LibreOffice 5.3 Beta Available For Beta Testing

[slacka]

LibreOffice Calc is slow!

I use LibreOffice Calc (5.2 and 5.3beta) with around 10 Worksheets and 2000-3000 rows Data per Worksheet. The Data consits of

...

What I would really like to see is performance bottlenecks being worked on for the upcoming versions of LibreOffice.

In less time than it took you to bitch on some random forum on the Internet, you could actually contribute to the project and help yourself to get the issue resolved. File a bug report and attach your test document. If the performance issue is a regression, there's a good chance it will be fixed quickly. I've found the developers to be both friendly and responsive. But they can't fix issues that they don't know about.

[ua=42]

Hello Mr. Troll. I guess I'll bite.

They should have switched to some sane language with good resource management

Like Java?

such as Rust

Ah, yes, you were wondering why they haven't used Rust? Maybe because the first stable release of Rust didn't come out until the middle of 2015.
Or maybe it is because libreoffice is mostly C++, which is object oriented while Rust isn't, which would make converting a royal pain in the ass.

[ua=42]

I'm just waiting and praying for either MS Office to come native to Linux or for it to get "The Ribbon™" Once you get used to "The Ribbon™" it's impossible to go back and everything else just seems clunky.

That's one of the experimental features of 5.3. It has a ribbon interface you can switch to.

[slacka]

While I agree that the Ribbon has better usability due to modern UI design principles like "showing buttons only when you are actually likely to need them", I'm against the fact that it is wasting a LARGE amount of vertical space to show a bunch of LARGE icons.

I have a netbook with 1024x600. I found the ribbon interface incredibly frustrating to use on it. Even on my secondary 1080p desktop, the ribbon interface seems like a terrible design decision. I have all this unused horizontal real estate, and MS decides to waste the precious vertical space with huge buttons. For 2 out of 3 of my machines, it's horrible.

[Mateus Felipe]

I can't get used to Ribbon after I started using LO back in 2012, it's simply a mess and I can't find a lot of things without searching on Google first. I really think LO UI can be improved, but hardly a Ribbon-like UI is a viable solution.

[ua=42]

I can't get used to Ribbon after I started using LO back in 2012, it's simply a mess and I can't find a lot of things without searching on Google first. I really think LO UI can be improved, but hardly a Ribbon-like UI is a viable solution.

That's the wonderful thing about LibreOffice's solution to the problem. They have designed it to be easy to choose and switch between different interfaces (Single Line, Standard, Ribbon) and let the user decide which one they like most.

[caligula]

Great trollpost. Bonus points for mentioning Rust in a situation where it's completely irrelevant.

The Libreoffice issue is that the rendering engine still runs like crap in calc, and whoever is using calc does not care about contributing code to fix it as they just switch back to excel (gnumeric is faster, but not as excel).

It's as simple as that. You want it to get better? Do something yourselves.

As long as you whine and troll in forums nothing will get better.

I've used tons of spreadsheet programs. From IBM, Microsoft, Google, StarOffice (in the 1990s), Lotus 1-2-3, Gnumeric and so on. The fact is, they all worked relatively fast. Only the Libreoffice branch of old StarOffice is slow. I've used OpenOffice since the 1.x series. It used to be faster, now the LO Calc isn't. I know you can file bug reports, but from my point of view they're the ones who broke it, it's the only spreadsheet program that is so slow. I could understand the need to contribute yourself if it was broken right from the start, but the incompetence of current generation of developers, it's not your fault. So for me it's easier to switch to other programs like Gnumeric while waiting for them to fix their mistakes.

Of course Rust is relevant. It *is* a better implementation language. They'd probably have a much better quality spreadsheet program if they had started with OCaml or SML. Both are already old. The current LO is a clusterfuck of languages, a fractal of bad design. It's not written in a single language.

[ua=42]

They'd probably have a much better quality spreadsheet program if they had started with OCaml or SML.

They started with openoffice, which was 8 million lines of code and approximately 75% of it in C++.

[edoantonioco]

Where's the snap package? Since deb is only for ubuntu and debian

And the UI is still stuck in 1995.

The current UI is very good, if you are used to it you will not find the MS Office UI that great. What happens is that it is usually the other way around, people are more used to MS UI so they want to have the same tool on linux.

[ssokolow]

AFAIK, it will be possible to choose between the ribbon and non-ribbon interface...

Also this will be an optional thing – most probably we will keep a “Classic Mode” with the legacy Toolbars for the foreseeable future.

*sigh* I'll put it on my list of things to plan for replacing right after I finish my emergency reaction to Firefox's announcement that they'll stop accepting new non-Chrome extension in 2017 (and, thus, my favourite grandfathered-in XUL extensions could cease receiving updates from demoralized developers at any time and I have no way to tell which ones will go.)

(Can you tell I don't have much faith in claims that "legacy" things will remain an option?)