LibreOffice 5.3 Is Coming This Week, A Look At The New Features

[slacka]

This. Many times this. Goddamn Office isn't 100% compatible even with itself.

Yes, it's 99.999% compatible. I worked in IT for a company that had tens of thousands of MS .docs that spanned multiple generations. Over the years, I never once saw a case of a newer version of Office incorrectly importing an older version in our service desk issue tracker. While it's true that when we were on 2003, we had some issues with 2007 documents, but that' forward compatible. LibreOffice doesn't even offer "compatibility packs". Good luck trying to open a LibreOffice 5.3 document in LO 3.4. All of these claims of incompatibly are almost always unfairly forwards, not backwards compatibility issues.

In the real world backwards compatibility, is just not an issue. Period. Even if it were true, it's a poor excuse. Both SoftMaker Office and WPS office offer far superior MS Office interoperability than LibreOffice, proving that the issue is with LibreOffice NOT the OOXML spec itself.

I would love to see LibreOffice’s OOXML interoperability improve. Trying to shift the blame to MS does nothing to get us there. What we need are more developers either through corporate sponsors or bug bounties.

[finalzone]

In the real world backwards compatibility, is just not an issue. Period. Even if it were true, it's a poor excuse. Both SoftMaker Office and WPS office offer far superior MS Office interoperability than LibreOffice, proving that the issue is with LibreOffice NOT the OOXML spec itself.

I would love to see LibreOffice’s OOXML interoperability improve. Trying to shift the blame to MS does nothing to get us there. What we need are more developers either through corporate sponsors or bug bounties.

I sincerely disagree with the above sentence which unfairly shifts the blame to Libre Office considering the well-documented history of Microsoft playing dirty tricksx when it comes to format like OOXML complete with its enormous 6000 pages for the specification alone. Even Google Docs struggle to fully format docx without accessing undocumented codes specifically made for Microsoft Windows. Office 2011 for Macs has trouble to open external OOXML too prompting to use the legacy doc.
Need to reminds the whole document format mess was instigated by Microsoft themselves for obvious lock-up.

[finalzone]

The unaaproval message is getting annoying.

[ldo17]

I worked in IT for a company that had tens of thousands of MS .docs that spanned multiple generations. Over the years, I never once saw a case of a newer version of Office incorrectly importing an older version in our service desk issue tracker.

Maybe they never reported them....

[slacka]

Maybe they never reported them....

Did you even read the article you linked to? It's about VBA automated scripts. Do you even know what these are? They record your actions and replay them to automate tasks. Not only has MS depreciated and disabled Macros by default since 2007, they have never guaranteed this would work between versions. They are not "documents". They are scripts that automate tasks. If that was the best you could come up with, it just proves my point.

[dkasak]

Yes, but I think they will eventually migrate to Qt, as more and more Linux desktop applications have done. So there is no need to worry.

What a stupid thing to say!

[nomadewolf]

The compatibility improves with each new version, but unfortunately it can't be made flawless. Sometimes our internal model (and/or a similar feature in ODF) is not compatible with a feature in OOXML and we have to make a compromise to make it work. Sometimes a feature is not implemented in LO yet (and is not trivial to implement it). MS also makes sure it extends the format with every release which are causing incompatibilities (for example: slide transitions were completely redefined 2 times since MSO 2007 and OOXML standard).

Anyway, the biggest document layout breaker in Writer today are fonts. OTOH Impress support still needs to be improved..

I understand that achieving comaptibility is hard, and that M$ probably does everything in it's power to make it even harder.
But my take on this as a System Administrator is that in my company we don't use LO because we don't have that guarantee. That's literaly the only reason. Not that compatibility is something we really value, but since everyone else uses M$ Office, we just need that, if we're going to change.

[slacka]

I understand that achieving comaptibility is hard, and that M$ probably does everything in it's power to make it even harder.
But my take on this as a System Administrator is that in my company we don't use LO because we don't have that guarantee..

If your company has a support contract with Redhat, Collabora, or Canonical. you do your part to part by filing bug reports for documents that don't open correctly or round-trip correctly in LibreOffice. It's really a chicken and egg problem. We need more companies using, so they put more resources into improving compatibility.

[nomadewolf]

If your company has a support contract with Redhat, Collabora, or Canonical. you do your part to part by filing bug reports for documents that don't open correctly or round-trip correctly in LibreOffice. It's really a chicken and egg problem. We need more companies using, so they put more resources into improving compatibility.

That's true. But our company works on schedule based delivery system for said documents.
We just can't afford to wait for solutions when we have deadlines to meet.
It's cheaper to just pay M$ and have our business work.
I'd never be able 'sell' such a solution to our Administration. The moment we'd lose our first contract over such a simple matter, all hell would literally break lose.

[nomadewolf]

To sum up: please, use ODF whenever possible.

It would take legislation enforce that. Which i think would be good.
Our company can't force our customers to use what we want. Rather, it's the other way around. They use M$ Office, cause that's what they're used to...