4 ms·
As someone who was part of a failed LibreOffice roll-out, I have to agree in my experience compatibility is the issue holding LO back. But users don't obsess, t
by slacka 13y ago
As someone who was part of a failed LibreOffice roll-out, I have to agree in my experience compatibility is the issue holding LO back. But users don't obsess, they just require decent interoperability. If basic features like charts can't be imported[1], of course it's a showstopper.
I have to disagree with everyone here saying that basic MSO interoperability is some impossible goal. If that was the case how has TextMaker achieved such better results?[2] LibreOffice and OpenOffice both have a group of paid developers. While I understand that volunteer wouldn't want to work on this, why can't the paid developers put some effort into this?
[1] https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=96426 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=96426
[2] http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/office-compatibility-torture-test-302?page=0,0 http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/office-compatibility...
- orr721 13y agoIn my experience since version 4.0 the compatibility of LibreOffice Writer increased considerably. I do not have any problems with MS Word documents for quite some time. YMMV of course.. The compatibility test mentioned above [2] was performed in 2009. According to the LibreOffice release notes a lot of the positioning errors were fixed. http://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-0-new-features-and-fixes/ http://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-0-new-features-and-fix...
- slacka 13y agoSaying that the tests were performed in 2009 and LO team claims to have improved compatibility doesn't prove anything. In fact, if you had dug a little deeper, you would have seen that 3 out of 4 of those 2009 bugs are still open.[1][2][3] The first 2 come directly from the report, the 3rd is a long outstanding bug that goes back to OO 2.0. I don't know how you can claim that there are no serious problems with compatibility when you can't even import word docs that have charts or diagrams in them. This is stuff I was doing for my lab reports in HS and our marketing documents are full of this kind of material. These are not esoterica features we're talking about. In a vacuum, LibreOffice / OpenOffice are perfectly usable word processors. In fact I prefer the LO UI over MSO's ribbon interface. The problem is MSO is the industry standard. So until they take compatibility seriously, they are going to be relegated to home users. [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65865 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65865 [2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66058 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66058 [3] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58521 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58521
- davidgerard 13y agoUpvote for linking the bug reports with test documents, by the way - so many compatibility complainants don't actually produce the bugs.
- andybak 13y agoIs there a writeup of your 'failed LibreOffice roll-out' anywhere? I love reading the details of that kind of thing and I'm sure others do too.