LibreOffice 7.5 update: A great time to jump on this FOSS productivity suite The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 7.5 with a host of improvements. Windows and Mac users can just download it, and for Linux types the new version is already up on Flathub. LibreOffice, formerly known as OpenOffice, and before that StarOffice, is the go-to FOSS office suite, but there's always room for …
I use it only as a way of last resorts (i.e., when nothing else is available), mostly because "free" as in "free beer" doesn't compensate for the fact that developers seem to be more concerned with icons, themes and mundane bugs while longstanding problems remain unfixed. A prime example is Base, which was supposed to be vaned off its dependency on Java and moved over to Firebase, something that has been on the cards for several years.
On mac OS, I found Apple's former iWorks suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) to be better tools and more than sufficient for what I need. Pages is actually also much better in handling Word documents than LibreOffice Writer is, and Keynote creates much nicer presentations and does so with less effort than even PowerPoint (LibreOffice Impress is just awful).
For other platforms (Windows, Linux), I'd rather spend the few quid for a Softmaker Office licence than wasting valuable time dealing with LibreOffice's shortcomings. Even if it has to be free (i.e., as in "free beer") then I'd rather use something else.
... doesn't compensate for the fact that developers seem to be more concerned with icons, themes and mundane bugs while longstanding problems remain unfixed.
You . took . the . words . right . out . of . my . mouth.
I was about to write the exact same thing: I couldn't give a monkey's toss about themes, icons, dark/whatever modes, colours and all the bling.
I . want . LO . to . be . FOSS . *and* . also . work . properly ...
The developers/maintainers can play with the bling once all the stuff waiting on the shelves gets fixed. <- something that applies to quite a bit of FOSS software.
You there, XFCE? Firefox?
That said, good review Liam.
Have a good week-end
... doesn't compensate for the fact that developers seem to be more concerned with icons, themes and mundane bugs while longstanding problems remain unfixed.
You . took . the . words . right . out . of . my . mouth.
Double. I reported a bug on duplex printing (not a completely insignificant issue) that has never seen a single reply, leaving me to wonder if UI is more important than fixing reported problems. I am left to decide that, industry-wide, yes, UI has more concern than bugs because UI/X makes headlines, moves product, and makes reviewers who only touch these creations long enough to write a review happy.
I guess it's a matter of what you need and what you're used to.
Of the Apple suite, I 100% agree with you that Keynote is THE program for presentations and that status hasn't changed for years, but I am personally less enamoured by Pages and Numbers, which is where I much prefer LibreOffice. Pages is good if you want to open a Word document and not work with it (i.e. have it render reasonably accurate), but as soon as it comes to creating, editing and revision documents, LO is what I'll use, also because it can generate PDFs with the original data embedded in them, locked down by password or as forms (although that process is IMHO still more laborious as it ought to be, but I don't use that often).
That doesn't mean it's perfect, but especially since Patrick Luby from NeoOffice has been so kind to port some of their Mac code to LibreOffice (the trick of holding down a character to get access to an accent menu, handy if you use an English keybord but work in mutiple languages) there are few reasons left to use anything else - definitely with the ever increasing assaults on your personal data that Microsoft appears to be planning.
[Author here]
> developers seem to be more concerned with icons, themes and mundane bugs while longstanding problems remain unfixed.
I am writing in the back of a talk in the LibreOffice stream at FOSDEM.
This is a vast, hugely complex suite. It dates back to a CP/M word processor for the Z80 in 1985.
It's a huge and vastly complex multiplatform codebase, which has changed hands multiple times, and was most recently somewhat screwed over by Oracle:
https://www.theregister.com/2011/06/01/oracle_openoffice_apache/
I have just watched 4 talks in a row by very smart, highly skilled, and rather frustrated developers talking about the weeks and months of effort that went into tracking one specific tiny bug per talk.
They are slowly and painfully fixing what they can in a vast and complex codebase, written in a very dated style of C, which wasn't written by Collabora, or the Document Foundation, or Oracle, or Sun, but by a German development company nearly 40 years ago which no longer exists.
But worse still they are trying to make it compatible with a closed-source proprietary suite whose code they can't see, which is just as old, and which is by a secretive company that is hostile to FOSS and which obfuscates file formats and changes them every few years.
It's _amazing_ that it works and works so well. This office suite is comparable in size and complexity to the entirety of Windows around the turn of the century.
They are slowly chasing bugs, trying to speed it up, trying to enhanced and turbocharge a geriatric elephant of a program, all the while trying to keep it compatible with something they can't actually see.
So, each new release also throws in some visible cosmetic stuff to keep people interested or distracted from a an epic task of continual ongoing Forth Bridge painting and maintenance.
And they give the result away for free.
I think it's *amazing* for the cost and the scale of the project.
I am well aware of the history behind LibreOffice, OpenOffice and StarOffice (which I used on Solaris and Windows back in the days), and the complexities behind it. And it's really great that the old code found a new home and is maintained, and that's great.
But from a user's perspective, what LibreOffice gives me is a buggy office suite comparable to something between MS Office 2000 and 2003 at best. And while Star Division and later Sun did a great job back then and resolved existing bugs quickly, the LO developers are busy with bling and "quick win" issues instead of modernizing the aching codebase (the failure to complete the planned Base migration to Firebase and finally get rid of the stupid Java dependency of LO is just one example). And frankly, even the visual aspects of LO are still pretty lackluster (icons are still a mess, as is core functionality in many areas). And that doesn't seem to be changing much.
So as someone who most and foremost wants to get work done but wants to avoid MS Office, the choice is literally between an outdated piece of software that's poorly maintained but FOSS (the latter which is great in itself of course but at the end of the day doesn't help me getting work done), or pick one of the modern alternatives such as Softmaker Office or the Apple iWork trio (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) which aren't FOSS but still "free" as in "free beer". Or just go full web and use Google apps, which have come a long way and still better than LO.
"I think it's *amazing* for the cost and the scale of the project."
Yes, it's amazing, but it's also a lot of wasted potential. I remember when the split away from (then Oracle owned) OpenOffice started and LibreOffice came into being. ANd what was one of the first new features that went on the roadmap? Themes. And here we are...
Funny how many people find LO perfectly usable, rather than being some bug ridden wade through treacle experience of abject misery and frustration which no one in their right mind would touch with a barge pole, unless forced to by their employers.
Is LO 'perfect'? No more than anything else.
Some of us really are glass half-empty folk, who are never happier than when we are being nitpicking miserablists. Thankfully it's only some of us.
Have a wonderful day. ;-)
As someone fairly familiar with the OOXML specification I can say that, while the spec is a mess, Microsoft has continued to support it and also deal with bugs in Office relating to it. I've seen all kinds of regressions, particularly in LO, that indicate that developers have not really bothered to look at specification and just done what they think is right. The split from OpenOffice was also handled very badly. I spoke with some of the OpenOffice team at FOSDEM a couple of years ago and they pointed out changes in LO, including the licence, made it more difficult for the projects to cooperate. This is included work that had been paid for by the EU and was supposed to be for both projects. It's naive to ignore the politics of this.
On MacOS I still find OpenOffice better to look at, easier to use and more stable than LO. While I prefer the ODF file format, to be honest, I think that both teams have missed the boat and would recommend OnlyOffice for anyone looking for a desktop system.
"As someone fairly familiar with the OOXML specification I can say that, while the spec is a mess, Microsoft has continued to support it and also deal with bugs in Office relating to it. "
OOXML Strict or Transitional, I guess you think you're talking about OOXML Transitional, as none of Microsoft's Office products default to use OOXML Strict format, despite Microsoft saying it would when they release Office 2010, as was predicted at the time, they lied.
Yes I agree, OOXML transitional is a mess, and that Microsoft are still dealing with it (changing how they work with it), ....gosh this makes things tricky if you're trying to be compatible with numerous docx file formats! Actually docx can'even be called OOXML anymore.
Knowing the above 2 facts in the 2 paragraphs above, then if you look https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/compat/office-file-format-reference you will see that docx that Office creates as its default file format is NOT OOXML, they don't even call it OOXML, ....but you do.
I believe you should feel that you have been conned by Microsoft into thinking that docx is a standard file format!
Transitional is still OOXML and, for the majority of cases, the differences are in the namespace, though this itself is a a PITA and has probably done more than anything else to delay broader adoption. They do, however, disingenuously claim that XLSM files should not be considered OOXML.
I exception to the notopn that I've been conned by Microsoft. It's taken time, but the conversations have been constructive, clarifications have been forthcoming, and bug fixes have been made. Notably absent, at least during my time, has been developers from other projects such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
'Notably absent, at least during my time, has been developers from other projects such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice.'
I wonder why? Could it possibly be MS's long history of acting in bad faith, especially in the area of file formats and compatibility? Sometimes you just have to decide that you only have so much time to waste on this planet, and make a pragmatic/romantic choice about what to waste it on. Wrestling with the MS pig over file compatibility may be neither pragmatic nor romantic.
Your assertion directly contradicts my report that, at least over the last ten years, no one from either LibreOffice or OpenOffice has taken part in the ISO Working Group meetings. I'm not at all a fan of Microsoft's business practices but talking bullshit like this does nobody any favours.
So, you are implying that LO, etc. have not been involved out of mere laziness or pique?
Perhaps they actually do have better things to do with their time than waste it on discussions that history has demonstrated over and over again will be routinely ignored in practice as MS persist in 'defending' their monopolistic ambitions.
It would be bizarre for LO, etc. to fail to engage for trivial reasons, given what is in question. Presumably, at least from their perspective, their reasons are well founded.
no one from either LibreOffice or OpenOffice has taken part in the ISO Working Group meetings
Why would they ?
Microsoft now owns a proprietary closed "standard that isn't actually a standard"* which it bought it's way through the ISO process despite everything I ever saw about it being that it's a crock of poo and stinks to high heaven. Unless they've massively revised it (and dumped masses of backwards compatibility*) then it's not a completely specified standard and it's not possible to build a third party verification suite against it. I.e. it's more or less everything that a good standard shouldn't be. They couldn't even break themselves away from the "our way or no way" attitude to use existing standards for things like dates, time, country codes, and all sorts of stuff like that - instead a big chunk of it is describing how their own wheels work differently to everything else in the world that isn't MS.
So when there's a meeting to discuss what shade of lipstick to add on next, and you know that whatever MS says is what will happen regardless of what anyone else says, why would you waste your time getting involved at all ?
* Does it still have a section that says "binary blob in Word 97 format" ? Not the only example, but it's a clear example of why it is not an open, not verifiable, freely implementable standard. Yes, when it was being consideredbought, I did look at it in some detail. And IIRC the official review from the BSI basically came down to "a pile of poo that should in no way be accepted as a standard" ... before the bought seats voted it through.
Microsoft don't call their default docx Office file format "transitional OOXML", they just call it xml, same as they called it with Office 2003.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/compat/office-file-format-reference
Microsoft have lots of deviations in their XML docx file formats, not a standard.
"I have just watched 4 talks in a row by very smart, highly skilled, and rather frustrated developers talking about the weeks and months of effort that went into tracking one specific tiny bug per talk."
I read an article yesterday that demonstrated (with full transcript) ChatGPT assisting with bug detection and code clean-up. Supervised closely by a knowledgeable software engineer, mind. One section exampled presenting a piece of code to ChatGPT (copy an Excel workbook with user interaction) and saying "this code has a bug in it, what is it?". ChatGPT detected the bug (explaining its logic in plain English) then went on to make a fix/improvement suggestion. The examples may have been a bit staged, nevertheless the potential was clearly stunning. So... Libreoffice bug fixing with AI help next?
> developers seem to be more concerned with icons, themes and mundane bugs while longstanding problems remain unfixed.
There are loads of LibreOffice developers, many volunteers too, most have nothing to do with icons and themes. However, the new icons do look great.
> It's a huge and vastly complex multiplatform codebase, which has changed hands multiple times, and was most recently somewhat screwed over by Oracle:
Yes LibreOffice was formed because of Oracle's behaviour. Over the last 10 years LibreOffice has undergone a planned and structured refactoring. For more information, see the "LibreOffice Technology whitepaper". It is now a single software platform for productivity on desktop, mobile and the cloud, with a comprehensive API that allows fast rendering of documents for any application.
> I have just watched 4 talks in a row by very smart, highly skilled, and rather frustrated developers talking about the weeks and months of effort that went into tracking one specific tiny bug per talk.
The suite is extremely reliable, some outstanding bugs are tricky to fix, these can be very rewarding when fixing them by very smart engineers, they want to talk about it, this is great, this wouldn't be allowed with other office suites because they are not open.
> They are slowly and painfully fixing what they can in a vast and complex codebase, written in a very dated style of C, which wasn't written by Collabora, or the Document Foundation, or Oracle, or Sun, but by a German development company nearly 40 years ago which no longer exists.
Not quite, see above for "LibreOffice Technology whitepaper".
> But worse still they are trying to make it compatible with a closed-source proprietary suite whose code they can't see, which is just as old, and which is by a secretive company that is hostile to FOSS and which obfuscates file formats and changes them every few years.
Why worse?.... LibreOffice Engineers participate/ed deeply in various document standards processes, they get it, interoperability with proprietary Microsoft Office format is extremely good, hard to do, but nearly always a great layout when compared side-by-side with other Office Suites that try.
> It's _amazing_ that it works and works so well. This office suite is comparable in size and complexity to the entirety of Windows around the turn of the century.
Not really, LibreOffice Technology is a modern cross-platform office suite with a single code-base that runs on Android, iOS, ChromeOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, others, and Online and headless too. No other office suite match this.
> They are slowly chasing bugs, trying to speed it up, trying to enhanced and turbocharge a geriatric elephant of a program....
Not really, see "LibreOffice Technology Whitepaper"
> And they give the result away for free.
Yes they do. LibreOffice Technology is available for free and without limitations on Android, iOS, ChromeOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, others, and also Online. Some of the TDF, LibreOffice partners sell support services, this helps pay for LibreOffice development.
> I think it's *amazing* for the cost and the scale of the project.
I agree, it's success creates so much FUD whenever a new release comes out every 6 months, with people trying to push other office suites.
LO offers a choice of UI. I've tried them all, including the much-vaunted ribbon - which looks like a splurge of icons has been vomited onto the screen. By contrast, the standard toolbar option, looking much like that found in the last half-decent MS Office, ie 2003, is all most people will need. It's simple, intuitive and highly customisable.
[Author here]
> The worst part is that it still looks bad and very dated despite them spending time of the aesthetics.
And this is why it's hard for FOSS developers to catch a break.
Top of the thread: "why are they wasting their time on cosmetics and icons?"
Downthread: "it still looks bad and dated."
If they work on the looks, or if they don't, either way, they get criticised.
So, for my 2¢'s worth:
I don't really care about the looks. If you value the appearance over the functionality and the fact that it's FOSS and it's multiplatform, then fine. There are other suites which have put more effort into that.
OnlyOffice looks pretty and modern, and it has good MS Office compatibility.
I barely use MS Office, and indeed, when I do, I use very old versions. Notably, Word 97 and Word 2003, because they do all I need and more, and I personally detest the cosmetic aspects of the newer versions.
I value the traditional UI and hate the modern one, as others have noted. I prefer a suite that runs natively on Linux, *BSD, macOS and Windows, has a 1980s/1990s UI that I am comfy with and find efficient. I prefer stability to features, and functionality like portability to cosmetics.
For some of us, looking dated is a *GOOD thing* and that is a desirable aspect.
If it's not for you, fine. If you don't need non-Linux apps, go try OnlyOffice. If on top of that, you don't care if it's FOSS and freeware is enough, try ThinkFree/Hancom, or WPS Office, or SoftMaker Free.
But I do not feel that yours is a valid or constructive criticism of this tool. It has different strengths.
Absolutely agree with this! These things are tools and as such need to be fit for purpose and easy to use, consistent and memorable. Changing interfaces every five minutes and hiding controls behind obscure icons goes against all of those.
The project I work on hasn't significantly changed its layout since 2006, while under continuous development with new features added in the same style. The only complaints we ever get are from those who don't use it!
This may be useful, Collabora use the LibreOffice Technology, I found a Collabora comparison with OnlyOffice, I believe Collabora did this report in response to OnlyOffice comparing themselves to Collabora a year or so before: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/comparing-collabora-with-onlyoffice/
Have you checked the file sizes Pages produces?
A one page document should not be filling over a hundred Kb.It's way more inefficient than Word ever was.
I only keep Pages and Numbers on my Mac because some parents insisr on sending documents using this awful software...
"A one page document should not be filling over a hundred Kb."
Why not? Not everything in a document is necessarily plain text.
And frankly, who cares? We're no longer in 1989, and unless you're using floppies a few hundred kb for a document doesn't matter when even older computers come with tripple digit GB size of mass storage.
"It's way more inefficient than Word ever was."
Actually, file sizes between Word and Pages are roughly the same.
"I only keep Pages and Numbers on my Mac because some parents insisr on sending documents using this awful software..."
What horrible people. Hopefully you'll show these offenders the errors of their ways by sending them a sternly worded fax.
A one page word document is around 21kb max, unless it includes images.
A one page Pages document is around 800kb
I don't consider these to be roughly the same
Yes, 800kb is OK when computers have multi-gigabyte memory, but why is the file so large? What crappy code is pages using to render the document.
Also, my current work in progress is 230,000, about 550 pages. It's a 734kb file, so smaller than the single page Pages file.
Fixing MS Word eff ups has always been the main reason for my keeping a copy of LO on my hard drive. It has improved over the years, particularly a faster start up, but compatibility with Word, particularly in long, image and table laden docs, has always been a problem. I like LO, but it still has its limitations at this point.
Of course there are good things about LO, for example better at handling .CSV files - especially with Unicode. Or that you can configure it to ALWAYS use the English function names in Calc, where as Excel always uses the weird local translations (unless you jump through quite some hoops). But on the other hand, beside my pet bug, conditional formatting of cells is still way too limited and convoluted unless your need matches what is offered by the builtin list.
Long time user of LibreOffice here. Great to see things being improved and the pace of change continuing.
I do wish they would tackle some of the remaining pain points though:
- I still find that large tables are awfully slow and cause Writer to stutter.
- Settings are kinda all over the place as well and I often find it difficult to locate what I want. I understand why they are like that but from a usability perspective it's not great
- They still seem to be in a transition period regarding context properties both in the right-click menu and the properties pane. This is particularly relevant to Wrap settings for images and embedded pictures.
- Some of the defaults I find a bit weird as well. Images can be set to stay within text boundaries but the default is for them not to be. I think that in the main, when typing prose, most people would want embedded images to stay within the text limits. As an example, if you add an inline image and edits above push the picture down to the bottom of the current page, the image will kinda fall off the bottom rather than dropping to the next page in a way that looks like a bug.
I know they did the "papercuts" thing recently and I think those kind of things are really great to address some of these problem, yet perhaps less important issues.
And I thought I'd be the only with that problem not being able to find those speeches. Some links in this thread only lead to sites which tell when the speech happened, but no audio or video anywhere - or if they are there, the sites are heavily screwed up so neither firefox or edge show anything. Making me wishing back Web 1.0 times, where more than four major HTML rendering engines actually worked.
As far as my search-fu tells me: Since about November 2022.
You have to compile the source on your own.
This seems to be the first "hey, it compiles on RISC-V" commit.
Good luck!
I use LibreOffice on a Mac and on Windows 10 computers. A great product and it is is continually improved. It isn't perfect and has its bugs but works well. I use it for stuff I keep in .odt format. For documents I save in Word format I use TextMaker in Softmaker Office. I still like the traditional menu interface. Both SoftMalker Office and LibreOffice give you a choice of either tabs or a traditional menu interface. LibreOffice is a small download compared to MS Office. I also don't like being tied to the cloud. Also both office suites don;t require a subscription. I donate some to LibreOffice each month to support the project. Thanks to all of the developers and companies that support LibreOffice!
I remember when Sun first bought StarOffice, they did a promotion where you could get a free CD-ROM with the Linux version on it. It used Motif as the GUI toolkit on Unix platforms, and was pretty much feature complete compared to the then current MS Office 4.3
was pretty much feature complete
That's the thing that annoys me most. There's really not much you can add to a modern word processor, which is why companies like Microsoft have been making a mess of the file format and UI for years to justify selling a new version. But fundamentally, wordprocessors are "there".
Apart from Microsoft probably adding ChatGPT to it now, I guess, a sort of Lore Ipsum for deception websites and marketing (but I repeat myself)..
Strangely, I've heard it described as OneProblem.
You can only love the ribbon if you have never known anything else (i.e. you've never been exposed to products with good usability). Go ahead, download LibreOffice (it's totally free) and try ALL of the various interfaces. LO is the only package that lets you choose what UI you prefer instead of ramming their choice down your throat. You may then discover just what a mess the ribbon actually is.
Sorry, but as much as you may loathe the ribbon, the fact remains that OneNote is still heads and shoulders above all the other taking programs/apps.
Not the UWP version they sharted and is now being 'integrated' (read: abandoned). Even with few updates to the desktop version it retains its lead.
But apparently that's not popular with the crowd here. If you like making notes with Markdown or what-have-you, well... everyone and their dog has something for you.
[Author here]
> the fact remains that OneNote is still heads and shoulders above all the other taking programs/apps.
Try to remember that your opinions are, however strongly held, just opinions and are not facts.
You are specifically saying that your choice is a fact.
It isn't.
I've tried OneNote, repeatedly, since it came out. I loathe the thing. It's a cluttered mess when in a note-taking app being *uncluttered* is an absolutely pivotal core feature *for me*. I need it to start FAST, ideally in under a second, be ready to go immediately, to support structured text of some kind in an open cross-platform product, run fast and natively on any of the multiple FOSS OSes I use, and have a clear keyboard-driven UI.
OneNote fails on all of these.
It's a junky bloated cluttered mess of an app, *for me*. If you like it, good for you. I detest it and I have good reasons which probably don't even appear on your radar.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but you are telling me and everyone who disagrees with you that they are wrong and you are right.
I mainly use Markdown for editing these days because OrgMode is only supported in things that are also cluttered lumps with terrible UIs. I sometimes write Markdown in a Google Doc because the live cross-device sync is handy.
I am evaluating LogSeq, which has potential.
But OneNote isn't even on my list.
Remember that other people have different needs than you.
As with many "m$ is sAtAn" commenters, you seem to be conflating "my experience/opinion" with "all experience/opinions"...
I bloody love OneNote, and indeed the Ribbon, but I'm neither arrogant, foolish, nor indeed emotionally immature enough to believe that everyone else in the world agrees with me, nor that they should.
Can we all calm down a little bit? At the end of the day, it is just software. We all get a bit attached to the stuff we like, and maybe a bit too much to the stuff we really, really like, but not sure we need to get into stupid flame wars about s/w likes and dislikes.. (And yes, I know, I have seen the internet. In fact, been here a long time, but we don't have to choose to be bellends all the time, do we?)
"...I bloody love OneNote, and indeed the Ribbon, but I'm neither arrogant, foolish, nor indeed emotionally immature enough to believe that everyone else in the world agrees with me, nor that they should..."
I agree with this.
As a long time user of MS Office products and using e.g. Word to write/edit long documents over the years before the ribbon, I knew what I wanted to do but had to search to find how to do it.
The original rationale for the ribbon was exactly that - when asked about new features average users wanted to see in Office 2007, a huge percentage were already available but hidden, so the original idea was to bring them front and centre and make them easier to find.
Which, for me, it succeeded in doing.
Where Microsoft went wrong, as per usual, was to forget why they had done this in the first place and over time the ribbon itself became ever more cluttered and things once again became harder and harder to find - something they seem to have been trying to reverse again with mixed levels of success recently. Despite that, I prefer the ribbon to how it used to be.
Now I understand that for a small percentage of power users, moving things around was problematic.
But it was done over 16 years ago.
Yes, as a power user I saw my productivity nuked by the ribbon because they had not just changed the menu structure, they also thus changed the shortcuts to select the more advanced functionality from the keyboard (which is several factors faster than using a mouse).
If that's 16 years ago it means that Microsoft incentivised me 16 years ago to find alternatives that would recover my productivity which led to me experimenting with OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and I have been happily able to avoid it since..
[Author here]
> the original idea was to bring them front and centre
This is true, but what MS forgot is clear if you use the Mac versions.
My preferred way to use MS Office last century was to just turn off all the toolbars and drive it with a keyboard. Failing that, use the mouse to navigate the menus. This is fast, efficient in screen-space, accessible to disabled users, and hasn't changed much since before 1994.
And in Mac Office, _you still can_.
But where MS went wrong on its native platform is that in their efforts to force everyone to use the beginners' UI, they took away the experts' UI. I was an expert. This made the tool into which I'd invested decades suddenly useless to me.
I am fine with efforts to make software more accessible to newbies. That is a good thing. But the hard part is to do it while keeping it accessible to non-newbies.
MS learned this, somewhat, with Windows 8, which forced the Windows Phone "modern" UI on all OS users. There was an outcry and it had to back down. Windows 10 reverted the change, and Windows 11 continues that.
Office 2007 did the same thing, but sadly, the newbies won and we old hands were alienated.
But I don't have to learn the crappy beginners' UI. I could just keep using the 1 old product I liked, and switch products for the rest. I still can.
It is both hilarious and deeply wrong-headed that so many people who like the beginners' UI are infuriated by this. I have a choice, I took it, I occasionally say that I took it and remind others that there is a choice, and the response is rage. "But I LOVE the ribbon!"
Good for you. I detest it.
MS: here's our new UI. You can learn it. It's better for beginners.
But I'm not a beginner. So why would I want to do a thing like that?
I chose something else.
You mad, bro?
That was quite the rant.
MS haven't removed the keyboard shortcuts. I am not sure where this keeps coming from. Per my other post, in a Word document say, hit Ctrl F, Ctrl O and you still get the File, Open dialogues. Oh and I can hide the ribbon and just have the tabs showing if that's my preferred view.
I have never been mad about it - I just find it funny that people are still angry and still go on rants almost two decades later. The rage almost exclusively comes one way here.
Also "we old hands" - I'd been using Word to do long docs since the late 90's. My productivity went up immeasurably when they swapped to the ribbon.You are using your own use case and applying it across the board. It wasn't for "newbies" it was clear from research that many users wanted features that were there but not visible. So MS made them visible.
I started writing docs when WordPerfect tried to go graphical. I wrote documentation before (on DOS) but the professional angle came a tad later. Eventually, Word became pretty much unavoidable and especially after discovering Document Map it was a reasonable tool once you started using styles so you didn't veer oo quickly into the need to clean up formatting with OpenOffice/LibreOffice (see elsewhere).
As a result of having started on DOS the use of keyboard shortcuts was simply ingrained.
If you used a function often, you eventually looked up its shortcut or menu sequence ([F10} and the keys to select the item in the menu) and that worked well - until the ribbon arrived. Now I'm the forst to agree that different people work differently, but it seems to me that the MAJORITY of Word users had problems with it. Companies blew a fortune (again) on "training" courses (read: people who had already figured out where all the useful stuff had moved to selling their time for money and bad coffee), and generall productivity took an absolute dive while people figured where the &^$# Microsoft had shifted the things to they used most. Probably the most insiduous thing MS did was change the menu structure alongside - it really forced you to go on a "search" tour to find where the useful stuff had gone.
To make matters worse, if they had simply mirrored the previous menu structure onto the ribbon that could have helped too, but nooo - that would have been too easy.
So I'm happy for you that the ribbon worked for you, but for most people it absolutely did not when it was introduced, and what I find interesting is that that has seemingly not improved over time.
I agree with #1 but as far as #2 is concerned, as another poster already suggested it's not free from problems, especially if you use it together with SharePoint (but then, everything has problems on SharePoint). And depending on what you use it for, there are alternatives like Google Keep, Bear, Evernote and others.
Hmm, a non-Microsoft (and an especially competing one at that) having problems working together with Microsoft products.
We never heard that one before..
My single experience with OneNote was when importing some files from a practice we bought. In the folder was a OneNote file that looked like it had an inventory list. I figured I'd give it a try. When launching the program it demanded I sign in with a Microsoft account. I still have an old throwaway hotmail account so I used that. Imagine my dismay when I discovered it changed my local user to an online Microsoft account. Only way to undo that seems to be creating another administrator account and use it to remove the unwanted one.
As for the file I wanted to view: "OneNote can not open this file because it was created by an older version of the program".
Agree on both - took a bit of re-learning (as do most UI changes) but now I actually prefer it. Not sure if it was by accident or design, but the general increase in monitor sizes means it's now something that suits the way I 'drive' perfectly.
I bloody LOVE OneNote, use it so much every day, in and out of work, it just organised enough and just chaotic enough to match the way my brain works.
1. I am tired of Proven's continued snarky remarks about the ribbon. I love the ribbon.
This is one thing I like about LO, you get to choose. There is no "best" or "most productive" UI, there is only "what works for me". I prefer a two-bar (call it menu bar + toolbar) UI, both along the top so my workflow is always strictly top-down. I have touch-typing friends who hate mice/pointers and like to do it all with the keyboard. LO gets out of the way for each of us. What's not to love?
"I am tired of Proven's continued snarky remarks..."
And that, I submit, is why the powers-that-be have been sanding off El Reg's rough edges of late, making it a much less entertaining read -- and, I think, a somewhat less interesting one.
I happen to agree with this opinion of Mr. Proven's, but that's beside my current point; I disagree just as strongly with another one (his pining for Ubuntu's old Unity interface, which I couldn't stand). Regardless, I want both opinions to still be welcome in these pages.
I suspect Dabbsy fell victim to the same sanding-off process. Though I was never a fan and rarely read him, I wish, for the sake of those whose cup of tea he was, that he were still here.
I liked El Reg's trademark snark, and would love to see it return.
(TBH, I'm less fond of snark in the comments. I don't know why; maybe it's just that we aren't as good at it as the professional writers behind the articles. (See also: all the bad gonzo journalism from people who aren't Hunter S. Thompson.))
Long live (quality) snark!
Even since some Microsoft moron came up with the idea of copying formats alongside contents (a problem we've now been living with for literally decades), especially cut & paste activities are still the most direct way to totally mess up a Microsoft Word document because it still copies fragments of formatting instructions.
Even more fun is that the potential for arriving at a non-recoverable concoction that Word refuses to open without crashing grows with the size of the document, because that is likely to contain more orphaned formatting fragments that Word confuses itself with. Ergo, if you use Word for a living (say, you're a consultant that writes client reports), the potential for disaster increases the closer you get to your deadline. Wonderful, isn't it? You can increase the speed by which you reach the point of no return by not using styles, which means you are even more likely to orphaned formatting debris strewn all over the place. If you're writing professionally you really shouldn't, but it appears few get taught the fundamentals of properly writing documents in a word processor these days.
Now for the good news: you can recover from this. Load your now Word-crashing document into LibreOffice Writer and then save it again as a Word document. You have to force the write, so add and then remove a space or something (Save As may not be enough to make Writer process the document) and then save in Word format. You will find the document will now load again in Word as Writer automatically cleans out the orphaned formatting instructions.
If you want to keep the corruption monster as far away as possible you best zap ALL formatting while you have the document in LibreOffice's Writer and then properly apply styles before you export again - you will then notice that Word will work also considerably faster as it no longer has to chew its way through the mess you made with localised formatting.
Of course, if you did all of your work in LibreOffice to start with you would never come even close to this problem, even with larger documents (note: SINGLE ones, have not used the master doc facility much due to mostly having to clean up other people's mess), but even if you do not it is evidently still worth having a copy of LibreOffice installed. Make sure you keep it up to date so it keeps pace with all the new junk Microsoft tends to dump in the format to make it appear LibreOffice is the problem (not exactly a new tactic), but have it around.
You'll need LibreOffice for document First Aid if you do more than just write one pagers. It may save you from the whooshing sound..
I can only concur,
We had a user manual which required page formatting which word styles could not handle.
At one point, the document could only be read by LO.
Rather than fixing it in LO and re-importing it in word, the document went to live happily in LO.
At the time of writing, it has two cxhildren, and it has learned another language.
We have LO installed on about a hundred Windows computers. It covers everything that 99% of our users need. Not only does it save a lot of money, but frees us from having to manage a lot of licenses.
As for the remaining 1%, one subscription to O365 on the boss's computer keeps him happy. Except when the credit card expires and it stops working.
Something that seems to get missed in reviews of LibreOffice is that office suites using LibreOffice Technology support a huge variety of platforms, still free, and they share the same codebase too for excellent document fidelity. Some supported platforms are as follows:
Apps for Android (smartphones and tablets)
Apps for Apple iOS and iPadOS (smartphones and tablets)
Apps for ChromeOS (optimised for Chromebooks and Chromeboxes)
Apps for Windows
Apps for Linux
Apps for macOS
build your own for BSD and others
Online versions accessible via web on all of the above, and on others that use a modern web browser, but also with more functionality than Microsoft's web based office suite which is quite a striking comparison too.
There's also the vastly more intelligent handling of languages in every aspect (not just in Calc - I honestly couldn't believe what Microsoft had done the first time I had to deal with an Excel document originating in France), probably because LibreOffice was born in Europe.
Working in multiple languages only had one problem on Macs (how to place accents on characters you don't have on your keyboard - that UI was horrific) but that is either already addressed in 7.5 or it will go public in 7.6 - I know that long outstanding bug has been addressed. Add to that that it also supports vastly more languages than Word in interface and documents (to the point that they even added Klingon for fun) and LO is the Office suite of choice for anyone who knows that not everyone speaks American English..
Update: the fix is present in 7.5 - hurray :)
Also discovered they added QRcode functionality a while back (Insert - OLE object - QRcode or barcode), but I'll probably have to post some helping details with the UI for that as the interface is a tad bare. Unless you already know how to format a QR code for the various bits of functionality it can offer the current UI is not of much help, nor does it tell you what barcode it generates in 2D mode (my feeling is that it's Code 39 judging by the starting/ending bars, but it could also be Code 128)..
Enfin, happy now - full multilingual character support was on my wishlist for a while. Less bothered about QR and regular barcodes, I have plenty of tools to generate those. I have Code 39 in a font, much easier :)
"As before, there's a choice of UIs: you can have old-style menus and toolbars, or a single context-sensitive toolbar, or a tabbed toolbar (which is to say, a ribbon), if you like that sort of thing, which can be full-size, compact, or moved to a sidebar – especially useful on widescreens. This puts LibreOffice ahead of rivals such as OnlyOffice, WPS Office, and of course Microsoft Office, all of which give you just the ribbon-type UI whether you like it or not."
Not quite true as MS365 apps on macOS have both toolbar and menu - giving a choice of which to use at all times. As somebody who moved from a Windows base to Mac >10 years ago, I kept some of my former Windows habits. I have a Microsoft365 subscription (shared within family) and MS Office is the default for the main apps (it's what others in my circle use and it ensures full compatibility). I have Win11 and Ubuntu VMs - the former for a handful of programs that aren't available on Mac (including Publisher, for the occasional file I get in that format). I also use Libreoffice when on Ubuntu. In my experience, the MS apps work best in the Mac environment, though YMMV...
"In my experience, the MS apps work best in the Mac environment, though YMMV..."
I have to disagree. There is little that's worse than the OneDrive client for Mac, which has a habit of regularly wetting the bed and stopping to sync, losing its MS account (and then not letting the user login again) or just hanging randomly.
Granted, OneDrive is particularly bad (although Teams is in a sold second place), and the main MS365 apps (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) behave a quite bit better, but if it has to be Microsoft Office then the experience on Windows is generally much better than on mac OS.
On top of that, the way Microsoft's mac OS apps are updated through an old-fashioned standalone updater app is quite annoying when on Windows the MS365 apps update in the background.
[Previous AC here]
I don't really think of the OneDrive app as part of Microsoft365 - I'm stick stick in an Office mindset!
I agree that OneDrive isn't great. It used to work quite well on my old (2011) iMac, on which which I'd set up a separate partition for storing files that were sync'd to it. When I switched to an M1 Mac a year ago, and no longer wanted to download and store the sync'd files, the app just din't work properly: it insisted on downloading all files. I think that's beed sorted in subsequent updates but my current workflow suits OneDrive access through Safari just as easily.
I totally agree the updating process if the office apps are downloaded from Microsoft is annoying, but they can be downloaded from the App Store and get updated by the native macOS process. Some apps have restrictions in their App Store versions (restrictions that sometimes limits their use) - I've not noticed any significant (to me) issues with these.
[Author here]
> MS365 apps on macOS have both toolbar and menu - giving a choice of which to use at all times
This is a good point and one I've tried to make elsewhere in the comments.
I personally think it's hilarious that the native MS Office suite has a considerably better UI on its primary non-native OS platform (macOS) than it does on MS' own OS.
Modern MS Office remains vaguely approximately usable on macOS. I left it behind forever on Windows over 1½ decades ago. I've never regretted it but wow it makes the MS fanboys mad.
"This version is a bit prettier than before, with new, much more colorful icons for both the individual modules and their respective documents."
Well, as much as I consider this lackluster, I'd say, FINALLY, they did put office-like icons for itemization (numbered or not) of text !!!
It was ridiculous such thing never existed before ...
We used LO for about 2 years on a project and still do
I recommend it's installation to friends and family rather than office365 on home kit as thier use cases are simple.
I use LO to fix broken docx files...
However for customer facing documents we have to open in Office, fix the formatting and layout before delivery as a PDF or docx.
The issues are around
- images and text flow
- odd default options when inserting an image
- table formatting (painful)
- odd spacing that appears randomly
- cross referencing breaks, but it also breaks in office but differently...
It's not a show stopper but it's annoying.
That's not to say that Office does not have problems, just different.
I do however sometimes wonder if some of the issues I'm seeing is just user error or sloppyness, in that they don't care because some other mug will tidy the document up before delivery...
Has the LO developers given any thought or looked at possibly re-writing LO from the ground up in modern code? This could make it easier to track down and fix bugs.
Note - I am not a software engineer so do not know the complexities involved. I do know that with with program like LO, it would be a massive project.
If they did that it would take them, easily, 10 years just to be at the state LibreOffice is now, in the meantime current users would have to keep using the current version, they would just switch to something else.
Also, many bugs come from edge cases nobody would predict in advance, rewritting from scratch means reintroducing those bugs.
Refactoring old code may be hard, boring, thankless work, but it does work.
[Author here]
> re-writing LO from the ground up in modern code
I think Joel on Software applies here:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
What is good about LO is that it is this great big complex decades-old thing and it does what it does well because it encodes decades of knowledge and fixes and workarounds.
Just like Linux does, and Windows.
There are plenty of alternatives to Linux out there, but they can't do all the things Linux can. I could run FreeBSD but I don't because Linux just works, has more drivers, I can plug in random hardware and random software and be confident it'll work acceptably well.
Whereas merely wanting to print from FreeBSD involves stuff like this post from earlier today:
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/02/07/print-on-freebsd/
I don't use any bits of any office suite in my daily work. I don't need them. This is good.
(My main app is an Electron one and that's bad but that's another story.)
But sometimes you *do* need that, and then, it's great to have a tool like LibreOffice around.
If you don't need all that baggage, then there are things like OnlyOffice.
The ground-up rewrite stuff is already out there. Trying to move a vast old codebase via a total rewrite... no, bad plan.
I used to work in an international standards body, creating 1000+ page documents in MS-Word with track changes (for the 100+ people in different companies working on the document).
Of course, we had fairly regular corrupt files, which had the potential to destroy man-years of work.
My go-to process for un-corrupting was always import to OpenOffice (at the time), save as native file format. Close the program, restart, open the newly saved doc, save as MS-Word.
It never failed.
I did enjoy pointing this out to the Microsoft reps in the meetings.
There's another neat trick that LibreOffice has which is completely missing from O365, MS Office or whatever they're now calling it... You can load text-based PDF's into LibreOffice Draw and then Copy (as in Copy / Paste) and to some extent (results a bit more variable here) Edit the text at will. In no sense is LibreOffice a full-fetaured PDF editor, but it's "good enough" for quite a wide variety of uses. LibreOfice Draw is also a long way from a full AutoCAD or Visio product but definitely, again, good enough for quite a range of simple, domestic vector grapics drawing tasks - and streets ahead of trying to use Word or Powerpoint in that way!
While I’ve found potions of LibreOffice useful over the years, it will be interesting to see whether there has been a material improvement in the word processor’s capacity to accurately render files created with Microsoft Word. While it costs $75, Softmaker’s Textmaker does that flawlessly both in the Linux and MacOS environments.
I should add that one must wonder about the future of any Microsoft Office clones now that legitimate copies of the MSFT product can be purchased for as little as $35.
So many of the arguments about the interface of LO take me back to 35 years ago and the days when the kind of nerds who hate ribbons and nicer looking icons were arguing that GUIs were inefficient and a waste of time and why couldn’t people just learn the command line like they did.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
