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.
I'm curious why people bother tolerating modern versions of MS Office when they could instead use an offline version like 2019 and call it a day?
Are the more recent versions really that necessary or useful for features? I miss using 2007 when the ribbon was introduced and the UI finally felt organized.
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.
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.
Has anyone audited/read their code. I found it very suspicous that a company as small as them would be able to deliver software as complex as it was on the face of it. But when I last checked, I guess it hadn't been open sourced yet. Being Latvian, I am skeptical of other Latvians, but in this case, I'm skeptical of running potentialy Kremlin aligned source.
> 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.
Oracle stalled development, made the bugtrackers etc private, and kicked out all of the contributors and tried to commercialize the product at the time. The reason for Oracle "dumping" it to the Apache graveyard is that most of the "free" (as in unpaid) contributors switched sides to LibreOffice because of Oracle's hostile behavior towards the development community. And they donated OpenOffice because it was effectively a dead project for a couple of years.
There's probably still some contributor talks about it on one of the old CCC conferences on their media server.
If you want to learn about how to manage open source, Oracle's track record is a prime example of how not to.
The problem is that Apache Foundation is being stubborn[1] to admit the OpenOffice death, which distracts and prevents users from using so much better software (LibreOffice) that harms an open source image and ecosystem in general.
Slightly more correct: Sun kept StarOffice as a commercial offering and also open sourced it under the name of OpenOffice.org in parallel. The .org was quite important to them in the name.
> LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun.
The actual forking happens earlier with a patch set living outside Sun and sponsored by some Linux distros for a while. After Oracle's acquisition however the foundation was built and the name LibreOffice was picked.
No, a 40 year old codebase with only 25 years of commit logs. And the initial commits during the Sun releases are insane - they took a bunch of commits, mashed them together and then added them as a single commit with a log message stating what all the commits they munged together did. Nightmare fuel.
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.
My parents evolve backwards when it comes to computer literacy. It seems they especially unlearn all the windows 8+ changes, since a lot of UI philosophy stayed unchanged from 95 to the end of the XP era, so that appears to be burned into their brains forever. Word 2000/XP. They don't really write any documents anymore, but LO might actually be more what they expect today than modern MSO.
My mom uses LibreOffice, too. Granted, she doesn't do anything special. Just a few docs for housekeeping. I even forgot about the fact that she is using it. Just recently noticed it again. I would assume she would have had WAY more problems if she would have to use some stupid microsoft account to be able to use word.
You can actually use this to import pdfs generated with Matplotlib as vector graphics into Impress presentations. This allows you to change, e.g., the color of lines or the legend (or any other part of the plot) right within Impress to better fit your presentation. I found this extremely useful in the past. In Powerpoint, I could not even import an svg, let alone a pdf (although maybe the newest version supports this?).
The only downside is that currently you have to first import the pdf into Draw and then copy the shapes/curves over to Impress. I hope they will add direct import into Impress in the future.
Change your default printer to Microsoft Print to PDF (if you're on Windows) and it will fix the issue. But I agree, that bug is a huge pain in the ass.
Congrats Adobe, you lost? (guess it depends on the pov, although I do think overall it's primarily a loss when a product is such a pain in the arse that ppl can't even be arsed to pirate it)
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
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.
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)
Excel/Calc is like an IDE for CSV. Much easier for the eye to spot errors if data is aligned. A text editor won't show you if you're missing column data for some row.
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.
Don't get me wrong, I use LibreOffice a lot, but I kind of despise it. The biggest headache I have, with Writer - which is what I use most often - is that if I select text in order to change the formatting, it changes formatting of stuff not selected. I think this has to do with paragraph styling .. it's just very unintuitive how it figures out what belongs to a paragraph or not. My human brain wants to separate paragraphs with line breaks. So why would formatting selected text on one line change the styling on adjacent lines that aren't selected?! It is extremely infuriating how its styling behaves in general.
I think it's also worth noting that rich text formatting is the primary reason to even use a word processor instead of a plain text editor in the first place. Embedded objects and exporting tools are all useful too. But most of what I use Writer for could be done in a text editor if I didn't need styling. So all these years later, a core feature - arguably THE core feature that necessitates the existence of the application to begin with - is still broken and unintuitive.
And when I search for help on how to get styling things working etc. and I find posts by other people that share these concerns, the answers are legacy document formats etc. that contain these bugs by design so it's something that's really hard for the developers to fix.
I used StarOffice 3.something to 5.someotherthing (I think...) on Debian back then. It had a kind of DE built in and I recall that I mostly used that on top of XFce3.
I was on a Computer Chronicles kick and watched a late-80s demo of a Sun workstation with StarOffice. It was then that I realize the legacy of the app.
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.
Likewise! For some reason I had it chronologically penciled in roughly with Firefox's introduction. Oh man, I'd better call my mom, and schedule a doc appt...
The "NotebookBar" tabbed user interface is a huge change and was implemented a few years ago. Still needs some refinement (anyone is welcome to help the Design community volunteers!) but there have been some very big changes...
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?
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.
Readit News
(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.
Are the more recent versions really that necessary or useful for features? I miss using 2007 when the ribbon was introduced and the UI finally felt organized.
I use the online version because it worked out cheaper than the offline version + Dropbox.
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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.
[1] https://www.onlyoffice.com/
Sun named it OpenOffice. LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun. OpenOffice was subsequently donated to the Apache foundation.
Oracle stalled development, made the bugtrackers etc private, and kicked out all of the contributors and tried to commercialize the product at the time. The reason for Oracle "dumping" it to the Apache graveyard is that most of the "free" (as in unpaid) contributors switched sides to LibreOffice because of Oracle's hostile behavior towards the development community. And they donated OpenOffice because it was effectively a dead project for a couple of years.
There's probably still some contributor talks about it on one of the old CCC conferences on their media server.
If you want to learn about how to manage open source, Oracle's track record is a prime example of how not to.
[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-let...
Slightly more correct: Sun kept StarOffice as a commercial offering and also open sourced it under the name of OpenOffice.org in parallel. The .org was quite important to them in the name.
> LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun.
The actual forking happens earlier with a patch set living outside Sun and sponsored by some Linux distros for a while. After Oracle's acquisition however the foundation was built and the name LibreOffice was picked.
Dead Comment
Excellent lately though.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
Instead of the increasingly uphill battle with Acrobat torrents and cracks, I am a happy LibreOffice user. Congrats Adobe, you won.
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)
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)
I wonder how much StarOffice code still remains in the repo.
Don't get me wrong, I use LibreOffice a lot, but I kind of despise it. The biggest headache I have, with Writer - which is what I use most often - is that if I select text in order to change the formatting, it changes formatting of stuff not selected. I think this has to do with paragraph styling .. it's just very unintuitive how it figures out what belongs to a paragraph or not. My human brain wants to separate paragraphs with line breaks. So why would formatting selected text on one line change the styling on adjacent lines that aren't selected?! It is extremely infuriating how its styling behaves in general.
I think it's also worth noting that rich text formatting is the primary reason to even use a word processor instead of a plain text editor in the first place. Embedded objects and exporting tools are all useful too. But most of what I use Writer for could be done in a text editor if I didn't need styling. So all these years later, a core feature - arguably THE core feature that necessitates the existence of the application to begin with - is still broken and unintuitive.
And when I search for help on how to get styling things working etc. and I find posts by other people that share these concerns, the answers are legacy document formats etc. that contain these bugs by design so it's something that's really hard for the developers to fix.
Deleted Comment
Reminds me of devenv.exe.
The UI/UX doesn't feel like it's changed very much