LibreOffice 7.3 RC1 Available For Testing This Open-Source Office Suite

[quikee]

.. because the author (1) is an unabashed fan of LibreOffice---he very much wants it to succeed; he very much would like to NOT be dependent on Microsoft;

He is far from an unabashed fan of LibreOffice. If he was he would've known that reporting bugs in a blog post achieves nothing but only feeds the trolls...

"...What can I say? LibreOffice 7.2 feels better than its predecessor, but then, it feels like an entirely self-made situation. You have a sub-par release, with lots of bugs and problems, so when these get fixed in a new version, one can perceive these as progress or improvement. Which is true, but it also doesn't take away from the fact none of these issues should have existed in the first place...

Sounds like the new release fixed some things for him and he acknowledges there is progress... but he wants to complain anyway.

[microcode]

He just shows the typical ignorance. If you have to use the catastrophy ooxml is, you will never have any other choice then using MS Office, period. MS puts a lot of work into being as incompressible with everything (including themselves) as possible as long as they can make people think they use a standard. They only made up ooxml and enforced its standardization through corruption bexause they feared everything not being an ISO standard would be excluded from public calls for tenders, especially in the EU and that they would all jump ship to OpenOffice after they got ODF approved to be the first ISO standard in that area. But as long as people believe that lie and as long as they can count on corruption that prevents them to get their asses kicked out they'll do anything to prevent any real competition. So he can wait forever for a release that could fix all good issues, because you can bet your ass it wouldn't take MS too long to create new incompatibilities.

ODF sucks in its own way. Impossible to version, the ODS format in particular is crazy: They have a way to repeat simple values in cells, usually empty cells, but no way to repeat identical expressions; so a moderately complex spreadsheet can easily be in the hundreds of megabytes of XML once LO adds in arab, desi, and CJK font specifications to all your cells, and injects styles where there were none to begin with. My company has an important spreadsheet which is well over a gigabyte of XML in ODF format, which could easily be less than a hundred megs with small improvements to ODF; small improvements I trust will never materialize. Furthermore, LO writes ODS files that are invalid under their own schema, and when I bring this up outside of their official channels they just get mad at me instead of helping me report it.

And let's say you're okay with all of that, LO will non-deterministically rename all of the styles in your spreadsheet, and then apply all those names to the cells, so you can't make meaningful diffs without writing your own ODF parser/emitter and normalizer.

[Mez']

Well, the Writer still has issues with figures inside both doc and docx. Some scientific paper docx templates, e.g., RSC, could not be opened with Writer at all. Complex formatting is not the strongest side of all LO equvalents. I use both LO 7.2 and Office 365.

I hope this is a joke. Not a single office suite is better at complex formatting than Writer. Especially not Word, which I'm using daily for work and is still unable in 2021 to have you spend less than 50% of the time formatting the document rather than actually writing it.
Sure, most people don't bother and, only spend 20% formatting, but their document are usually barely legible as they show inconsistencies all over the place, and don't look very professional.
If you want to have perfect consistency while spending more than 75% actually writing instead of fighting with formatting, you can only pick Writer, as it completely destroys MS Word.

[Artim]

ODF sucks in its own way. Impossible to version, the ODS format in particular is crazy: They have a way to repeat simple values in cells, usually empty cells, but no way to repeat identical expressions; so a moderately complex spreadsheet can easily be in the hundreds of megabytes of XML once LO adds in arab, desi, and CJK font specifications to all your cells, and injects styles where there were none to begin with. My company has an important spreadsheet which is well over a gigabyte of XML in ODF format, which could easily be less than a hundred megs with small improvements to ODF; small improvements I trust will never materialize. Furthermore, LO writes ODS files that are invalid under their own schema, and when I bring this up outside of their official channels they just get mad at me instead of helping me report it.

And let's say you're okay with all of that, LO will non-deterministically rename all of the styles in your spreadsheet, and then apply all those names to the cells, so you can't make meaningful diffs without writing your own ODF parser/emitter and normalizer.

Reporting bugs outside of the proper channels simply helps nobody and is considered bad practice. So no wonder they aren't particularly keen on such behavior. And your comment shows perfectly what's wrong with the use of free and open source software, especially by companies: they just use it because it's free and then don't do anything to give back. You have s problem with LibreOffice? Feel free to hire a company like Collabora to help fix it and don't just complain about it. That behavior just leads to gigantic problems in the long term like Heartbleed in OpenSSL or the current fiasco with Log4j. Everybody uses it but nobody cares to take a look at it and see if it's actually that good. And then they are all surprised when they are in the middle of a wildfire

[onicsis]

Seemingly, Microsoft blew up [web] links to his own past.
More likeley to find information on archive.org about some old Microsoft products, than on Microsoft sites :\, better using Libre Office .

[rclark]

All I know ... is I use LibreOffice at home and it has stood us well over the years for writing and spreadsheets whether it was a Windoze box or Linux. I don't see why one would use anything else at least for home use. Even for what I do in the office, it would work great, but our company is an M$ shop....

[caligula]

Wow - so many people are arguing with Wikipedia through me. That's literally where my information is coming from...

I see so you're just trolling. Wikipedia does not guarantee the timeliness of the information in any way. You could just install the packages and compare yourself. Apparently even a fresh screenshot isn't enough to make you question your choice of sources.

[Artim]

Thank you. I was wondering how long it would take the cockroach-level-IQ types to come out of the woodwork. You did not disappoint.

"I would like to agree with you, but doing so would affront your intelligence."---William F. Buckley, Jr.

'Critical thinking' and 'reading comprehension' are two very basic skills which you very obviously lack (and we all just KNOW, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you did---absolutely---read everything of dedoimedo's).
The saying of George Carlin was never more appropriate than in your case, to wit:

"Think about how dumb the average person is. Half the people are dumber than that!"

Wow. I see, you can not accept any criticism. So you just lash out and insult everyone that's able to think further then you'll ever be capable of. You can't even state what's wrong in your opinion. You have simply no argument, which is actually the most obvious proof that you simply have no way in arguing in a constructive way. You're really pathetic.

What I described are simple facts. If you are able to prove I'm wrong go ahead. But I already know that you are incapable to, otherwise you would already have. So better leave on your own before you get kicked out

[ALRBP]

Most publishers disagree with that bold statement...

I have never seen a publisher rejecting LaTeX, though they usually also accept MS Office. That said, I may be different in fields other than computer science (my field). Anyway, none of my coworkers use something else than LaTeX for papers, and I think LaTeX is also the most common tool for presentation, even though I saw many people using other software. I know, however, that in other fields, LaTeX is not at that level of hegemony.

[Artim]

Care to elaborate, rocket scientist?

I highly doubt your childish behavior of insulting everybody not agreeing with your distorted worries view is welcome here. Wouldn't be surprised when you comment will soon be removed, if you continue that behavior Micheal would be right to ban you completely