LibreOffice 3.6 Open-Source Office Suite Released

[Awesomeness]

I used to use open office at home on ubuntu whilst having to use MS office at College

And you never had the idea to simply carry a portable version of LO on a thumb drive?

[Artemis3]

Promote and install libreoffice everywhere you can

I used to use open office at home on ubuntu whilst having to use MS office at College. But it's compatibility with MS office's documents was very bad.

In this situation you should take Libreoffice with you, install it if allowed; ask to be installed; or carry a portable version. And do stick to common fonts, such as the ones in mscorefonts (arial and friends), unless you can also install the fonts you used at home.

There is also the choice of booting the whole thing from usb, the very same ubuntu you use at home with the very same packages.

Everyone should have libreoffice installed, and encourage others to install it, even if they prefer to use another suite; having it installed won't hurt and will make sure they can open and view documents made by people who can't afford the other suite.

[randomizer]

It's amazing that LO can interoperate with OOXML documents at all. Not even Office 2010 supports the real standard fully, since it can only read standards-compliant documents (not that any application actually generates them anyway). I think that Office 2013 is the first suite to actually provide write support for non-transitional OOXML documents.

[d2kx]

I can confirm better .docx support in LO 3.6, saved my ass today, and MS OOXML support will further improve with the next releases, because some big German and Swiss cities are now investing a huge amount of money to improve this right now.

[Vadi]

Best free suite ever? Hm. I think IBM's Lotus Sympony does a better job than LibreOffice at everything right now - compatibility with MS documents, looks and extensive document features .

[domicius]

Yeah, it seems like LibreOffice really makes my excel spreadsheets look bad. Not sure why it doesn't do well with formatting. Makes it hard to use as a daily driver at home when my work uses only MS Office. Still nice to have for personal use though.

Yeah, though improvments are made with every release - thanks to submitting bugs with example documents. If you can share an example document and show what looks wrong, it's very important the developers get it because otherwise they can't solve these problems.

[Redi44]

Am I the only one who never had a problem with M$ file formats in LO? And we are using quite advanced spreadsheets for reporting some stuff to government...

I never had problem with compatibility between two LO versions BTW...

[finalzone]

I used to use open office at home on ubuntu whilst having to use MS office at College. But it's compatibility with MS office's documents was very bad. I'd spend a lot of time re-designing, a presentation for example, then exporting it to PDF format and from there on out edit the documents when I was back at home. If I were to open it up in MS office at College after doing so in open office it would cause everything to be completely muddled again. Before exporting it into PDF format (leaving it in open office format) the lecturer would sometimes notify me of it's contents being all over the place.

I'd used Google documents to store my work on but never used it's editing document ability's. One day after another document was completely muddled I thought to try Google documents. It worked with them flawlessly. While MS office is the standard I'll have to continue to do so.

When Microsoft really a full specification of their formats, other companies will be fully able to provide compatibility with MS Office. You fully know that Microsoft deliberately insures to prevent competition that very interpolarity. MS Office is only standard by hook and by crook.

[MonkeyPaw]

I used to use open office at home on ubuntu whilst having to use MS office at College. But it's compatibility with MS office's documents was very bad. I'd spend a lot of time re-designing, a presentation for example, then exporting it to PDF format and from there on out edit the documents when I was back at home. If I were to open it up in MS office at College after doing so in open office it would cause everything to be completely muddled again. Before exporting it into PDF format (leaving it in open office format) the lecturer would sometimes notify me of it's contents being all over the place.

I'd used Google documents to store my work on but never used it's editing document ability's. One day after another document was completely muddled I thought to try Google documents. It worked with them flawlessly. While MS office is the standard I'll have to continue to do so.

Yeah, it seems like LibreOffice really makes my excel spreadsheets look bad. Not sure why it doesn't do well with formatting. Makes it hard to use as a daily driver at home when my work uses only MS Office. Still nice to have for personal use though.

[GreatEmerald]

Well, the later MS Office versions support ODT documents. Or claim to (I never really got that to work, although it was probably on MS Office 2007, and not a more recent edition).