[HN Gopher] LibreOffice 7.1 Community Edition
___________________________________________________________________
LibreOffice 7.1 Community Edition
Author : varbhat
Score : 171 points
Date : 2021-02-03 12:52 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.documentfoundation.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.documentfoundation.org)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Hah! My friend has been asking for "outline mode" for 15 years
| before he'd consider using it!
|
| https://www.debugpoint.com/2020/11/libreoffice-7-1/
|
| Probably too late but I'll bring it up with him. :-D
| narush wrote:
| Congrats on the release! LibreOffice was one of the first large
| applications I looked at, mostly due to my interest in
| spreadsheets generally. I generally have massive respect for
| anyone / anything that can parse a legacy Microsoft file format.
| [1]
|
| My interest in spreadsheets lead to me making https://trymito.io.
| Check it. We're a spreadsheet that sits inside a Jupyer notebook,
| allowing you to write spreadsheet formulas and generate
| equivalent Python code. Feedback greatly appreciated!
|
| [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-
| micros...
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| For folks using it on PCs without admin rights or wanting it
| installed to a synced cloud folder, I'm packaging up the portable
| version for PortableApps.com now.
| pentagrama wrote:
| I have LibreOffice 7.0 installed, is not mentioned in the article
| what will happen to me, I guess I will be updated to 7.1
| "Community" edition?
|
| "LibreOffice" sans edition will not exist anymore? The editions
| will be "LibreOffice Community" and "LibreOffice Enterprise" from
| now one?
| asicsp wrote:
| > _no, "Community" doesn't mean that TDF is going commercial
| (it is and always will be a non-profit). No, we're not going to
| offer "Professional" or "Enterprise" versions. No, no features
| will be removed/limited._
|
| see
| https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lblnfn/libreoffice_7...
| for more details
| pentagrama wrote:
| Thanks for the info!
| ratiolat wrote:
| Long time user here. But not anymore, because it's veeeery slow
| on Retina Macbook Pro. That also prevents promoting it at work
| because it is so slow. Microsoft Office is a faster, sad to say.
| In general, everyone has access to Google Workspace and if
| functionality lacks, then Microsoft Office it is.
| nice__two wrote:
| 7.0 switched to Skia for drawing. Maybe give it another shot
| and see if it's faster now?
| illuminated wrote:
| I have personally found that OnlyOffice [0] has much better MS
| Word file compatibility than any other open source document
| editor.
|
| Files created and saved in Word are being handled by OpenOffice
| without an issue and vice versa.
|
| Haven't tried the spreadsheets, though.
|
| [0] https://www.onlyoffice.com/en/
| andrewshadura wrote:
| Well, that is provably untrue.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I use Softmaker FreeOffice, which I find to be better than
| LibreOffice.
|
| LibreOffice is a good faith project, but the legacy from Sun
| StarOffice is still there. Namely, a non-polished UI that in many
| aspects looks less-polished than other major office suites.
|
| The project roadmaps also do not give me any hope that will be
| better in the future. There are shapes with physics simulation,
| but the most user facing aspect of the product, the UI, looks
| highly neglected.
|
| I tried cloning the LibreOffice repo to tweak the UI to my
| satisfaction, but after witnessing the escheresque 4D spaghetti
| code that implements it I simply deleted the repo and continued
| doing something else.
|
| Adding features will not change the fact the UI still looks like
| Sun StarOffice.
| nice__two wrote:
| LO has its own platform abstraction layer (called SAL), which
| only supported pixel-precise layout of elements. That meant
| that the longest string in any of the supported languages
| dictated the element layout.
|
| Caolan McNamara (of RedHat) added support for automatic layouts
| a few years ago. Since then, LO has been cleaning up its
| dialogs and has innovated a lot (e.g. by introducing the
| notebook bar). This simply wouldn't have been possible
| previously. Compare it with Apache OpenOffice and you'll see
| why.
| Fiveplus wrote:
| Why should I switch from Google Docs/Sheets to LibreOffice? What
| makes it stand out? Genuinely interested as a potential new user
| :)
| davidgerard wrote:
| Vastly better DOCX handling. A word processor and a spreadsheet
| that do their jobs thoroughly when you need that sort of thing.
| lights0123 wrote:
| Google Docs is intentionally pretty bare-bones. You get
| features in LibreOffice like:
|
| - text boxes in Writer
|
| - vector graphics support (pdf, svg, ...)
|
| - LibreOffice Draw, which there really isn't any equivalent to
| anywhere (it focuses on both drawing and text, while most
| vector drawing apps generally suck at text while Draw doesn't)
|
| - higher performance with very big spreadsheets ("this should
| have been a SQLite file")
|
| - Self-installed fonts
|
| However, I do typically just use Google Docs when I don't need
| any of those. The recently added autocomplete feature finally
| did it for me.
| npteljes wrote:
| It's a comprehensive and capable offline office suit, that is
| also open source. For a better matching alternative check out
| ONLYOFFICE's private offering. They have nice online editors, a
| small free storage and everything is free software.
| II2II wrote:
| It all depends upon your needs.
|
| If you were originally an Excel/Word user who switched to
| Docs/Sheets, for reasons other than cost, you would probably be
| better off sticking with Google's product. This is particularly
| true if you use Google's products for collaboration.
|
| LibreOffice is better for people who are looking for a powerful
| office suite and primarily deal with printed documents (or
| handle electronic documents much like printed ones). It is best
| compared to Microsoft Office: Writer is very similar to Word,
| though Writer is better thought out in my opinion; Calc is very
| similar to Excel, though Excel seems to have better options for
| data visualization.
| smitty1e wrote:
| > ScriptForge libraries: an extensible and robust collection of
| macro scripting resources for LibreOffice to be invoked from user
| Basic or Python scripts
|
| The Python integration is the thing that should make LO go high.
| buovjaga wrote:
| The Help has received a lot more content thanks to Alain
| Romedenne and others: https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-
| US/text/sbasic/python...
|
| Also, keep an eye on the upcoming integrated dev tools:
| https://tomazvajngerl.blogspot.com/2021/01/built-in-xray-lik...
| nsajko wrote:
| Pretty sure LuaTeX or ConTeXt LMTX (an experimental LuaTeX
| fork) is a better choice for programmability. LuaTeX is the
| most recent TeX engine, and it is _very_ programmable using Lua
| (as in no TeX code required). I know, Lua sucks very much, but
| nonetheless the power that LuaTeX (and /or ConTeXt) offers is
| probably currently unmatched.
|
| (And don't forget that Lua has a C API, so it is possible to
| drive the TeX engine with C++ or Go or Rust or whatever.)
| SignalNotSecure wrote:
| Libreoffice is an amazing piece of software for writing and
| spreadsheets. However, it's inability to display written text
| beautifully has pushed me to Microsoft Word. Libreoffice made
| zero progress on this in over a decade.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| I just use Google Docs these days. I don't use most of the
| features of MS Office/LibreOffice anyways.
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| I just can't fathom why you barely hear about OnlyOffice while it
| is exceptionally useful and compatible with Microsoft Office.
| longtom wrote:
| Because it isn't open source.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| The Community/Enterprise language is confusing, if you don't know
| the backstory.
|
| A big chunk of actual development of LibreOffice is done by a
| company called Collabora, that is also selling LibreOffice-based
| products for mobile and for cloud.
|
| https://www.collaboraoffice.com
|
| They seem to be the major contributor to LibreOffice Online (even
| still have their logo there?). Which is actually including the
| iOS and Android apps.
|
| https://github.com/LibreOffice/online
|
| On actual LibreOffice proper, which they call "LibreOffice Core",
| they seem to have 30% of commits, with RedHat also 30%.
| asicsp wrote:
| Explanation from Mike (The Document Foundation) [0]
|
| > _Why are we doing this? Well, please read the blog
| announcement to find out. But TL;DR: The majority of code
| commits in LibreOffice come from companies in the ecosystem
| around it. Many of them are finding it difficult to justify
| investments into LibreOffice, paying developers etc., while
| other companies /organisations/governments that use LibreOffice
| simply download it from the TDF website, install it and never
| contribute anything back._
|
| > _That 's their right, of course, but it's not great for long-
| term development of LibreOffice. So by calling the version from
| TDF "Community", we're stressing that it only has community
| support, and businesses/large organisations should get LO-based
| products from the ecosystem._
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lblnfn/libreoffice_7...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| yeah, my reaction is, wait, there's a product with "Libre" in
| the very name that is not actually open source, only the
| "Community" version is, is that what's going on? I thought the
| whole point of LibreOffice was to be open source, it's in the
| name! Is it actually "open core" or something?
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Sort of?
|
| It seems the naming is just for branding. Collabora seems to
| be putting all their code for online and mobile back
| upstream.
|
| https://github.com/LibreOffice/online/tree/master/ios
|
| it is updated often.
|
| edit
|
| also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26013601
| davidgerard wrote:
| It's confusing, but no, it's not open core. That thing is a
| genuine full LO.
| buovjaga wrote:
| Collabora no longer uses TDF infra to develop Online, the new
| repo is https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Ah, I missed that. Again it is a bit confusing. LibreOffice
| Online is actually the same as Collabora, and it includes the
| mobile releases.
| the_duke wrote:
| I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a
| professional setting.
|
| In my experience everyone uses MS Office or Google Docs, and
| LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that
| don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux
| users.
|
| I'm sure the situation is different in other parts of the world,
| where saving on license cost is more important.
|
| It's a bit of a shame that eg governments aren't switching en
| masse.
|
| But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using
| something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an
| office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, and the
| incompatabilities of Writer with Word make it problematic.
| FriedrichN wrote:
| > But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using
| something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an
| office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, and the
| incompatabilities of Writer with Word make it problematic.
|
| I find Calc to be quite complete and quite compatible with
| Excel files. I deal with way more Excel sheets than I would
| like to, but I can't remember the last time I ran into a
| problem with them.
|
| Google Docs on the other hand is quite slow and lacks a lot of
| features and has the disadvantage of being browser based and a
| Google product.
| ta988 wrote:
| Calc is good, but Impress is disastrous. Really buggy and
| lacks a lot of ergonomy compared to Powerpoint. Writer works
| really well except some weird behavior when switching
| languages occasionaly.
| kenniskrag wrote:
| tried impress yesterday. Killed the layout completely.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| The phrase 'killed it' could mean it was great or it was
| awful.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Yeah, Impress is a mess. I use OnlyOffice for ppt files
| since I don't really care about performance in a slide
| editor.
|
| As for Writer, one more problem is that it is sometimes
| simply unbearably ugly. Just scrolling through a pretty
| small document creates rendering artifacts everywhere and
| the font rendering tends to randomly switch between
| passable and horrendous. If you're lucky though and that
| doesn't happen for you, it's actually pretty usable
| (ignoring format compatibility, of course, but that's also
| MS's fault).
| m-p-3 wrote:
| There are some formulas from Sheets that I use and are sadly
| inexistent in Excel/Calc. I suppose it's one way to lock some
| users in.
|
| Example:
|
| QUERY: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343
|
| ARRAYFORMULA: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093275
| gcblkjaidfj wrote:
| QUERY: is selfserving google feature. But you can probably
| do it in libreoffice in a way that is less google-
| selfserving and more portable, by using a macro/script that
| fetches content.
|
| ARRAYFORMULA: https://help.libreoffice.org/6.3/en-
| US/text/scalc/01/0406010....
| cosmie wrote:
| ARRAYFORMULA itself doesn't exist in Excel, but they did
| recently add support for dynamic/spilled arrays[1]. Which
| brings it close to (if not at) parity with ARRAYFORMULA.
|
| It's not even close to as handy as QUERY (in ease of use or
| intuitiveness), but they also recently introduced
| FILTER[2]. Which can be used in combination with other
| functions to replicate a subset of QUERY use cases.
|
| My pet list of functions that have me reaching for Sheets
| are the regex ones[3][4][5]. Excel's search and replace
| functions support basic wildcards[6], but anything more
| sophisticated than that quickly becomes infeasible,
| impractical, or impossible to replicate using Excel
| function built-ins and requires dropping writing into
| Javascript or VBA to write up a custom function.
|
| That said, Excel has had a pretty nifty and powerful ETL
| tool hidden inside of it for the past ~7 years called Power
| Query[7]. This is essentially an entire app-within-an-app
| (and is a data processing engine in many Microsoft data
| products), complete with it's own programming language[8]
| and compressed columnar data store format. For anyone with
| a development background, you can easily ramp up on Power
| Query's language and do 90% of the work you need to do
| there, and obviate the need for complicated and fragile
| formulas to begin with.
|
| [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/guidelines-
| and-ex...
|
| [2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/filter-
| function-f...
|
| [3] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098244
|
| [4] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098292
|
| [5] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098245
|
| [6] https://support.microsoft.com/en-ie/office/using-
| wildcard-ch...
|
| [7] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/getting-
| started-w...
|
| [8] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/
| ekianjo wrote:
| Calc handles unicode csv properly, unlike Excel...
| corty wrote:
| Calc handles CSV far better, period. Excel has language-
| dependent unconfigurable separators, quoting problems,
| whitespace problems, charset problems, BOM problems, weird
| expansion problems (like interpreting stuff as dates
| randomly), etc.
|
| I cannot understand how anyone uses Excel with any
| nontrivial amount of CSV data without going mad...
| zokier wrote:
| Power Query
| acomjean wrote:
| Calc also seems to handle comma separated (or tab) files much
| better. Especially when saving.
| olav wrote:
| Other than being the ,,Right Thing" to use, this is the
| real killer as Excel frequently can't open its own CSV
| Files. Microsoft seems to hate its users very much.
| gizzlon wrote:
| Also when importing :) Spent a few hours with Calc today
| because I could not get Google Sheets to import and handle
| my csv correctly.
|
| Much better experience than I expected, TBH. Will use it
| again, and probably default to LibreOffice Calc for single-
| user sheets.
| franga2000 wrote:
| YES! This 1000 times! I keep LibreOffice installed on my
| Windows install solely because of that. In general, Calc
| has got to be the best in the suite and perhaps the only
| one that actually has any advantage over MS (besides Draw's
| PDF editing, but that has no direct MS counterpart).
| andrewshadura wrote:
| Well, Writer offers sane menus, toolbars and sidebars,
| unlike Word. Word's are a complete mess, each time I have
| to use it I'm lost and can't do basic things.
| davidgerard wrote:
| Writer is as good or better than Word.
| longtom wrote:
| It amazes me how an open source project can outperform a
| 40 year old multi-billion dollar app. I think this points
| to major corruption and incompetence as a result of
| market monopolization.
| franga2000 wrote:
| It doesn't though, as basically everyone in this comment
| section can attest to. This is simply one instance where
| it's better - looking at it closely, this is actually an
| open-source program supporting a standard open format
| better than proprietary software that has its own
| alternative - pretty common when you think about it.
| longtom wrote:
| Though CSV is an extremely common format. Even if does
| not outperform in every regard, it is still astonishing
| how close it gets.
| gcblkjaidfj wrote:
| > open source project can outperform a 40 year old multi-
| billion dollar app
|
| differente incentives.
|
| I guarantee the open source is not outperforming the 40bi
| company offering on the metric they care about: profit.
|
| Likewise, nothing is outperforming the metric the open
| source project care about: developer (well, power user)
| satisfaction.
| tsomberi wrote:
| I have not used Goog Sheets for years but it is very annoying
| when the keyboard shortcuts of the browser interfere with it.
| ysavir wrote:
| You mean when Google Sheets interferes with the keyboard
| shortcuts of the browser.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction
| in a professional setting.
|
| Here, also nope. There are GDocs users, and then MS Office
| users (there is a tendency that GDocs users here are using the
| office suite for its relative ease of use while MS Office users
| do tend to use the bits that are relevant to their needs (for
| example, Excel automation and advanced formatting found in Word
| which is good enough to not justify spending more in InDesign
| and similar applications).
|
| We have trialled LibreOffice before, but the results were
| dismal: even though LibreOffice (to its advantage) approaches
| Microsoft compatibility, we still experienced some minor bugs
| (were reported and subsequently fixed) and missing features (in
| the sense that PowerBI and others were providing, plus real-
| time collaboration which Microsoft has a decent solution) means
| that even considering and removing training costs from the
| computation, it would not justify changing from Microsoft
| Office (or even GDocs) to LibreOffice for us. Google has eaten
| the basics and Microsoft has eaten the advanced users (and
| R/Py/Julia for _even_ more advanced users), so to speak.
| justin66 wrote:
| > I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction
| in a professional setting.
|
| > In my experience, everyone uses MS Office, and LibreOffice
| still remains relegated to private individuals that don't
| happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users.
|
| At one job, I recommended OpenOffice for handling some very old
| files that were in a Lotus format Microsoft Office didn't
| support. I wouldn't call it gaining traction, but they
| installed at least one copy.
| swiley wrote:
| My understanding is that it's popular among EU users.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I think they have a lot of users in Africa, Eastern Europe,
| places like that. If you look at their blogs they also have
| contributors there and focus some outreach there I think.
| tlamponi wrote:
| The defence ministry of Italy does, as well as other Italian
| government bodies.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/from-microsoft-to-libreoffice-...
|
| Well and my company does, but naturally biased as we're
| European (meaning, sending over lots of data to Microsoft is a
| bit more frowned upon) and produce open source software
| ourself.
| pmontra wrote:
| A customer of mine has both Office and LibreOffice on their
| Macs. They tend to use Word and Excel (not much) but can open
| odt and ods. However most of their documents are created and
| stored on several online platforms. Word and Office are not as
| important as they used to be.
| dang wrote:
| Hi, sorry for complete offtopicness, but would you mind
| emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you a
| repost invite for a good submission and we don't have any
| other way to contact you!
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| At some point I recall Munich tried to switch to
| Libre/OpenOffice.
|
| After spending a fortune they ended up going back to Microsoft
| Office because it just worked.
| teddyh wrote:
| You mean, after Microsoft spent a fortune "convincing" them?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LiMux&oldid=99256.
| ..
|
| Also, it seems that they have now switched _back_ to Linux
| again:
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-
| munich-i...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| When they switched back they still had something like 40%
| of workstations running Windows.
|
| I assume they'll make the same discovery as last time: It's
| not free as in free beer; they'll have to develop the
| missing pieces themselves if they want it to work.
| tlamponi wrote:
| Yeah, because the efforts to switch all over was
| constantly messed with, from Balmer cancelling his
| vacation for a immediate visit with the Mayor, to people
| complaining that their random exe cannot be installed
| (which was mainly due to newer stricter policy and every
| admin can tell you that this is a general complaint).
|
| Oh and did you actually read the links?
|
| FYI: They are switching to Linux again.
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-
| munich-i...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > to people complaining that their random exe cannot be
| installed
|
| When it's critical software that's required to get work
| done it's a legitimate complain. And that's why they were
| still running Windows in parallels years after
| "switching"
| ksec wrote:
| >MS Office or Google Docs
|
| I see these two as very different need and usage. Google Docs
| is for some basic cross department collaboration usage. Which
| is replaceable only by Office 365 online but not traditional
| Office itself.
|
| With Office, 2007, 2010, 2013+ ( Anything beyond 2013 is far to
| new for most Enterprise upgrade and usage ). These group of
| user aren't going to be switching to anything.
|
| I am willing to bet money there are _Trillion_ dollar revenue
| today relying on Good old Excel SpreadSheet. From Small family
| business to large Investment firms using Excel to its limit.
| Which is working perfectly fine, _DONT FUCKING TOUCH IT_.
|
| Even if LibreOffice promise 99.99% of Excel compatibility, are
| business and Enterprise willing to risk 0.01% of failure? For
| What? Ideology to not use anything from Microsoft? Or
| Supporting Open Source?
|
| I have stated this before, the biggest lock-in Microsoft has
| might not be Windows, but Excel. Companies are more than
| willing to switch over to Mac as long as Microsoft Excel is on
| the platform. ( Which is also one reason why I see a slim
| possibilities of Microsoft one day open sourcing Windows Kernel
| )
| tyingq wrote:
| O365 is probably the final nail for any broad deployment of
| LibreOffice in a largish company. Especially with so many
| working remote from their own PC's. That's despite the fact
| that online Word is probably less compatible with regular Word
| than LibreOffice is :)
| easton wrote:
| At least it can render the document correctly in Word Online,
| last time I gave LibreOffice something complex the fonts and
| formatting were messy (same goes for Apple's built in Word
| previewer, which I'm pretty sure hasn't been updated since
| iPhone OS 1.0).
| tyingq wrote:
| _" At least it can render the document correctly in Word
| Online"_
|
| Sometimes. Online Word chokes on many things, and misses
| simple stuff like center aligned columns.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| It's almost never the same layout as in proper Word even
| for simple documents. It's only really useful for shared
| documents you don't need to print etc.
| davidgerard wrote:
| I'm inclined to think this is, almost entirely, a fake
| objection - just something people feel they have to claim
| about LO.
|
| Google Docs is absolutely bloody useless at DOCX reading in
| every way, and messes up quite simple documents, but nobody
| ever raises this objection.
|
| LO is really fantastically good at reading the fake
| standard called DOCX. In my experience, it handles it more
| consistently than MS Word - which is notoriously
| incompatible with other versions of _itself_.
|
| Put it this way: I believe this class of objection when the
| objector links the LO bug, with a test document.
| vetinari wrote:
| > the fonts and formatting were messy
|
| Did you have these fonts installed, or LO was forced to use
| substitutes with slightly different metric?
|
| Just having identical fonts available is 99% of solving the
| layout problems.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Word Online is a mess, but the real killer feature of 365
| seems to be collaboration within the standard apps. You get
| the full power of a well-established desktop app with the
| convenience of someting like G Docs. Add to that the new-ish
| diff and merge features for the majority of companies that
| still rely on sending docs back and forth through email and
| it seems that LibreOffice really has no way of competing in
| anything but a highly-regulated and locked-down scenario such
| as some government offices, where MS's fancy features
| actually pose a security threat (and a project can't survive
| from just that).
| e40 wrote:
| I tried for a while, but gave up. Using anything but MS Office
| is swimming upstream. It's just not worth the hassle.
|
| I have been impressed with Google's in-browser compatibility,
| but it isn't a replacement. It's just nice not to have to fire
| up Word or Excel and get a quick glance, if that's what I need.
| blackhaz wrote:
| I'm transitioning our small telecom business to LibreOffice.
| Not sure if that is representative at all. MS Office
| subscription model makes little sense for us. LibreOffice works
| well, and I am happy to see predominantly ODTs and ODSs now in
| the internal circulation. Files in external correspondence
| still have to be MS Office.
|
| Having a full stable office suite like LibreOffice was probably
| the final reason I've switched to FreeBSD on my desktop, and
| haven't looked back.
| freeopinion wrote:
| #isp-oss:matrix.org
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Anecdotally, I'm "the Linux person" at my company, so I have
| LibreOffice on my machine. Everyone else is on Office 365. I
| rarely need an office suite, and LO does the job for me, but
| with the online MS Office apps, seems like LibreOffice is
| further from professional adoption than ever before.
|
| The online collaboration aspect seems to be the killer feature.
| If I load Excel Online in a browser to edit a file together
| with someone else, that just works, and it handles simple use
| cases very well. I suppose the web version of Excel wouldn't
| deal with complex spreadsheets well, but complex MS Office
| files are also prone to fail in LibreOffice.
|
| I continue to run LibreOffice because it does what I need, but
| seems like cloud office suites are now expected to be an
| option, and the FOSS options there seem to be way behind.
| davidgerard wrote:
| Collabora Office is the online collaboration version of LO,
| and it works well enough that Collabora sell it to companies
| as a service.
| Apofis wrote:
| Doubtful, everything is going web app these days. Web Assembly
| will help bridge the performance gap between native apps and
| webapps, which is really the last pain point.
| buovjaga wrote:
| Here is a list of deployments in the public and private sector:
| https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Migrations
|
| Feel free to add any missing ones :)
| genezeta wrote:
| Last couple of jobs I did, they used LibreOffice.
|
| The thing is they were administration (Army, Home Office) and
| in the last decade a lot of the administration here dropped MS
| in favour of Libre for economic/political reasons.
|
| And then, just a couple of months ago they dropped Libre and
| switched to mmm... OnlyOffice. There hasn't been much talk
| about it -compared to when switching to Libre- but it seems it
| was decided because they wanted a suite that was available via
| web but didn't want to go back to MS with O365 or use Google.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Microsoft is just amazing at 'helping' companies chose
| software. If you're already on a microsoft stack at work,
| maybe running some in house servers, exchange, some other
| things, and you're partially in the cloud as well, it's a no
| brainer to get office as well with it, and teams, and
| whatever else.
|
| Microsoft has an entire ecosystem that works fairly well. It
| doesn't make much sense to just use libreoffice when Office
| just works and comes with the the rest of the pie you are
| eating.
| franga2000 wrote:
| I'd add a small asterisk here, since MS stuff doesn't
| actually integrate _well_. It integrates barely
| sufficiently while making third-party integration near
| impossible, so you really don 't have much of a choice.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I have been a linux user since about 2006. I didn't
| really even know anything about the MS stack when I
| started at LargeCorp a few years ago. I was actually
| pleasantly surprised how well most things just worked.
| Teams was a bit shakey at the start, but the office
| online integraiton was nice, we were able to collaborate,
| exchange worked out of the box nicely, the phones in the
| office were even tied into whatever system we had so I
| could have my number even if i was sitting at a different
| desk for a week.
|
| I understood why when teams came out they said "okay stop
| using slack because we now get teams for free". They
| already have MS every-other-product and now they got
| another one at no extra cost.
| Closi wrote:
| Additionally both Google Docs and Libre fall down if you are
| doing more comprehensive data analysis.
|
| Google Docs is functionally pretty close to most of excel, but
| has significantly more restrictions in terms of row count.
|
| Libre office misses key functionality available in the latest
| office releases last time I checked. Things like unique(),
| filter(), let() and more recently lamda() really do change the
| game.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Out of curiosty, what kinds of things would actually hit the
| row limit? It's hard for me to imagine a situation where you
| have enough data points to reach it, but don't have any
| specialised software to analyze it.
| Closi wrote:
| I work in logistics consulting - it's pretty common to
| receive orderline data that is a few hundred thousand rows
| and excel is great at analysing it (eg to build a material
| flow).
|
| Excel for this is significantly faster and more flexible
| than any other tool I've used.
|
| Also transport data and models can often use many columns.
| Google Docs limit is actually the active cells used so this
| then reduces the row limit further.
|
| If we receive data that is a few million rows on bigger
| formats, we will still use excel, just with PowerQuery /
| PowerPivot and using measures which works pretty well up to
| 10 million records or so.
|
| Bigger than that and we will use PowerBI.
| galacticdessert wrote:
| Don't know about the comment author, but in consulting huge
| excels are quite the normal. Especially when dealing with
| data driven domains such as energy
| Closi wrote:
| Yep I'm in consulting, good guess! (Supply chain &
| logistics)
| blablabla123 wrote:
| I work as Software Engineer but LibreOffice is my first-choice
| for any Office related task, both at work and at home. The CSV
| import/export is far better than that of MS Office - and Docs
| for that matter. Which is exactly what I need, Spreadsheet is
| the most common tool I need at work. But I also use the other
| tools, not that often though. Most notable IMHO is the well-
| working PDF export in Writer that predates any built-in PDF
| export in Office or Windows by years.
|
| But yes, some "normal" tasks take a few clicks more than in MS
| Office when you're not used to it. The look&feel is really
| different and the UI still make this 90s-OSS-hardly-works
| impression - which is unjustified. On the other hand it is far
| more powerful than Google Docs and I can check in the files in
| git which is not an option for Google Docs. FWIW I think
| there's an online version of it as well now.
| physicsguy wrote:
| It's used in Universities by academics using Linux that need to
| open word documents sent to them by admin staff in my
| exprrience, but that's about it.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Slight remark:
|
| it's easy to forget, but even for document edition.. legacy can
| strike hard. My last bout at a court room they were using
| WordPerfect 12, due to coupling with its template system with
| the legal doc generator.
| taylodl wrote:
| Yes - LibreOffice Draw. Microsoft has made quite a mess of
| Visio and Draw is much, much easier to use. My organization is
| an MS Office shop but that really just means we use Word,
| Excel, and Power Point. Us techies? We use LibreOffice Draw.
|
| Now that GDocs has become more popular and so people more and
| more are distributing presentations as PDFs I've also seen more
| people starting to use Impress. It's usage isn't widespread,
| but it's trending up.
|
| Word and Excel? I don't see their dominance fading in my
| organization anytime in the foreseeable future.
| ta988 wrote:
| I have switched almost fully to diagrams.net, using a local
| version. I found it much more practical than Draw.
| franga2000 wrote:
| That's Draw.io, for those that haven't heard of their new
| name, and I definitely agree that it's brilliant piece of
| software. Pretty much the one and only web-based
| productivity software I enjoy using.
| throwawaybutwhy wrote:
| Web-based? It's also available in VS Code as a plugin.
| Integrated workflow at its finest, IMO.
| sngz wrote:
| i use the electron desktop app for it too
| ChrisRR wrote:
| I used to use LibreOffice all the time because it was free, but
| then Google Docs overtook that for me
|
| Nowadays I don't even have an office suite installed because of
| Google Docs
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using
| something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an
| office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel,
|
| This sounds really paradoxical to me: granted Calc isn't Excel,
| but it has maybe 50% of the features when Google Doc has, I
| don't know, maybe 3% ...
|
| When doing basic things, you are almost always good with Calc,
| meanwhile Google Doc is like the most minimal spreadsheet you
| can get.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Keep in mind that the author already states they rarely need
| an office suite, so needing spreadsheets is an ever rarer
| occasion. For those kinds of users, Google Sheets is
| perfectly fine and even has some convenience features that
| the competition doesn't (for me, those are mainly great
| checkbox and dropdown support, some fancy "online" formulas
| that can do things like currency conversion, and linking
| spreadsheet ranges into Docs).
| ricc wrote:
| But then he said this:
|
| > Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel
|
| Which sounds really BS when compared to Google Sheets, as
| the post that you replied already mentioned.
| indymike wrote:
| In 2007 my company (a digital agency) had it's last bad
| Microsoft day. We had a bad Windows update that caused every
| employee 4-5 hours of downtime. So, that afternoon I asked
| everyone Mac or Linux. The next day we switched. It worked out
| largely because OpenOffice (and then LibreOffice) were good
| enough to let us interop with our customers and vendors.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| While I don't love Microsoft, 4-5 hours of downtime due to a
| bad OS update isn't anything to write home about and is by no
| mean restricted to Windows, especially in 2007.
|
| Same thing can happen on Mac (Catalina bricking MacBooks via
| bad EFI update) or Linux (where do I start).
|
| Basically, you have to pick your poison and a sysadmin that
| withholds updates until all SW apps and packages are tested
| thoroughly on the company devices before green-lighting the
| rollout.
|
| Clicking _Update_ each time you get a notification, has the
| risk of ending badly for your business no matter what OS you
| choose.
| indymike wrote:
| At the time this happened, that was the last straw after
| losing about 2 calendar days times 21 employees. You know
| what? We never had it happen again after moving. Not once
| in the next four years (I sold the company and didn't pay
| attention after the sale).
| m45t3r wrote:
| > Linux (where do I start)
|
| Not true, there are tons of ways in Linux where you can
| completely recover from a bad update. Either manual backups
| (even using tar works), BTRFS or ZFS, or something more
| fancy like NixOS (that I use).
| vetinari wrote:
| I will add, that currently Ubuntu does that by default,
| when on ZFS. For users, it will snapshot their homedir
| every hour, so even if they accidentally delete
| something, it doesn't need to be catastrophic.
| trinix912 wrote:
| This still doesn't mean there's absolutely no downtime,
| especially in an enterprise setting where it's usually
| easier to perform generic rollbacks on Windows than
| Linux.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Not sure about that last point.
|
| In my uni, the computers booted over PXE and were often
| re-imaged, while mounting user files over the network. I
| imagine it is a rather common setup?
|
| Anyway, since they had groups of similar hardware,
| software was thouroughly tested before any update was
| deployed to a given group. This was the case for Linux,
| and probably for windows as well.
|
| This was a smallish university, with an IT staff of 3-4,
| mind you, so that's probably not too complex to deploy.
| There's probably turnkey solutions out there (Red Hat
| likely has something like this).
|
| Linux makes sense in a company setting IMO, as companies
| can generally pick the machines their employees will use,
| so they can vet compatibility and software updates in
| advance. Of course, more moving parts (different HW/SW
| combinations) means more difficult testing.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| You're right but that wasn't my point. I didn't say you
| can't recover easily from Linux, I said it's just as
| likely to break your shit through an update as any other
| OS.
| type0 wrote:
| It isn't though, even when it did, ah let's say 15 years
| ago I could always repair it when it booted into terminal
| or with a resqueCD. The same can't be said about Windows,
| that's usually because GNU/Linux had sane filesystem
| which Windows never had.
| augustk wrote:
| > In my experience everyone uses MS Office or Google Docs, and
| LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that
| don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux
| users.
|
| Of which quite a few in the latter group think that proprietary
| software is for suckers.
|
| https://www.tedxgeneva.net/talks/richard-stallman-free-softw...
| domano wrote:
| Our company used Libreoffice for many years but we switched to
| Google a few years back and i could not be happier.
|
| We are a development consultancy, the sales people mostly used
| MS Office before the switch to Google.
| tifadg1 wrote:
| I keep looking at the changelog as the versions come and go and
| am generally disappointed that there's no concentrated effort to
| improve eye candy/defaults, especially in calc, but writer as
| well.
|
| I use writer heavily at home, mostly for strict structured
| technical data and it serves my needs, though everything still
| looks awful in word. Given up on using calc though - still no
| tables, pivot tables are fugly and inintuitive - end up booting a
| VM 2-3 times a week to edit in excel for years now.
|
| That said, I'm thankful for the contributors and everyone
| involved doing the best they can.
| indymike wrote:
| I've been using LibreOffice and before that OpenOffice for as
| long as it's been open source. Writer, Impress and Calc are
| fantastic products and as capable as anything else on the market.
| That said, I fear the market for non-web based office software is
| going to slowly shrink.
|
| The real competition is web based office suites like Google Docs,
| Zoho and Microsoft Office. The web based suites are missing lots
| of features, but they make up for it two ways: auto
| revisions/save and real-time collaboration. It's hard to go back
| to old-style local single-access files once you've had a team of
| four working on a document at the same time.
|
| Finally, most of us have been frog-potted one too many times by
| software that switches to a community / paid enterprise license
| model. The name "community edition" tends to signal a bleak
| future. I've had to switch from SugarCRM, ElasticSearch and a few
| others because in the rush to create value in the "enterprise"
| version, eventually they just make the community one suck instead
| of making the enterprise one that much better. Also, the truth is
| I wouldn't have even bothered using Sugar or Elastic if the only
| option was to pay for it.
| tssva wrote:
| People have mentioned features which LibreOffice lacks and the
| poor state of the UI but what I haven't seen mentioned here is
| the reason I don't use LibreOffice anymore. It is slow. Whenever
| I used it I felt like I was stuck in molasses. Even the basic
| stuff like launching the applications, opening documents and
| scrolling through them always felt extremely slow.
| analog31 wrote:
| This was my experience too. Graphing a column of a couple
| thousand numbers took forever in LO, and is almost instant in
| Excel. There were other things like the "smoothness" of the
| user interface for lack of a better word. Excel seems more
| forgiving of not clicking in precisely the right place, and
| stuff like that. LO is more physically laborious to use, and
| the speed problem seems to compound this issue.
|
| That was when I used Excel. Today I use mostly Python, and my
| few uses of a spreadsheet are handled by a crusty old Office
| 2010 license.
|
| My impression is that Microsoft sweats the details of Excel the
| way that Apple sweats the details of iOS, and doing this is
| just a very big costly effort. I consider Excel to be the
| flagship of Microsoft.
|
| Oddly enough I'm seeing Word vanishing. People just write in
| the chat or e-mail editors, and insert bitmap screen captures.
| Word processing is being relegated to stuff that nobody reads,
| such as business procedures and dissertations. ;-)
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Mac version of Excel can be frustratingly slow, in my
| experience. And while multi-threaded computation of column
| formula, it can also be a real annoyance for small to mid-
| sized Excel sheets where the performance gain seems to be
| outweighed by whatever overhead is involved.
| ACAVJW4H wrote:
| I am also quite fond of Onlyoffice. We deployed the community
| edition alongside our nextcloud and I think we don't miss the
| Large Corporation Office suite much
| newscracker wrote:
| I use LibreOffice Calc a couple of times a year for personal use.
| At work I have to use Excel. I donate a small sum to The Document
| Foundation (which develops and publishes LibreOffice) every year.
|
| I have a few longstanding disagreements with the state of the
| application and its development approach over the years. The
| first is that the application loads slowly, but that's not quite
| as bad as the other gripes I have. The UI is quite ugly with poor
| fonts, cluttered (and ugly) menubar icons, not a well designed
| layout, etc. (on Windows and macOS). The fact that Calc uses
| keyboard shortcuts that aren't anywhere close to what Excel uses
| (even the Excel/Office 2003 version that's before the Ribbon Menu
| days) makes using Excel knowledge and Excel muscle memory for
| keyboard shortcuts quite useless when switching to Calc. For
| years, I've encountered some strange copy paste bugs in Calc
| where it doesn't seem to get the clipboard contents from the OS.
| If these were resolved, I'd be very thrilled to recommend it to
| others.
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