LibreOffice 7.6 Beta Available For This Excellent Open-Source Office Suite

[oiaohm]

but if you want something the rest of the world will be able to open and edit, while staying formatted properly, or doing serious spreadsheet work, MS Office is the only solution.

Sorry to say MS Office does not offer "staying formatted properly" as a feature. One example of this not being a feature page break maths in MS Office is based on connected printer. Libreoffice and adobe products page break maths is based on the the documents page size the result is when you print as long as the printer has the same size paper page breaks stay the same with Libreoffice and adobe products where MS Office it changes when you change printers. Formatting is a major reason why PDF is the dominate used business to business document format..

This is one of the things to be aware of Libreoffice odf format does in fact offer stable formatting when handled by libreoffice this is why some governments around the world use libreoffice for internal documents as they have found not having to deal with formatting issues saves them money.

[oiaohm]

it's the latest version that works on Wine thoughever...

https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsoft-excel-365

Yes not paying for the commercial version of wine only gets you so far.

[zexelon]

oiaohm I probably did not express myself well. My reference to stable formatting was with regards to the "business world". If you put together a Word document it is pretty much 90% likely that the person you send it to will be using Word and therefor able to open and review it accurately.

With regards to cross system format stability, yah, nothing touches the PDF format. It is pretty much going to show up properly regardless of what system you are on as long as its a standards compliant viewer... but good luck editing a PDF! Even simple edits tend to break documents.

As for the issues with Word and "printers", this may be true but I have never run into it personally... and who prints? (I have a personal hatred of printed documents)

[oiaohm]

oiaohm I probably did not express myself well. My reference to stable formatting was with regards to the "business world". If you put together a Word document it is pretty much 90% likely that the person you send it to will be using Word and therefor able to open and review it accurately.

Not everyone in the business world will be using the latest version of Word or word on the same platform it does come a problem. MS office 365 local windows layout maths is different to MS Office 365 mac and that again is different to MS Office 365 cloud by webbrowser and this is different again to MS Office 365 android and this different again to MS Office 365 IOS.

Libreoffice is the same core engine/maths everywhere it runs.

With regards to cross system format stability, yah, nothing touches the PDF format. It is pretty much going to show up properly regardless of what system you are on as long as its a standards compliant viewer... but good luck editing a PDF! Even simple edits tend to break documents.

Libreoffice does hybrid PDF/ODF documents. Something to be aware of at times when some companies will send out PDF that really simple to edit because its a PDF/ODF hybrid. Lot of cases that has come from Collabora Online (yes that Libreoffice inside)

Libreoffice is not always under the name Libreoffice.

[USER="105978"]As for the issues with Word and "printers", this may be true but I have never run into it personally... and who prints? (I have a personal hatred of printed documents)

Even if you don't print the fact word sees your computer has a different printer to what it has it will redo the page breaks and in the processing a document with complex formatting can turn into a complete mess.

zexelon some business with a miss review of a document could be dead to lots of people have there systems libreoffice based normally normally paid for Collabora solution. Issue with MS word and other MS Office parts lack of formatting stability is a problem.

Stable formatting like it or not is not a feature MS Office has. The idea that user will review document accurately is wrong because when you change between MS Office versions just even platform to platform a correction one person has done can magically disappear for the next person along that fun of change printers mess with formatting this can also make document corrections disappear..

Lot of business near enough is good enough so they go MS office. Commonly installed is a feature MS Office has with lot of common integration to accountancy software and so on. Stable formatting and stable review process is not something MS Office has. People presume since they pay a lot of money for MS Office that it would have those features. Yes the works for me problem and the warning saying of a broken watch can be right twice per day.

[aorth]

On a related note, I saw that OnlyOffice 7.4 was just released this week. I have heard about it for years but somehow kept hoping that LibreOffice would improve. I've been using OpenOffice and LibreOffice for nearly twenty years and it's always been "ok". Sigh... maybe time to try OnlyOffice.

[mirmirmir]

Claims to be a spreadsheeting "professional".
Uses an 8-year old version of Excel which reached end of life 3 years ago.

Even 15yo Ms office works better than libreoffice 😔😞.

Besides, no one cares to install latest version of ms office in workplaces anyway, there's just no reason to

[cavenditti]

Not sure what the problem with LibreOffice is, works absolutely fine for me when doing most common tasks.
Some colleagues even installed it beside Office 365 because Calc seems to be able to handle bigger CSV files better than Excel.

There are issues for sure but it's not bad at all.

[Melcar]

I just wan them to change their toolbar, make it more accessible and easy to navigate. I'm sure then can come up with something that is not the awful ribbon from MS.

[oiaohm]

I just wan them to change their toolbar, make it more accessible and easy to navigate. I'm sure then can come up with something that is not the awful ribbon from MS.

https://books.libreoffice.org/en/IG72/IG7212-UserInterfaceVariants.html#toc6

Libreoffice did come up with a few more options. Current version you only have 9 different options.

Libreoffice did a lot of research into UI and was not able to come to agreement on what worked for all so end up providing the top 9.