LibreOffice does not look nice but it is functional. What is its main function? For many people, it has completely replaced Microsoft Office.
Of course MS Office has an even larger feature set, but few people max it out. Likewise, there are people who will prefer LaTeX but that's a small group. The advocates of web based office systems tend to ignore that desktop systems provide much more privacy. LibreOffice sits right in between those groups and is useful to many.
I think that there is a huge market for simplified office tools. Why don't we have standalone Google Docs for desktop? And I am not talking about a web app but a fully functional desktop one.
On the other hand, for the typical westerner, "does not look nice but it is functional" does not cut it for other products, either. Even power drills aren't purely sold on functionality.
I certainly have some aversion against Libre Office because it does not look nice.
> LibreOffice does not look nice but it is functional.
That's an entirely subjective judgment. I happen to think that LibreOffice looks much better than MS Office 2010, especially when considering visual design as a functional rather than a merely decorative quality. Full-screen file menus are ugly and disorienting.
> Of course MS Office has an even larger feature set, but few people max it out.
OTOH, there are features in MS Office that really are useful and aren't well-represented by equivalent features in LibreOffice. Pivot tables in Excel, for example; not everyone may use them, but for those who do, Excel unfortunately has no credible competition.
LibreOffice has now left OpenOffice in the dust, and is a viable replacement of Microsoft Office for all but a tiny minority of users. LibreOffice Calc may not yet be as shiny as Microsoft Excel, but it works well and reliably -- I use it regularly with fairly large spreadsheets chock-full of array functions that manipulate vectors and matrices.[1]
My major frustration with Office products (Excel specifically) was the cell limits (size, #cols, #rows) that prevented me from managing large quantities of data (e.g.: Excel 2003 could only manage 65k rows - IIRC, in 2007 that increased to 2M, but even that's too little for some heavy applications).
I try to stay away from *Office suites as much as possible. It seems that whenever I use them to do anything more complicated than typing a short letter, everything starts to fall apart and I wish I had used Latex/R/python instead.
On the other hand, LibreOffice is a very helpful piece of software to edit the occasional .doc attachment.
Writer is Good Enough to open a Word document I've gotten from someone else, and for what I mainly do with such documents, I actually prefer Writer to Word.
For my own purposes, the only office application I really find myself reaching for is the spreadsheet. I'm a big supporter of free/open source software and I run Linux on all my personal computers, so it pains me to write this - but LibreOffice Calc just doesn't come anywhere close to comparing with the functionality, stability and polish of Excel.
Using it is a steady aggravation, and I'm persuaded that the problem is not due to it being different from Excel - after all, other open source applications are different from their proprietary counterparts and I find them as good or better.
The problem with Calc is that it just doesn't work very well. Everything seems to take one or two more steps than the equivalent action on Excel, the defaults aren't as helpful, and the application is far more prone to freeze/crash.
Not much to say other than "I love LibreOffice" I'm by no means a power user but it gets the job done. For everything I do it is a 100% viable MS-Office replacement. Converting people to Linux would be a lot harder without it as well :)
I use Writer for basic writing, nothing fancy. Same for Calc and I hold my lecture using Impress. I use Draw every now and then for quick and dirty stuff.
Never used Base or Math explicitly.
Keep up the good work it is appreciated.
Edit: I have Googled for this a couple of times but never find anything. Is there an "Advanced LibreOffice" type book that anyone could recommend? I always make resolutions to use my office suite more efficient but never get around to it.
I am really surprised that no one mentioned the lack of OneNote, yet. Although it might not actually apply to libreoffice, if their ultimate goal is to replace ms office though then some really really good OneNote alternative has to be developed.
OneNote and esp. Excel have to have an extremely good alternative for MS Office to become somewhat less important.
One of the largest complains to LibreOffice has been its dated look. Given that time will always make something look dated, the developers probably thought that they should abstract the look to CSS or something and then make their lives easier down the line. The added benefit is now they can tell people that don't like the "dated" look to pick one of many.
Whilst you might want a single clean look, you definition and someone elses might differ.
This is, in much harsher terms, basically what I came here to say.
I completely agree. This is a stereotypical open-source software web site, and it shouldn't be. This goes to show the lack of attention to design detail that is no doubt influencing their whole product, and surely part of the reason it's not as successful as it should be.
Deny it all you want, but webwanderings speaks the truth, and the truth needs to be heard if open source projects such as Libre are to be taken seriously—as they should be. Design is important, marketing is important, and they need to treat it that way.
You may not like the looks, but I am pleased that they are not throwing my donations at making the website pretty. I much prefer they make the program work better.
At least it loads fast and is navigable.
It looks like it was designed by a programmer which probably makes sense. Would it make sense for libreoffice to devote funds and resources to hiring designers that could be used to improve the office suite itself?
For the past 23 years I have only very occasionally had the need to use Office-type applications. Today the typical uses of Office applications implies an outdated way of working.
For example, my company lives and breathes through its internal wiki -- which is quite an accomplishment since we are owned by a company that still lives in the dark ages: mailing Office attachments to each other.
Sure, the wiki software could have been a lot better. For one it needs an order of magnitude better performance. And it would be nice if the install wasn't such a messy affair. But it beats the alternative hands down. It beats mailing documents. It beats juggling multiple versions of documents. It beats overflowing mailserver quotas.
Most of all it beats not having to run Windows XP because the people who came before you were stupid fuckups who decided to tie everything so closely to a single platform that they can only afford to move the company to a new OS version every 10 years. And then only after a herculean effort. Inbetween everyone runs on outdated software. For a whole decade.
Real change doesn't come from offering marginal compatibility. Real change comes from not having stupid problems.
LibreOffice is a solution to a problem you should not be having.
I agree. Office apps are modeled after paper workflow. We live in a day of wikis, github, world-wide social networks and cloud storage with universal accessibility over all devices.
Writing paper formatted documents is bad on many levels. It uses dead tree as a medium. It does not have the web of links that exist in a wiki, nor the tags and classifications that exist in a blog or on twitter. Documents can't be live updated for everyone. There is no versioning and no easy way for a whole group of people to edit on the same project.
Information needs to be connected, searchable, instantly accessible and social.
While I think LibreOffice has its uses, I think the world is sort of moving away from desktop-based office software. I can't even remember the last time I used Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, it's probably more than 2-3 years ago.
Then again, if you're a hardcore Word user, then the professional office suites still offer more functionality.
(Additionally, not everybody is lucky enough to "work in the cloud" due to various constraints or restrictions).
Spreadsheets will be heavily used forever. Excel alone will keep Microsoft relevant in the business world. JavaScript gives us 1 numeric datatype, and there's no good way to load a gigabyte of numeric data into a web application.
It depends which `world' you're talking about. Every medium+ sized business I've come across utterly refuses to move over the a `cloud' replacement for Word, Excel, &c., mostly due to security concerns. Corporate IT departments are notoriously conservative, corporate policy-makers notoriously paranoid, so any progress toward a `cloud'-based provider will take many, many years to make significant gains.
"I have no use" != "world has no use", please distinguish between these two. For one, I wouldn't trust Joe Cloudfarmer with my tax return calculations, thankyouverymuch - server data compromise is a matter of when, not if (last year's Dropbox fiasco, anyone?).
- "Reduce Java code:" good, an unnecessary dependency, please continue.
- "Themes" ? I don't understand why anyone would want their office suite to look different than other desktop apps? I sort of understand with a music player, but a word processor?
Every time I see the blue gradient toolbars on MS Office clashing with my other apps I cringe. Reminds me of Myspace.
- Where is outline mode? I have quite a few colleagues who won't use it until it arrives.
It seems crazy to me that such a common usage mode doesn't seem to be driving any development work.
I'm one of a large number of people who won't be using LibreOffice until that RFE's addressed properly (nope, Navigator view is not an equivalent thing).
That said, in my spare time, I've been looking through the code base, and my impressions are that it's too large. For instance, looking at the vcl module, which handles widgets, windows, etc. when I look at the number of classes my mind begins to boggle.
I possibly (read: probably) speak from ignorance, but I use the function SVMain() [1] as an example. Instead of defining a purely abstract class with architecture specific classes derived from this, they have defined an extern hook function, then they run it, test to see if it returns false, and if so run the standard ImplSVMain function. This seems inelegant for two reasons: the code is somewhat unclear, and there seems to be two functions with lightly different names, one is an SVMain function that does something, the other is an implementation of a function... Yet both implement a functional part of the code base. There is even a comment that reads "the real SVMain.".
Then there are the names... There is a "desktop" object that runs the main loop, the desktop being the application. [2] But there is an Application class [3], yet at the same time there's a DesktopEnvironmentContext class [4]. This seems to be some sort of misguided attempt at reimplementing a "desktop" metaphor, which is a legacy of early versions StarOffice. It was one of the first things ripped out when work started on OpenOffice.org, yet the class name still remains, making its purpose most unclear.
Furthermore, for some reason they force the Application class to be subclassed. Which they do only once, via Application_Impl. But I have noticed that the base class has lots of empty non-pure functions, and only forces Main() to be a pure virtual function. What is the point of this?
Another thing that I find makes the code harder to read is it uses a lot of Hungarian notation.
This is a legacy code base, and I wasn't being sarcastic when I said I love LibreOffice. I think people like Michael Meeks and Kohei are amazing. But I see the code base as having been slapped together somewhat pver many years. And there are code smells and, frankly, code rot, throughout the source.
It needs to be rearchitected (not rewritten). There is code in the code base that nobody dares touch (the legacy filters). The code is organised strangely, for example there are multiple places to find filters. At the same time, they have a system abstraction layer (sal), which has specific architectural and generic classes, but then I see that http://docs.libreoffice.org has modules like "android" and "iOS".
There are literally thousands of classes in there. Go-oo sometime ago refactored away dozens of classes, I would think they could refactor away a lot more.
I'm truly sorry if this seems harsh or ignorant by the way. It's not intended to be that way. It's just this code base is massive, so massive that its hard to understand how it all works. This in turn, IMO, may cause issues getting more volunteers. Not to mention too much refactoring might break things.
It would be great if it people made the kind of changes you mention, but would it be worth the time and effort? It may be better for people to work on other kinds of programs than to spend a lot of time improving the LibreOffice code base.
Writer is good enough for education up through undergrad for many majors, and good enough for some nonprofits. It is certainly good enough for my needs. I don't use the other applications so I can't say about them.
I downloaded the new version, and tried it on a docx file that a colleague had sent me. In MSword, the file has 24 pages. In LibreOffice, it seems to have a bit over 5 pages. No error message, no dialog box ... it just gets to a certain string ($O_2$, expressed in latex format) and stops. If not for the fact that I have MSword, I'd email back to my colleague and ask her what the heck kind of a draft manuscript she was sending.
Although I use the Excel copy quite a lot (for grading), I have yet to see the Word copy function properly in a professional document of any realistic complexity.
I know, I should report the bug, but the material I'm looking at is under submission to a scientific journal, and will therefore be private until it may be published.
The star office applications all played well with each other in this shell of an application that looked like windows 95.
This is back when KDE was a new thing and many people were using FVWM ... it just looked so wonderfully sophisticated up against the desktop applications available for linux at the time.
I'll try it again, but OO/LO Impress PowerPoint replacement is particularly buggy. I often have to give scientific talks, and I'm always running into bugs. For example, various elements become fixed and uneditable, and figures often get mangled. The import filters occasionally mess up powerpoint documents, too. I wish I could avoid PowerPoint - I hate the ribbon and it can't cope with PDF figures.
I like LibreOffice Calc, though I have issues on occasion. It feels... bulky I guess, but it certainly seems to be more complete then good docs spreadsheets.
As an aside, just found out that you can use the perl module DBI:CSV: to treat a CSV as a DB and use SQL with it.
LO Impress has been a pain recently. Saving a presentation and re-opening it would yield garbage.
I've been testing LO 4 for a few weeks now, and it seems that the problem has gone. Apart from this, LO does the job, we use it for automatically generating API doc in HTML from specs we write with it, and this is great. Not that there is any other viable option on Linux (that I know of).
I wish I could have a Keynote-like on Linux. In the meantime, beamer does the job for quick & safe slide decks.
Ted comes home early from work to discover his best friend in bed with his wife. "Frank," he cries. "I married her, so I have to! But why did you?"
That rather old and tired joke (one of Isaac Asimov's, I believe) says how I feel about Libre Office. I use Ubuntu, so it's the only game in town if I want to edit documents and spreadsheets. But it may be unique in the world as the only software that's actively worse than Microsoft Office.
"Johnson," he said, "came home unexpectedly from a business trip to find his wife in the arms of his best friend. He staggered back and said, 'Max! I'm married to the lady so I have to. But why you?'"
[+] [-] stroboskop|13 years ago|reply
LibreOffice does not look nice but it is functional. What is its main function? For many people, it has completely replaced Microsoft Office.
Of course MS Office has an even larger feature set, but few people max it out. Likewise, there are people who will prefer LaTeX but that's a small group. The advocates of web based office systems tend to ignore that desktop systems provide much more privacy. LibreOffice sits right in between those groups and is useful to many.
[+] [-] unix-dude|13 years ago|reply
Sure, not many people use this, but its nearly impossible to create some math in a word document that doesn’t look horrible.
Great project in my opinion. It has its quirks, but I've yet to find one that I could work-around with a few seconds of Googling.
[+] [-] glazskunrukitis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone|13 years ago|reply
I certainly have some aversion against Libre Office because it does not look nice.
[+] [-] Gormo|13 years ago|reply
That's an entirely subjective judgment. I happen to think that LibreOffice looks much better than MS Office 2010, especially when considering visual design as a functional rather than a merely decorative quality. Full-screen file menus are ugly and disorienting.
> Of course MS Office has an even larger feature set, but few people max it out.
OTOH, there are features in MS Office that really are useful and aren't well-represented by equivalent features in LibreOffice. Pivot tables in Excel, for example; not everyone may use them, but for those who do, Excel unfortunately has no credible competition.
[+] [-] cs702|13 years ago|reply
--
[1] Yes, LibreOffice forumals can manipulate and return vectors and matrices, not just single values -- see https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Array_Functions#What_is_an...
[+] [-] r00fus|13 years ago|reply
Does LibreOffice have similar limts?
[+] [-] jre|13 years ago|reply
On the other hand, LibreOffice is a very helpful piece of software to edit the occasional .doc attachment.
[+] [-] RyanMcGreal|13 years ago|reply
For my own purposes, the only office application I really find myself reaching for is the spreadsheet. I'm a big supporter of free/open source software and I run Linux on all my personal computers, so it pains me to write this - but LibreOffice Calc just doesn't come anywhere close to comparing with the functionality, stability and polish of Excel.
Using it is a steady aggravation, and I'm persuaded that the problem is not due to it being different from Excel - after all, other open source applications are different from their proprietary counterparts and I find them as good or better.
The problem with Calc is that it just doesn't work very well. Everything seems to take one or two more steps than the equivalent action on Excel, the defaults aren't as helpful, and the application is far more prone to freeze/crash.
[+] [-] kriro|13 years ago|reply
I use Writer for basic writing, nothing fancy. Same for Calc and I hold my lecture using Impress. I use Draw every now and then for quick and dirty stuff.
Never used Base or Math explicitly.
Keep up the good work it is appreciated.
Edit: I have Googled for this a couple of times but never find anything. Is there an "Advanced LibreOffice" type book that anyone could recommend? I always make resolutions to use my office suite more efficient but never get around to it.
[+] [-] replax|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peapicker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calinet6|13 years ago|reply
Problem not solved.
[+] [-] nextw33k|13 years ago|reply
Whilst you might want a single clean look, you definition and someone elses might differ.
[+] [-] webwanderings|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calinet6|13 years ago|reply
I completely agree. This is a stereotypical open-source software web site, and it shouldn't be. This goes to show the lack of attention to design detail that is no doubt influencing their whole product, and surely part of the reason it's not as successful as it should be.
Deny it all you want, but webwanderings speaks the truth, and the truth needs to be heard if open source projects such as Libre are to be taken seriously—as they should be. Design is important, marketing is important, and they need to treat it that way.
[+] [-] dhimes|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacipr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grakic|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggy2011|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crististm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattDL|13 years ago|reply
More than that it's very usable to, to each their own I guess.
[+] [-] testimoney2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WayneDB|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nextparadigms|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bborud|13 years ago|reply
For example, my company lives and breathes through its internal wiki -- which is quite an accomplishment since we are owned by a company that still lives in the dark ages: mailing Office attachments to each other.
Sure, the wiki software could have been a lot better. For one it needs an order of magnitude better performance. And it would be nice if the install wasn't such a messy affair. But it beats the alternative hands down. It beats mailing documents. It beats juggling multiple versions of documents. It beats overflowing mailserver quotas.
Most of all it beats not having to run Windows XP because the people who came before you were stupid fuckups who decided to tie everything so closely to a single platform that they can only afford to move the company to a new OS version every 10 years. And then only after a herculean effort. Inbetween everyone runs on outdated software. For a whole decade.
Real change doesn't come from offering marginal compatibility. Real change comes from not having stupid problems.
LibreOffice is a solution to a problem you should not be having.
[+] [-] visarga|13 years ago|reply
Writing paper formatted documents is bad on many levels. It uses dead tree as a medium. It does not have the web of links that exist in a wiki, nor the tags and classifications that exist in a blog or on twitter. Documents can't be live updated for everyone. There is no versioning and no easy way for a whole group of people to edit on the same project.
Information needs to be connected, searchable, instantly accessible and social.
[+] [-] sgt|13 years ago|reply
Then again, if you're a hardcore Word user, then the professional office suites still offer more functionality.
(Additionally, not everybody is lucky enough to "work in the cloud" due to various constraints or restrictions).
[+] [-] skittles|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koralatov|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edwinnathaniel|13 years ago|reply
My wife uses MS Excel and Word almost everyday.
I think the world is not yet moving away from desktop-based office software :)
[+] [-] Piskvorrr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mahn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|13 years ago|reply
- "Reduce Java code:" good, an unnecessary dependency, please continue.
- "Themes" ? I don't understand why anyone would want their office suite to look different than other desktop apps? I sort of understand with a music player, but a word processor?
Every time I see the blue gradient toolbars on MS Office clashing with my other apps I cringe. Reminds me of Myspace.
- Where is outline mode? I have quite a few colleagues who won't use it until it arrives.
[+] [-] dcminter|13 years ago|reply
The bug's still open: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38262
Grandfathered in from: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959
It seems crazy to me that such a common usage mode doesn't seem to be driving any development work.
I'm one of a large number of people who won't be using LibreOffice until that RFE's addressed properly (nope, Navigator view is not an equivalent thing).
[+] [-] chris_wot|13 years ago|reply
That said, in my spare time, I've been looking through the code base, and my impressions are that it's too large. For instance, looking at the vcl module, which handles widgets, windows, etc. when I look at the number of classes my mind begins to boggle.
I possibly (read: probably) speak from ignorance, but I use the function SVMain() [1] as an example. Instead of defining a purely abstract class with architecture specific classes derived from this, they have defined an extern hook function, then they run it, test to see if it returns false, and if so run the standard ImplSVMain function. This seems inelegant for two reasons: the code is somewhat unclear, and there seems to be two functions with lightly different names, one is an SVMain function that does something, the other is an implementation of a function... Yet both implement a functional part of the code base. There is even a comment that reads "the real SVMain.".
Then there are the names... There is a "desktop" object that runs the main loop, the desktop being the application. [2] But there is an Application class [3], yet at the same time there's a DesktopEnvironmentContext class [4]. This seems to be some sort of misguided attempt at reimplementing a "desktop" metaphor, which is a legacy of early versions StarOffice. It was one of the first things ripped out when work started on OpenOffice.org, yet the class name still remains, making its purpose most unclear.
Furthermore, for some reason they force the Application class to be subclassed. Which they do only once, via Application_Impl. But I have noticed that the base class has lots of empty non-pure functions, and only forces Main() to be a pure virtual function. What is the point of this?
Another thing that I find makes the code harder to read is it uses a lot of Hungarian notation.
This is a legacy code base, and I wasn't being sarcastic when I said I love LibreOffice. I think people like Michael Meeks and Kohei are amazing. But I see the code base as having been slapped together somewhat pver many years. And there are code smells and, frankly, code rot, throughout the source.
It needs to be rearchitected (not rewritten). There is code in the code base that nobody dares touch (the legacy filters). The code is organised strangely, for example there are multiple places to find filters. At the same time, they have a system abstraction layer (sal), which has specific architectural and generic classes, but then I see that http://docs.libreoffice.org has modules like "android" and "iOS".
There are literally thousands of classes in there. Go-oo sometime ago refactored away dozens of classes, I would think they could refactor away a lot more.
I'm truly sorry if this seems harsh or ignorant by the way. It's not intended to be that way. It's just this code base is massive, so massive that its hard to understand how it all works. This in turn, IMO, may cause issues getting more volunteers. Not to mention too much refactoring might break things.
1. http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/svmain_8cxx_source.html...
2. http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Architecture/Process_Flow
3. http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classApplication.html
4. http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classDesktopEnvironment...
[+] [-] bjustin|13 years ago|reply
Writer is good enough for education up through undergrad for many majors, and good enough for some nonprofits. It is certainly good enough for my needs. I don't use the other applications so I can't say about them.
[+] [-] rnadna|13 years ago|reply
Although I use the Excel copy quite a lot (for grading), I have yet to see the Word copy function properly in a professional document of any realistic complexity.
I know, I should report the bug, but the material I'm looking at is under submission to a scientific journal, and will therefore be private until it may be published.
[+] [-] kristopolous|13 years ago|reply
The star office applications all played well with each other in this shell of an application that looked like windows 95.
This is back when KDE was a new thing and many people were using FVWM ... it just looked so wonderfully sophisticated up against the desktop applications available for linux at the time.
PS: http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soui-1.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soint-4.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-6.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-5.gif ... I don't know how it's taken them 15 years to start to be awesome again.
[+] [-] xioxox|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsiebert|13 years ago|reply
As an aside, just found out that you can use the perl module DBI:CSV: to treat a CSV as a DB and use SQL with it.
[+] [-] Surio|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsoft_Office
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cn.wps.moffice...
Office 2012 Free Suite: http://www.kingsoftstore.com/software/kingsoft-office-freewa...
I've used it. Mostly opens Office documents without too much formatting problems.
It uses the Qt framework, so the UI looks neat. Hope it helps.
[+] [-] pilooch|13 years ago|reply
I've been testing LO 4 for a few weeks now, and it seems that the problem has gone. Apart from this, LO does the job, we use it for automatically generating API doc in HTML from specs we write with it, and this is great. Not that there is any other viable option on Linux (that I know of).
I wish I could have a Keynote-like on Linux. In the meantime, beamer does the job for quick & safe slide decks.
[+] [-] etfb|13 years ago|reply
That rather old and tired joke (one of Isaac Asimov's, I believe) says how I feel about Libre Office. I use Ubuntu, so it's the only game in town if I want to edit documents and spreadsheets. But it may be unique in the world as the only software that's actively worse than Microsoft Office.
[+] [-] etfb|13 years ago|reply
"Johnson," he said, "came home unexpectedly from a business trip to find his wife in the arms of his best friend. He staggered back and said, 'Max! I'm married to the lady so I have to. But why you?'"
[+] [-] chmars|13 years ago|reply
The reason is simply OS X' default configuration:
'LibreOffice.app can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer.
Your security preferences allow installation of only apps from the Mac Ap Store or identified developers.'
I know, using the Ctrl key lets me confirm that I really want to run LibreOffice.app, however, how many Mac users know that?