LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha 1 Open-Source Office Suite Released

[oiaohm]

OnlyOffice is a superior experience and has much better support for MS Word .doc/docx and .xls/xlsx documents. I gave Libreoffice an honest try, but it really does suck ass compared to other "free" word-processor/spreadsheet products currently available. OnlyOffice is also "open source" -- but has paid versions for corporate use.

I do a lot of manuals. The master document format of Libreoffice is great. MS Office removed there master document format because they could not get it work. Yes Only Office does not support master documents.

I am sorry to say I understand why some people will be Libreoffice is the only way. There are features that Libreoffice has that you can use when making documents that make your life simpler that OnlyOffice and MS Office don't have. That not to say that OnlyOffice and MS Office does not have their own advantages.

Something else in spreadsheets that should have alarm bells ring.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_LibreOffice_-_Microsoft_Office

Spreadsheet functions (for details see Functions comparison of LibreOffice Calc and Excel)
Calc Yes. 517 functions (30 functions unique to Calc) See an extensive description of Calc Functions
Excel Yes. 492 functions (30 functions unique to Excel)

Pardon the mangled quote.

Take 517-30. That gives you 487 functions common. 492-30 is 462. This explains some of those case you open old excel documents and they don't work. 487-462 gives you 25 the number of excel functions Microsoft has removed from their product. Also this gets worse when you wake up MS Office 2024: is missing 5 functions that MS Office 365 has.
So removed functions equal 25 and unique functions equally 25 gives you basically even odds if a excel document not working due to missing function between Libreoffice and MS Office 2024.

Yes there is almost as many remove functions from excel as there are functions that Libreoffice has not implemented yet. The number of removed functions is growing.

OnlyOffice does a lot sales compare but really does not give a proper feature list. Libreoffice is way simpler to get the feature list and work out if what you are doing is compatible.

If you are needing legacy format support OnlyOffice is not for you.

What PDF signing is OnlyOffice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAdES

Yes there are legal requirements here. There is more than 1 way you can sign a PDF and not all of them are legally acceptable.

This is a big problem I have Libreoffice and MS Office both have good placed to go to get a detail feature list to work out if 1 if they are legal to use 2 get a really good idea what the limitations are going to be. Other options are not great in this department.

Yes OnlyOffice starts having issues when you need to get this deeper level of information to approve usage.

[oiaohm]

Microsoft Office does 1000x the things that LibreOffice does. That's not even remotely a close comparison. I like LO, but I'll be honest... if I don't need the features of Microsoft Office then Google Docs or Office Online work just fine.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_LibreOffice_-_Microsoft_Office

Not in fact true on that 1000x thing. Its a few 100 different things that Libreoffice does not do that MS Office does. The reverse is true as well. In functionality they are a lot closer to each other than they first appear. But when you hit the miss functionality it ruins your day. Small differences can be insanely painful.

[OneTimeShot]

Libre Office could do with a GUI overhaul (actually a lot of Open Source software could, et tu Gimp?), but the actual document parts are fine. It's a shame that Google don't pump some money in. It could easily push out MS Office in a lot of use cases now.

[oiaohm]

Have you ever tried to use the equation editor in LibreOffice? It's horrible. Should I use LaTeX instead? Probably. But sometimes I'd like to add pretty math to simple documents and LibreOffice sucks ass at doing that compared to literally any other word-processor. And there are a thousand other paper-cuts that make it the absolute worst choice out of all the free "community edition" / "free" office products currently available.

I will be truthful I use Libreoffice I avoid the directly using equation editor like the plague. https://extensions.libreoffice.org/e...ns/show/dmaths when I need to add a little bit of pretty maths the extension dmaths does the job for me. There are quite a few papercuts in Libreoffice that are covered by having the right extensions installed.

Yes there is texmaths extention as well but that requires LaTeX installed.

I do agree the out the box would be nicer if it was better here.

I would not say that Libreoffice is the worst choice out of all the options. OnlyOffice can get you into legal trouble because of it limited signing.

Also the paper cut list when you check it out is not as long as you would first think either. Just they are really really painful when you hit them and don't know the way around.

[NeoMorpheus]

Did you seriously early bird the thread just to say you prefer closed-source spyware because "open-source is old and ugly"?

That argument went out of the window when lots of so called open source champions blindly worship Ngreedia and their closed source drivers and other anti open source shit.

[uid313]

LO has made tons of progress. Only the UI is somewhat outdated at this point, but I don't think shininess is among the important factors when judging the quality/progress/worth of an office suit.

It's not only the UI that is outdated, it is also the templates and the UX. Documents produced with LO doesn't look beautiful and professional. LibreOffice Base seems full of bugs too and so confusing that I wasn't even able to use it.

[ktecho]

image.png

Is there any way to make it even display icons in Kubuntu 24.10? It's not only that it's ugly. It's unusable.

[JPFSanders]

Heh, I'm the exact opposite. To each their own.

Much prefer LibreOffice to anything with that stupid ribbon interface that hides functionality and moves it around every few weeks. Google Docs is okay for quick documents that need to be shared with others. But anything that needs lots of formatting (using styles) or goes beyond a handful of pages is written in LibreOffice.

We use it at work and at home, on Windows and Linux.

This reminds me I need to go and donate them some money. LO is overall great, not perfect, but great, can even open Visio diagrams 'almost' perfectly lately, The people that claim LO is outdated or confusing generally are the type who don't do anything complicated or long and love the software hand holding them through everything.

[jindam]

* huh..... lot of negative impressions
* libreoffice contains code modified, adapted, polished over 20 years
* its not easy to change overnight for todays generation
* its not replacement for cresting ms file formats
* i always use libreoffice to create ms file formats only if it will not give headache to other person or the person who is expecting in ms file format
* but how, i double check with my ms office
* for personal use and for like minded persons opendocument file formats only
* if you really care about using opensource, i recommend using opendocument file formats
* my opinion_
* opens ms documents without hassle
* make minor changes in ms files
* create basic files in ms file format

[Landway12]

.... The people that claim LO is outdated or confusing generally are the type who don't do anything complicated or long and love the software hand holding them through everything.

Completely false! After have been trying to replace MS Office with LibreOffice, the conclusion is that MS Office is far, far superior for both novice and professional users. The reason is MS Excel, which is the most popular and critical of them. Here LibreOffice is a nightmare, in comparison, when working with charts and Pivot Tables, and does not have the easy-to-use non-destructive features of Power Query.

LibreOffice Calc is were MS Excel was in the early 90s. It just can't work as a replacement unless it is used for extremely basic applications, below any of the level applied by average users. LibreOffice is unfortunately one of the strongest weaknesses of the Linux community, since its inferiority even for simple tasks pushes the users back to Windows.

OnlyOffice is definitely better, and possible will be the solution to start to move larger masses from Windows to Linux. Maybe.

*Edit*
I find LibreOffice Writer superior to MS Word (god I hate MS Word), however, the main application the average users are using in the field is MS Excel, by a massive margin compared to the other applications. LibreOffice Calc is the anchor of LibreOffice, and they just must fix Pivot Tables and the chart functionality first, if it is ever going to be considered anything remotely as a replacement to MS Excel.