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Escape from Microsoft Word

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The state of LibreOffice (Score: 2, Interesting)

by engblom@pipedot.org on 2014-10-23 06:01 (#2TM6)

The author is talking about escaping from Word to WP. However, the route most take will be to Libreoffice. This is giving me really mixed feelings:
1. Libreoffice is open source and free. It is good people notice there are alternatives to the highly priced commercial products.
2. However they might get a bad taste of how open source programs are. Libreoffice is extremely unstable. Openoffice had its unstabilities too, but not nearly as many as Libreoffice is having. This is the cost of a speeded up development.

If you copy a picture from the web, you actually copy both the HTML-tag and the picture. Libreoffice decides to use the HTML tag as default. This is causing more hangs and locks than should ever be allowed and it prevents the document from getting opened unless that picture is accessable online at the moment you open the document. Sure, you can go to Edit/Paste Special (Ctrl-Shift-V) and pick Bitmap, but despite how many times you tell a user to do this, they will just right click and paste as they would do with Word.

If you handle a lot of pictures in a document, you almost should expect a crash at some point and you need to remember to all the time press ctrl-s. This is about properly inserted pictures and not pasted HTML.

If you make a presentation with Impact you should save every time before adding an "animation" (even if it is just a simple "appear" because you want something hidden on the slide until later).

If you add a table but forgot to add an empty line under the table, you have big trouble to continue the text.

Sometimes documents get so messed up that there is no other way to correct them than pasting to a plain text editor and then again apply all the styles.

One minor update fixes often some problems but adds serveal other. For example 4.2.5 had problems with animations, 4.26 fixed some problems with animations but added instead some problems with pictures.

OpenOffice always had some problems but not nearly as many and as frequently as LibreOffice. While most people cheerish Libreoffice, I do not do it. I know a fork was necessary as Oracle almost stopped development of OpenOffice but the fork should have continued in a slow and stable pace adding the features and not rushing like now.

Libreoffice works well as a "Word Viewer" (for opening Word documents and printing them), but to actually work with Libreoffice might sometimes really annoy.

Re: The state of LibreOffice (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-23 13:00 (#2TMC)

I had a nicely written counterpoint but Pipedot ate it when my connection dropped temporarily.

In short, my experience is the opposite of yours. LO is a lot more stable for me than OO ever was, crashing about as often as MS Office. And I simply avoid pasting in graphics with HTML. Poof, no lockups.

Re: The state of LibreOffice (Score: 3, Interesting)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-10-23 17:13 (#2TMR)

Believe it or not my best experience was with StarOffice 7 back in 2004 or so. OO.o has been iffy, and LO.o, while better in some ways, remains annoying in ways that matter to me. I love the stylist and navigator, but I sense the project lacks a vision. SO7 was still kind of a techie tool not afraid to expose some of its more complicated functionality. I'm afraid LO and OO.o are too obviously chasing Microsoft's tail. Pasting graphics into a written doc is one pain point: Mac Pages does it so much better and elegantly without having to dick around with "anchors" or having stuff jump all over the page. Just this week I had headaches trying to paste a properly-sized graphic into the header of a LibreOffice doc and I have no idea why.

I've tried a lot of other software: Mellel, Copywrite, Appleworks, Abiword, Softmaker Office (thumbs up on Linux/BSD), WordPerfect 2013, and a few others. I detest MS Word but honestly I found WP to be kind of a mess and missing important functionality. Too bad, because I really wanted to like it and really wanted it to be my alternative to Word on my Windows machine. No dice. Not only did they want like $300 for it but it was annoying and very obviously not-as-good as Word in important ways (can't remember which ones anymore, but I only gave it a week or so of free trial before deciding 'no way.')

I remember WP on DOS fondly, but systems have moved on. Word sucks, but there's practically no escaping it. Unemployment, maybe would help. And before I forget, the Ribbon sucks!

Re: The state of LibreOffice (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-23 19:20 (#2TN0)

MS Word was way better back then too.

The application "office suite" reached its maturity at that point but no one seemed content to leave it alone. Ribbons? XML? Are you kidding me?

Re: The state of LibreOffice (Score: 1)

by tanuki64@pipedot.org on 2014-10-23 19:23 (#2TN1)

If you leave it alone... how do you convince people to buy a new version, when they are totally happy with the old one?

Re: The state of LibreOffice (Score: 1)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-23 20:04 (#2TN8)

If you leave it alone... how do you convince people to buy a new version
Change file formats every couple version.

Simply refuse to sell older versions to anyone, anymore.

Tighten the licensing restrictions and DRM, to ensure you can only ever install it one one single computer, ever.

Include tricks in newer version of the OS, that will gradually slow and bog-down older versions of the software for no particular reason.

etc.

Junk Status

Marked as [Not Junk] by bryan@pipedot.org on 2015-01-02 05:34