LibreOffice 7.1 RC2 Up For Testing This Open-Source Office Suite

[Mez']

Please don't even dare saying LO is not up to par with MSO. No one has yet, fortunately.

I've been having a hard fight for the last 2 weeks with MS Word on the formatting of a document at work. It's constantly trying to set for me in a very random way the size of paragraphs, space before and after paragraphs, (even in tables overriding internal table padding), indentation, bullet points. I've used the format painter (often to no avail) as much as I've produced and written actual content. It is driving me absolutely crazy.

When you pick the justified alignment (mandatory unless you want to hurt someone's eyes), why would they align the text to line end when it's not even occupying the whole line!? The purpose of the justified alignment is to have a consistent alignment (easier on the eye), not to align to line's end everytime there's more than one word on your line. Duh.

I will stop here, just writing about it is irking me to the highest level.

Since no one pays any attention to how they format their document, just the activity of reading a Word document produced by someone else is painful. There is absolutely no consistency in their interlines, paragraphs, alignement, etc...

Most of these are non issues in LO Writer.

As much as I respect their preference choice, I have a hard time understanding how anyone in their right mind could prefer MSO to LO (at least for the word processing part.

If only I was authorized to use LO at work...

[wdb974]

Please don't even dare saying LO is not up to par with MSO. No one has yet, fortunately.

I've been having a hard fight for the last 2 weeks with MS Word on the formatting of a document at work. It's constantly trying to set for me in a very random way the size of paragraphs, space before and after paragraphs, (even in tables overriding internal table padding), indentation, bullet points. I've used the format painter (often to no avail) as much as I've produced and written actual content. It is driving me absolutely crazy.

When you pick the justified alignment (mandatory unless you want to hurt someone's eyes), why would they align the text to line end when it's not even occupying the whole line!? The purpose of the justified alignment is to have a consistent alignment (easier on the eye), not to align to line's end everytime there's more than one word on your line. Duh.

I will stop here, just writing about it is irking me to the highest level.

Since no one pays any attention to how they format their document, just the activity of reading a Word document produced by someone else is painful. There is absolutely no consistency in their interlines, paragraphs, alignement, etc...

Most of these are non issues in LO Writer.

As much as I respect their preference choice, I have a hard time understanding how anyone in their right mind could prefer MSO to LO (at least for the word processing part.

If only I was authorized to use LO at work...

Which version of MSO are we talking about? (I'm being curious.)

[rockiron]

Please don't even dare saying LO is not up to par with MSO. No one has yet, fortunately.

I've been having a hard fight for the last 2 weeks with MS Word on the formatting of a document at work. It's constantly trying to set for me in a very random way the size of paragraphs, space before and after paragraphs, (even in tables overriding internal table padding), indentation, bullet points. I've used the format painter (often to no avail) as much as I've produced and written actual content. It is driving me absolutely crazy.

When you pick the justified alignment (mandatory unless you want to hurt someone's eyes), why would they align the text to line end when it's not even occupying the whole line!? The purpose of the justified alignment is to have a consistent alignment (easier on the eye), not to align to line's end everytime there's more than one word on your line. Duh.

I will stop here, just writing about it is irking me to the highest level.

Since no one pays any attention to how they format their document, just the activity of reading a Word document produced by someone else is painful. There is absolutely no consistency in their interlines, paragraphs, alignement, etc...

Most of these are non issues in LO Writer.

As much as I respect their preference choice, I have a hard time understanding how anyone in their right mind could prefer MSO to LO (at least for the word processing part.

If only I was authorized to use LO at work...

Microsoft Office was born much before LibreOffice, and there are switching costs to pay to switch to LO.

But the fact that LO doesn't fully support OOXML format makes the switch impossible, or equivalently, the switching costs too high (because you would have to re-write all your documents in LO from scratch)

[Mez']

Which version of MSO are we talking about? (I'm being curious.)

2013 and 2016. I've had both lately.

Microsoft Office was born much before LibreOffice, and there are switching costs to pay to switch to LO.

But the fact that LO doesn't fully support OOXML format makes the switch impossible, or equivalently, the switching costs too high (because you would have to re-write all your documents in LO from scratch)

I'm not saying otherwise.
And everyone is entitled to their own opinion, so it was just me venting a lot of late frustration.

[wdb974]

2013 and 2016. I've had both lately..

So, even MSO 2016 version is doing that? Yikes! Gotta say I'm glad I gave up on MSO since after its 2010 release.

[danmcgrew]

To all you LibreOffice Fanboys who refuse to accept the fact that, like it or not, LibreOffice--after twelve years of taking YOUR MONEY and NOT paying a dime to developers--STILL, to this very day, does not provide the very ONE thing which would guarantee LibreOffice's success: absolute compatibility with Microsoft Office. And don't spout that extremely worn-out sh*t about "...well, even Microsoft Office is not compatible with Microsoft Office..."

To all you effetes who consider use of a bloated, un-supported "application" to be proof-positive of your elegant and not-to-be-denied technical expertise, consider one of the very first opening posts here, which you would dismiss out of hand as being the work of a complete incompetent, because of his small number of contributions to this site:

...from 'rockiron', post #5--

"I think LO should focus on interoperability with Microsoft Office. Otherwise we don't even have the prerequisite to switch."

This person, unlike the majority of you, recognizes with laser-focused clarity, what the problem--and the only problem--with LibreOffice really is.
************************************************** ************************************************** *****************************
Now, for your entertainment, some additional deflections (and some valid observations) by the LibreOffice Literati--

I was hoping they'll accept Paulo Jose's proposal for a new icon theme.

https://paulojose-brainstorm.blogspo...020-icons.html

"Me too. It would be a very welcome update. I think they are great. Maybe they could be a little bit "lighter" in the colors..."

"In my opinion, the color fade swoosh part has to go. It just makes the rest of the icon harder to read"--#3

"...I have submitted 5 bugs report to LO and all of them have been substantially ignored..."--#7 [Really? TDF wouldn't do that, would they?]

"This so-called "review" is just biased. He is against Open Source, Linux, Firefox and LibreOffice in general..."--#8

"Well, I am doing office work and I am prevented from using LibreOffice because the documents of my co-workers, who use Microsoft Office,.."--#9

"I think it just depends on the type of documents you are using..."--#10

#11--"Please don't even dare saying LO is not up to par with MSO. No one has yet, fortunately...."{"Fortunately"? An indication that fanboys abhor criticism? Naaahhh.}, and
"...If only I was authorized to use LO at work..."{You would be if LO was compatible with MSO. Hard to understand?}

...and #11, yet again--
"...I have a hard time understanding how anyone in their right mind could prefer MSO to LO (at least for the word processing part"


...and I have a hard time understanding how anyone in their right mind could prefer LibreOffice, a program used only as a passable word processor, and at 600 MB, at that, to Abiword, an outstanding word processor, at less than 10 MB.
But then again, the use of Abiword doesn't feed your sense of self-importance and of superior technical competence, does it?

Oh, and a really srious disclaimer: Abiword won't open UOF files (for all you people concerned with that file format developed in China). Abiword is compatible with all operating systems which Wikipedia--and most objective individuals--considers important; LibreOffice is not compatible with at least three.

[Mez']

#11--"Please don't even dare saying LO is not up to par with MSO. No one has yet, fortunately...."{"Fortunately"? An indication that fanboys abhor criticism? Naaahhh.}, and
"...If only I was authorized to use LO at work..."{You would be if LO was compatible with MSO. Hard to understand?}

...and #11, yet again--
"...I have a hard time understanding how anyone in their right mind could prefer MSO to LO (at least for the word processing part"


...and I have a hard time understanding how anyone in their right mind could prefer LibreOffice, a program used only as a passable word processor, and at 600 MB, at that, to Abiword, an outstanding word processor, at less than 10 MB.
But then again, the use of Abiword doesn't feed your sense of self-importance and of superior technical competence, does it?

I'm not a fanboy. If you had read a bit further, you'd have understood I was just venting some frustration and it ended with a bit too many grand statements to my own taste. But I'm a fervent supporter of "to each his own" so I do absolutely accept a preference for MSO word processing or any other word processing and the positive criticism against LO. It's only fair as I've given a lot of criticism about stuff that does not work well in MS Word.

Regarding Abiword, I'd rather not have separate Office apps for just the one thing. I prefer a suite with consistent behavior and tabs. I already learned MSO and LO, at some point I have to produce content rather than spending time learning an interface. Also, I tend to avoid anything coming from the Gnome project when I can.
But I would still be interested to know what Abiword could bring to the table that would make people want to switch.

Finally, I disagree with the compatibility part. LO devs shouldn't lose all their time trying to be interoperable/compatible with MSO standards. Only a decent part of it. It's a catch-up game. And MSO standards are fluctuating too much to win that game. Even MSO doesn't manage its own game properly.
In my opinion, LO should focus on their own product, which I believe is a good product (not great) while in my opinion MSO is just average.

To which i will add some words regarding your personal attacks.
I always specify that it is just my own (little) opinion. It made me laugh to read about a sense of self-importance, that's really funny as I'm usually putting my opinion into perspective as only mine (among the total of opinions out there that have just as much value).
I don't have a superior technical competence either. On the contrary, that's really not my forte, I actually tend to avoid anything technical or the lower level details of the solutions, as I'm more interested by the operational/business/end users side of things.
E.g. After 15 years on Linux and about as much reading phoronix, I'm still confusing Mesa/X.org/kernel space Vs user space/amdgpu/drm in what they do, how they interface and where the lines between them are drawn.

[dkasak]

For me instead it doesn't work.

I have submitted 5 bugs report to LO and all of them have been substantially ignored (except for trivial change and recently being "confirmed" by another user. But no feedback at all from developers)

Software has bugs? Surely not ...

By looking on the internet and from personal experience it seems much more than just a few corner cases. For instance see here

Hehe. When someone reviews the installation process, you can tell this is a serious article.

Instead the freeware WPS Office is compatible with MS Office

Totally compatible? Really? I'm sure I could find some lame blog post that disagrees. But what's your point here really, other than that WPS Office has no bugs and is 100% compatible with MS Office? Why not just use WPS Office and be done with it?

Breaking the layout and content of all their previous work? I don't think so

<yawn> Yeah whatever. Use what you want.