LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

[mshroyer]

I've started switching back to LibreOffice because the situation with MS Office nagging me to save my files to the cloud, or to use "connected" AI experiences, keeps getting worse.

(The connected experiences, including Copilot, can be disabled with a dialog hidden deep in Office's Trust Center, but even that's confusingly worded. It's unclear from the wording and the structure of the dialog what the combination of checking "all connected experiences" but unchecking "experiences that analyze your content" should actually do, for example.)

MS Office is certainly the more polished product, especially Excel. There are some spreadsheets I can't feasibly convert to LibreOffice Calc without equivalents to Excel's lambdas and tables.

But LibreOffice does the job in most cases. I'm really excited to see this new work—especially CRDT-based sync between desktop app instances over a network file server, which would turn LibreOffice into a significantly better experience than MS Office for my purposes.

[Beijinger]

It is based on the formerly proprietary StarWriter, from a German company. Later acquired by Sun if I remember correctly, then open sourced.

There is another commercial German competitor from this time, SoftMaker. I used to buy the suite for Linux, just recently switched to LibreOffice. I never liked the clunky Libreoffice but since SoftMaker refuses to support LanguageTool....

There is actually a third German text processor from this time, Papyrus. Born on Atari ST.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Division

[2] https://www.softmaker.com/en/products/softmaker-office

[3] https://papyrus.de/

[4] https://papyrusauthor.com/

English new version of Papyrus seems to be released in a few days.

[cookiengineer]

There's also onlyoffice [1] which recently got a little more traction due to its integrations for moodle, owncloud, nextcloud etc. I think all of their software is AGPL3 licensed last time I checked. Their suite somewhat targets selfhosted collaboration for the web browser.

[1] https://www.onlyoffice.com/

[mr_toad]

> Later acquired by Sun if I remember correctly, then open sourced.

Sun named it OpenOffice. LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun. OpenOffice was subsequently donated to the Apache foundation.

[dsp_person]

"Distraction Free Writing" with pic of rainy background - would be pretty if this is animated!

[cpill]

a 40yo code base. Eeeek!

[relwin]

My mother-in-law couldn't get her old Word docs to format correctly on her new laptop (Win11 + MS Office365). Rather than fiddle around trying various settings I installed LibreOffice and with it her docs rendered correctly. Made her happy. Libre Writer reminds me of Word2000, which means I don't waste time learning new ways to perform mundane writing tasks.

[xaldir]

Ironically, at $work we do have more success opening old files (pre-2000) with LibreOffice than MsOffice, so yeah.

[pinoy420]

When I read that $person has installed $opensource_thing for $tech_illiterate_relative I always imagine the “anon uses gimp” greentext.

[cobertos]

My favorite underrated feature is editing PDFs directly at the object level with LibreOffice Draw.

[_fizz_buzz_]

I always use LibreOffice to edit csv files. Excel always seems to mess with csv files in ways I don't want it to.

[niccl]

absolutely agree. We get lots of csv files to process and most of our consultants will check them in excel and totally mangle them one way or another. You _can_ make excel import them without messing them too much but it's several hoops away from the normal file open procedure so they forget. Libreoffice Just Works. Love it. And the way it can split a multi-tab excel file into separate csv files from the command line is a godsend. Although the documentation for the incantation for the filters to make it do it is rather lacking. But once you get it, it's fantastic

[TiredOfLife]

Excel has two different ways to open csv. The open/doubleclick is kinda compatiblity mode, with reasons for default options lost in history. The way you are supposed to use csv is open blank workbook, data tab and import.

[Prickle]

Yup, this is a constant trouble maker for us.

Customer exports a csv file, then verifies the contents in excel. They never realize that excel modified some of the data, and pass it on to us.

Just, constantly! (I use notepad++ for CSV files however)

[econ]

Me too, I'm not impressed with the interface tho.

It should be able to sniff the csv flavor before ingesting it.

Maybe it would be cool to tie the settings to the file path so that it simply opens /banana/2.csv assuming it is just like /banana/1.csv (skipping the dialog)

[pdyc]

you can also try this tool for csv https://newbeelearn.com/tools/csvonline/

[mmooss]

Why not a text editor?

[doright]

I had no idea the lineage of LibreOffice went back that far.

I wonder how much StarOffice code still remains in the repo.

[jonathaneunice]

I dunno about StarOffice code, but the interchange file format became the Open Document Format (ODF) is almost unchanged. I've worked with it since before ODF was formalized. The current version is at most a polishing of structures that have been there well over 20 years. It's also, in extraordinary sharp comparison to the XML structures Microsoft drafted (confusingly called Office Open XML), well-designed and joy to work with.

[ok123456]

StarOffice was exciting circa 1999. You could get an office suit on Linux that was useable and largely compatible with MS Office.

[technothrasher]

I've been following it along the whole time. I fondly remember using StarOffice on my SGI Indigo back in the early 1990's to do all my homework in college.

[nelblu]

Although I don't use it frequently, I love that LibreOffice exits. I was wondering if there are any online resources that summarizes some of the cool tricks and features of LibreOffice for an occasional user like me?

[haunter]

I think the feature comparison against MS Office is a pretty good resource https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...

[bugglebeetle]

My favorite thing about LibreOffice is that it can open CSVs without breaking them. Pretty much everything else about it is a slow, unintuitive mess, but this one killer feature makes me always install it and something that somehow Excel does not have.

[cassepipe]

I have tried to use LibreOffice Base to connect to the database... It needs some love. The workflow to import CSV was to actually copy cell data from a spreadsheet and paste it... It was a weird experience. I went with DBeaver which is clunky too but more capable.

I have also tried to use the javascript API for LO Calc but I couldn't find any documentation even though I have read it was possible in some places... was it unmaintained and taken away ?

I tried to do things with Draw quite some time ago, it was a clunky clunky. I hope it got better.

Writer is just fine though imho, pretty much does what you expect from rich text editor

[kibwen]

Someday in the unimaginable future, Microsoft will be a memory, Word will be lostech available only via running a cracked binary inside fifteen nested VMs, and a working copy of the LibreOffice source will still be kicking around on an FTP server somewhere and developed by users communicating over IRC.

[ww520]

LibreOffice is such a great software, not just among open source but software in general.

[sporkydistance]

When I was at Intel in the late 90's, early 2000's, one CPU project decided it was going to use it exclusively. It was agonizing: slow, terrible UI, buggy, missing a lot of features. I never tried it again, did it get better? It's tragic that there is no competition in this space (rip Lotus).

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

The UI is really bad though.

[geff82]

I just wrote a thesis in Libreoffice, because the faculty didn’t allow to use LaTex. It really impressed me with its features. It is a pro-tool

[dingdingdang]

Did the same back in the day with OpenOffice. MS Word would crash ad-hoc past a certain page count plus the auto-indexing feature of OO actually worked and was predictable. Also.. the styling was, if clunky, at least workable! Actually think the later versions of LibreOffice have started going down hill, heavier (initially the libre fork prided itself on being light-weight afair) and still as ugly as ever.

[metropolbadger]

A faculty not allowing LaTeX seems like a weird choice, what were their reasons? Did they need direct access to a document for editing or something? Would honestly be a huge red flag for me if someone would tell me in which editor I cannot write a doc.

[rossant]

I like this alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice

[dsr_]

We installed it, tried it, and paid for a license.

Then we learned about the password recovery mechanism, the non-logging of useful things, and the support system.

I recommend it highly to certain people, but not people I like.

[Agraillo]

I think the project is great, but for me it is connected now to an empiric rule of big complex projects with a large user base: An issue will be fixed more or less quickly if it affects millions/thousands of users, otherwise it will live forever in an eternal priority queue. There's an issue I noticed in LibreOffice, found the corresponding tracker post, confirmed it with a test, and now it is only visited by a robot checking whether stall issues are worth deleting. Another example is Chromium, where I posted an issue about wrong rendering of some elements with rare sets of attributes. The post is more alive than the LibreOffice one, but nevertheless, never fixed since it requires precious developers time but too niche to gain much attention

[openrisk]

Libreoffice features prominently in the "eurostack" initiative/proposal that was launched today. If there will be ever mainstream self-sovereign compute, it will almost certainly include this incredible project.

The nag I will always repeat: libreoffice should have made much bigger, much sooner, strides to integrate the Python ecosystem in deep ways (striking on its own and ignoring Microsoft's path).

Had it done so, it would now undisputably own the desktop productivity future, with local LLM integration just the trendy example.

[dsp_person]

Would love to see a new project doing a complete re-write of the standard office suite

- desktop / local first

- cross-platform and first-class wasm build

- optional online/collab capabilities

- low bloat and fast compile time

- highly extensible and reusable libraries, practically a GUI toolkit for building office-like applications

- first class scripting e.g. creating/editing docs with python, as well as API for GUI / LLM control

- Prefer to innovate completely new doc/spreadsheet formats rather than adhering to past baggage

- Spreadsheet cells more like a shell/repl/notebook interface

- first class touch & ink support

[nhatcher]

100% agree. I _think_ we will eventually get there. But is going to take time.

Many of your bullet points is what I am trying to do at IronCalc[1], that's a very small step in that direction.

LibreOffice is an impressive technology, but I don't see it running smoothly on the browser. Maybe I am wrong, I want to be wrong.

[1]: https://www.ironcalc.com

[v3ss0n]

We have OnlyOffice.

[xvilka]

... in Rust, to make developers (and users) care less about memory leaks and OOB accesses.

[solardev]

Wow, I thought OpenOffice was new software written as an alternative to Microsoft Office.

Actually the history goes back way further. If anyone's curious:

- First release of StarOffice was 1985. It was a closed source commercial word processor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice

- Sun, now Oracle, bought StarOffice in 1999 and released it as OpenOffice the following year

- Oracle bought Sun in 2010, and the community fragmented because nobody trusts Oracle

- In 2011 LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice

- Later that year Oracle gave up on OpenOffice and gave it to Apache, but that version (Apache OpenOffice) is an orphan that nobody maintains anymore.

So yeah, there's probably still LibreOffice code that dates back to 1985 in some form!

[tannhaeuser]

There's a short history of Star/Open/Libre Office at [1] [in Denglish].

[1]: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/History

[hurtuvac78]

I recently bought a new laptop, I did not buy the Office license for the first time and I am trying LibreOffice.

It's been a month, so far it's great, I hope I will be able to stick to it.

(I am an occasional user of Office, I used to be a heavy one.)

[celsoazevedo]

Anyone using LibreOffice on a Mac with the M4 SoC? It eventually freezes on my new M4 Max MBP when I explore the settings.

[grandinj]

There is a guy (Patrick Luby) slowly chewing his way through the weirder mac issues and he seems to be making progress, so things are getting better (slowly)

[tannhaeuser]

Would those bugs be specific to M4 macs? Using LO without probs here for very simple docs if the increasingly rare occasional need for a printed letter comes up.

[therealmarv]

Strange bugs on Mac made me switch to OnlyOffice (and also open source) for the very seldom local file editing of office documents (using mostly Google Workspace).

[olzhasar]

The same thing happens to me all the time. One of the most annoying things on Apple Silicon for me as a long time Linux enthusiast.

[mshroyer]

I'm not experiencing that issue on my M4 Pro (Mini), fwiw