, but that's me :P
- buovjaga 13y ago
  Yep, and even in Base: http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/18322/is-there-any-plan-to-ditch-java-in-the-future-and-use-only-cc-code/ http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/18322/is-there-any-pl...
  - mariuz 13y ago
    Firebird will be the default database instead of hsql in Base so yes java will be removed in the future http://www.ahunt.org/2013/07/firebird-now-in-master/ http://www.ahunt.org/2013/07/firebird-now-in-master/ http://www.ahunt.org/2013/05/gsoc-2013-libreoffice-firebird-sql-connector/ http://www.ahunt.org/2013/05/gsoc-2013-libreoffice-firebird-...
elchief 13y ago
I would love to see LibreOffice Calc work with XMLA OLAP servers, like Mondrian. This would be a major competitive advantage to Excel, which can only talk to SQL Server, or to others via very expensive plugins.
- ygra 13y ago
  Excel can use any OLE DB driver or ODBC just fine to access other databases. It's not restricted to Access and SQL Server. From the dated look of the dialog windows involved I'd say it's been that way for a long time and isn't new in 2010.
  - bkor 13y ago
    OLAP is not like SQL or ODBC. It shows things in a cube. OP is talking about OLAP, not just SQL/some database (which is of course works perfectly fine). Note: Aside from knowing that OLAP is different, not much practical knowledge.
    - ygra 13y ago
      Ah, then I got the wrong idea about them mentioning SQL Server.
  - elchief 13y ago
    I should have said "Excel can only talk OLAP to SQL Server". It can talk ODBC/OLEDB to many databases.
analog31 13y ago
Any faster? My one reason for clinging to Excel is the speed of computations involving thousands of cells, including graphing.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  Extremely fast. In some cases, they load Excel spreadsheets faster than Excel 2010.
  - Joeri 13y ago
    Loading != calculation. Excel has a multi-threaded calculation engine: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/bb687899.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/bb687899.aspx Apparently LO does not: http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/5371/is-lo-calc-capable-for-smp/ http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/5371/is-lo-calc-capab...
    - skriticos2 13y ago
      There is an effort on the way to use the GPU for computation, though that's still some time off. http://www.datamation.com/applications/libreoffice-accelerates-open-source-spreadsheets-thanks-to-amd.html http://www.datamation.com/applications/libreoffice-accelerat...
    - chris_wot 13y ago
      Nothing like high speed inaccuracies.
chris_wot 13y ago
"A very large number of bugs have been fixed at an estimate of around 3000 bugs, of which 400 came from authors with apache.org mail addresses." I believe that the Apache OpenOffice developers have been complaining that the LO guys just cherry-picks their changes and don't do anything. This should hopefully put paid to that complaint!
qoo 13y ago
Meh. I've been using their 4.1 RC. CSV filtering / sorting / manipulation is still dog-slow for large files (>10MBytes).
laurent123456 13y ago
> Integration of libmwaw written by Laurent Alonso brings support for a multitude of pre-OSX Mac word-processing documents in different file-formats. Although it's great to support very old formats, I wonder if it makes sense to integrate this to the main distribution, and thus increase the code size with features few people need. They should have some kind of plugin system to support this.
- mattst88 13y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. It uses the external libmwaw library, like it already uses libwpd (for WordPerfect) and libwps (for Microsoft Works).
  - laurent123456 13y ago
    Oh I see, I assumed it was compiled into the main binary, but in fact it's an external library that's only loaded when opening the document, right?
slacka 13y ago
I would be happy if LibreOffice didn't add a single feature for the next year and did the following: * Improved MS Office Interoperability * Fixed bugs * Reduced memory usage/improved performance In fact, those are the primary reasons my company abandoned our plans to migrate from MSO to LO. I have filed several bug reports with both the AO/LO teams on issues such with incorrectly importing NetSuite generated Excel documents for our sales team. Most of the bugs were validated, opened, and then ignored for the past year.
- _pmf_ 13y ago
  > Improved MS Office Interoperability The problem is that this is a moving target (and event more in motion due to Microsoft's need to port this to some mobile platform, so no matter how much is invested in this issue, they will never get close to acceptable.
  - ZeroMinx 13y ago
    Yes, it is a moving target, but you can still get it to a very solid good level. In the past it's always been a few years between updates, and they have version details in the files, so you can say "Supports Word 2007 files" and not worry about Word 2016. I've written a bunch of Perl code (that I should open source.. maybe some day. anyone here'd find that useful?) for creating and editing docx files. It's not that hard -- it's all XML! EDIT: I was using a LibreOffice daemon before, but I did this code just because Libre had so many bugs / missing features when converting a document to docx.
    - slacka 13y ago
      Agreed MS 97-2003 .doc is NOT a moving target. Back in 2008 when we were considering moving from MSO 2003 to OO or SoftMaker Office, SoftMaker had near perfect MSO import filters. 5 years later, and only 3 of the 14 .doc import bugs that I filed with OO (now on AOO tracker) have been fixed. It's too bad the Oracle didn't take OO under their wings. With their resources they could have turned it into a true competitor to MSO. As it stands now, volunteers enjoy adding new features not bug fixing or scouring the 200 page OpenXML spec. sheet.
mikevm 13y ago
Has LibreOffice reached parity with MS Office 97 yet?

112 points by tlongren 13y ago

What is the state of the relationship between OpenOffice and LibreOffice? I remember that there were some licensing issues that caused the fork in the first place. Are they at feature parity? Any chance the two projects will merge ?

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JohnTHaller 13y ago
LibreOffice has had more development time (both features and bugs) than OpenOffice. OpenOffice was entirely dead for over a year and then Apache put the effort into redeveloping features so they could be relicensed under the Apache license instead of the L/GPL. The one big addition to OpenOffice was the contribution of IBM's Lotus Symphony sidebar properties dialogs. LibreOffice 4.1.0 adds these as well but considers them 'experimental' as they are new and largely untested. LibreOffice has a larger and more active development team and can pull bug-fixes and features from OpenOffice as the L/GPL 3.0 is Apache compatible. OpenOffice can not pull features and bug fixes from LibreOffice unless they re-license as L/GPL. The projects are unlikely to merge. Every major Linux/Debian/BSD distro now ships with LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. OpenOffice may still be more popular on Windows, though, due to name recognition. I don't know what the public numbers are in terms of downloads for the same period to compare.
ExpiredLink 13y ago
> What is the state of the relationship between OpenOffice and LibreOffice? LibreOffice won, Oracle lost. Game over.
- synchronise 13y ago
  Apache is still in the game, and they're doing a pretty good job.
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- mariuz 13y ago
  OpenOffice download daily count is going down so yes LibreOffice has won in long term http://www.openoffice.org/stats/downloads.html http://www.openoffice.org/stats/downloads.html also the number of contributions is insane for libo http://documentfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/developers2.jpg http://documentfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/develo...

interpol_p 13y ago

Maybe I'm being overly fussy. But I think they should polish their UI. For example https://www.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/EN-Project_images/4.1NewFeatures/Calc/ChartWizardSteppedLine.png https://www.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/EN-Project_images... — the "Properties" button and "Line Type" drop down are completely misaligned. These design issues add up and end up giving a poor impression of the software, regardless of its features.

davidw 13y ago
> I think they should polish their UI. Probably. They may need help though - it's a big project with a lot of code that runs on various platforms. Did you file a bug report, or, if nothing else, drop them an email?
- interpol_p 13y ago
  This image was selected and highlighted on their new features page. They must be aware of the layout issues, surely? I'm not suggesting that this is horrible software, just that it gives a bad first impression. I am suggesting that these sorts of screenshots shouldn't be used in advertising material until they are polished.
JulianMorrison 13y ago
Looking through the change log, clearly they are doing, and clearly it's a big job of work which isn't finished yet.
PhearTheCeal 13y ago
Why don't you help do something about it then? At least a bug report? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/bug/ https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/bug/
- interpol_p 13y ago
  The main reason I referred to this image is because they are using it to advertise a new feature. This was an image that was selected for marketing purposes. My point is that doing such a thing can make a bad impression. Show only the polished parts of the app.

Jakob 13y ago

Wow, much faster startup than 4.0. I liked > don't parse fourteen thousand lines of label descriptions on every startup, defer them until a sheet of labels is used

mrng 13y ago

Anyone use it along with Apache's OpenOffice? Which one is (in your experience) less buggy/more stable in its current incarnation?

JohnTHaller 13y ago
I much prefer LibreOffice. OpenOffice fell behind during the hiatus when a majority of their development team quit to form LibreOffice. LibreOffice has a big headstart on OO and a more active development team. Plus, they can pull features and bug fixes from OpenOffice while the OpenOffice team can't pull from LibreOffice due to licensing.
bkor 13y ago
LibreOffice works on multiple versions at the same time. So 4.1.0 is just out, that'll be advertised as "potentially buggy" (forgot what name they gave it). Then they will still continue to release new updates for 4.0.x and IIRC also the version before that. So suggest LibreOffice, as you can choose what kind of stability guarantee is good for you.
synchronise 13y ago
I've used both, but I stuck with Apache Openoffice because it's usually given me less grief than Libreoffice, it also integrates better with OSX than Libreoffice does.
keithpeter 13y ago
As you can see from the earlier child posts, opinions differ! Using yum localinstall, I installed LO4.1 and oOo4.0 on a CentOS based desktop last night along with the native LO3.4 install. At present, I'm finding oOo has scrolling issues (nvidia graphics, proprietary drivers) and the 'use hardware acceleration' option is un-ticked and greyed out on installation. LO4.1 has the option ticked and editable on installation.

artagnon 13y ago

Dinosaur. We're moving towards minimal formatting, and web-based solutions (like Google Docs). The ones who need typesetting are stuck with LaTeX anyway.

Silhouette 13y ago
We're moving towards minimal formatting, and web-based solutions (like Google Docs). You might be. Some of us have been moving back the other way, after discovering that doing real work using children's toys instead of grown-up tools is inefficient and frequently produces substandard results. People have written entire books specifically on how to present information effectively, on top of a vast body of knowledge about graphic design, typography, and the like. The fact that a typical web-based word processor today offers only trivial formatting tools doesn't invalidate all of that previous experience and understanding; it just means that a typical web-based word processor today isn't very good at producing well-presented documents.
- dctoedt 13y ago
  > The fact that a typical web-based word processor today offers only trivial formatting tools doesn't invalidate all of that previous experience and understanding; it just means that a typical web-based word processor today isn't very good at producing well-presented documents. Or it could be that for many people, "good enough" is good enough; they simply don't care about the incremental benefits of "well-presented documents" enough to abandon the convenience of Web-based word processors. It's sort of like the audiophiles who love vinyl record albums and vacuum-tube amplifiers but can only listen in their sound rooms, versus the iPhone users who can take their 10,000 songs everywhere they go.
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    Or it could be that for many people, "good enough" is good enough I don't think there's any "could" about it. What you said is certainly true, and a huge proportion of the most successful web apps have been built on that premise, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, that doesn't mean those who still need or want something of higher quality are dinosaurs who are somehow being left behind the times. While I understand your music analogy, I don't think the relative differences in quality and flexibility are very similar at all in the two cases.

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benatkin 13y ago

When will Apache's OpenOffice be ready? I hate it when mean corporations like Oracle set out to crush community projects, but I hate the GPL more.

bkor 13y ago
If you Google or visit the website you'll notice that AOO released 4.0 a few days ago.
- benatkin 13y ago
  I meant when will it be good enough. I'm looking for anecdotes, not particulars. Several people in this thread have expressed that at present LibreOffice is much better than OpenOffice. I'm wondering how much better and if enough work is being done on AOO that its expected to catch up anytime soon.
  - takluyver 13y ago
    'Good enough' really depends what you need it for. I understand that LO has more people working on it than AOO, so I wouldn't expect the latter to catch up unless there's some big shift in the landscape.
    - brokenparser 13y ago
      StarOffice was already good enough over a decade ago for me to buy it. Back then, WordPerfect was still around. Today, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are the last of their kind but the latter has a much quicker development pace. They could just box it up and ship it like OpenBSD does, 10/10 would buy again regardless of how they call it.
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    I think you will find the current (4.0) oOo 'good enough'. The differences between oOo 4.0 and LO 4.1 seem to be minor but noticeable. I used oOo for years through the 2.x and 3.0x incarnations and produced a lot of work with it.

mikemoka 13y ago

I appreciate the effort of everyone involved in this complex project but I think that we should see something like an opensource replacement to google docs in our future

JohnTHaller 13y ago
The problem with that is the issue of storage and functionality (aka, you have to host it). No one is really going to pay to host it or roll their own when there's a 'free' version already available. And the fact that while the word processor in Google Docs is moderately functional, everything else in the suite is nowhere near a replacement for the actual applications.
krmboya 13y ago
I believe it was their plan to create both an Android and a web version. Just can't find the link to the video..

mililani 13y ago

I would forgo all of these new features if LibreOffice would create more compatible MS Office docs. As it stands, I can no longer use LibreOffice in my current work environment. Everyone complains my MS converted docs do not open correctly, AND VICE VERSA, on their MS Office apps.

bkor 13y ago
If not confidential, could you please file bugs regarding bad conversions? LibreOffice actually has various test cases to make sure they do not regress such bugs.
stephen_g 13y ago
MS Office support has been coming a long way over the last few releases - some massive improvements in this release and 4.1. You can see come examples of what's been fixed in this version here - http://vmiklos.hu/blog/lo-41-ooxml-improvements.html http://vmiklos.hu/blog/lo-41-ooxml-improvements.html (and there's a link there to what was fixed in the last version). If you are having issues with it on work documents, you could really help out in having them fixed by trying to replicate each problem you find in a sample document, and attaching that to a bug report. Far better than just hoping someone notices it and fixes it.
- slacka 13y ago
  I've filed almost 40 MSO interop bugs with LO and 20 with AO over the past as 5 years. Far as I can tell only about 3 or 4 of them have been fixed. This is a personal issue with me, because I lost some face with the owner. I had pushed for OO instead of MSO 2007/2010, but after a partial migration, it was clear OO was not up to the task.

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shirederby 13y ago

> Port Agenda Wizard from Java to python. Removed 11 files, 5345 lines of java code (Xisco Faulí) > Port Web Wizard from Java to python. 140 files changed, 5076 (+), 11416 (-). Removed 55 files, 10426 lines of java code (Javier Fernandez) So it looks like they're trying to scrub out the Java parts (except perhaps in Base). Does anyone know if this is the case?

bkor 13y ago
Michael Meeks once said they want to get rid of as much of Java as possible. Not sure of all the reasons. Just having Java enabled in OO.org used to be a major cause of OO.org starting up slowly. I haven't checked if that is still the case in LibreOffice, but not needing Java is quite nice. IIRC the Java dependency was not really made on technical reasons, more that either the developers (Sun) knew+liked it or that they wanted to push it. I really appreciate that they're reducing the amount of languages in the project, makes it easier for new developers to join. There are loads of things that they're doing just to make it easier for developers. Pretty weird reason to prefer LibreOffice because of this, but that's me :P
buovjaga 13y ago
Yep, and even in Base: http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/18322/is-there-any-plan-to-ditch-java-in-the-future-and-use-only-cc-code/ http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/18322/is-there-any-pl...
- mariuz 13y ago
  Firebird will be the default database instead of hsql in Base so yes java will be removed in the future http://www.ahunt.org/2013/07/firebird-now-in-master/ http://www.ahunt.org/2013/07/firebird-now-in-master/ http://www.ahunt.org/2013/05/gsoc-2013-libreoffice-firebird-sql-connector/ http://www.ahunt.org/2013/05/gsoc-2013-libreoffice-firebird-...

elchief 13y ago

I would love to see LibreOffice Calc work with XMLA OLAP servers, like Mondrian. This would be a major competitive advantage to Excel, which can only talk to SQL Server, or to others via very expensive plugins.

ygra 13y ago
Excel can use any OLE DB driver or ODBC just fine to access other databases. It's not restricted to Access and SQL Server. From the dated look of the dialog windows involved I'd say it's been that way for a long time and isn't new in 2010.
- bkor 13y ago
  OLAP is not like SQL or ODBC. It shows things in a cube. OP is talking about OLAP, not just SQL/some database (which is of course works perfectly fine). Note: Aside from knowing that OLAP is different, not much practical knowledge.
  - ygra 13y ago
    Ah, then I got the wrong idea about them mentioning SQL Server.
- elchief 13y ago
  I should have said "Excel can only talk OLAP to SQL Server". It can talk ODBC/OLEDB to many databases.

analog31 13y ago

Any faster? My one reason for clinging to Excel is the speed of computations involving thousands of cells, including graphing.

chris_wot 13y ago
Extremely fast. In some cases, they load Excel spreadsheets faster than Excel 2010.
- Joeri 13y ago
  Loading != calculation. Excel has a multi-threaded calculation engine: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/bb687899.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/bb687899.aspx Apparently LO does not: http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/5371/is-lo-calc-capable-for-smp/ http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/5371/is-lo-calc-capab...
  - skriticos2 13y ago
    There is an effort on the way to use the GPU for computation, though that's still some time off. http://www.datamation.com/applications/libreoffice-accelerates-open-source-spreadsheets-thanks-to-amd.html http://www.datamation.com/applications/libreoffice-accelerat...
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    Nothing like high speed inaccuracies.

chris_wot 13y ago

"A very large number of bugs have been fixed at an estimate of around 3000 bugs, of which 400 came from authors with apache.org mail addresses." I believe that the Apache OpenOffice developers have been complaining that the LO guys just cherry-picks their changes and don't do anything. This should hopefully put paid to that complaint!

qoo 13y ago

Meh. I've been using their 4.1 RC. CSV filtering / sorting / manipulation is still dog-slow for large files (>10MBytes).

laurent123456 13y ago

> Integration of libmwaw written by Laurent Alonso brings support for a multitude of pre-OSX Mac word-processing documents in different file-formats. Although it's great to support very old formats, I wonder if it makes sense to integrate this to the main distribution, and thus increase the code size with features few people need. They should have some kind of plugin system to support this.

mattst88 13y ago
I'm not sure what you mean. It uses the external libmwaw library, like it already uses libwpd (for WordPerfect) and libwps (for Microsoft Works).
- laurent123456 13y ago
  Oh I see, I assumed it was compiled into the main binary, but in fact it's an external library that's only loaded when opening the document, right?

slacka 13y ago

I would be happy if LibreOffice didn't add a single feature for the next year and did the following: * Improved MS Office Interoperability * Fixed bugs * Reduced memory usage/improved performance In fact, those are the primary reasons my company abandoned our plans to migrate from MSO to LO. I have filed several bug reports with both the AO/LO teams on issues such with incorrectly importing NetSuite generated Excel documents for our sales team. Most of the bugs were validated, opened, and then ignored for the past year.

_pmf_ 13y ago
> Improved MS Office Interoperability The problem is that this is a moving target (and event more in motion due to Microsoft's need to port this to some mobile platform, so no matter how much is invested in this issue, they will never get close to acceptable.
- ZeroMinx 13y ago
  Yes, it is a moving target, but you can still get it to a very solid good level. In the past it's always been a few years between updates, and they have version details in the files, so you can say "Supports Word 2007 files" and not worry about Word 2016. I've written a bunch of Perl code (that I should open source.. maybe some day. anyone here'd find that useful?) for creating and editing docx files. It's not that hard -- it's all XML! EDIT: I was using a LibreOffice daemon before, but I did this code just because Libre had so many bugs / missing features when converting a document to docx.
  - slacka 13y ago
    Agreed MS 97-2003 .doc is NOT a moving target. Back in 2008 when we were considering moving from MSO 2003 to OO or SoftMaker Office, SoftMaker had near perfect MSO import filters. 5 years later, and only 3 of the 14 .doc import bugs that I filed with OO (now on AOO tracker) have been fixed. It's too bad the Oracle didn't take OO under their wings. With their resources they could have turned it into a true competitor to MSO. As it stands now, volunteers enjoy adding new features not bug fixing or scouring the 200 page OpenXML spec. sheet.

mikevm 13y ago

Has LibreOffice reached parity with MS Office 97 yet?