Vendor-bender LibreOffice kicks out 6.4: Community project feel, though now with added auto-█████ tool The Document Foundation has updated its free and open-source LibreOffice suite to 6.4, which it describes as "performance focused", though there are also new features. LibreOffice is a large office suite, and there are seven applications included: Writer for word processing, Calc for spreadsheets, Draw, Impress for …
You obviously haven't drunk the right kool-aid.
Microsoft office has one, so every office suite needs one. :)
You are supposed to launch it full screen and it becomes your desktop and gives you access to all the applications you every need. Or so I was told when my employers decided to go full Office 365 and we had our training.
"You are supposed to launch it full screen and it becomes your desktop and gives you access to all the applications you every need."
I remember when EMACS embodied this philosophy. Of course, in an era pre-dating shell history, integrated applications, etc., running everything through EMACS represented a huge improvement in productivity and in the user experience.
Well, at least it doesn't have a menu item "Insert online video" like Word does.
In a word processor? It's pointless. Because, depending on when/who/where the recipient is, the online video will be taken down/blocked/in a foreign language, or, of course, if the document is printed, not viewable at all.
Microsoft: bringing you new, exciting features you didn't know you didn't need.
I secretly like Office 97 as it is a usable office suite but it can also run on NT 3.5.1, the last NT with the old Win3.1 UI, pre-start button (unless you installed NewsHell) which was why it drew it's own controls.
Handy for bringing an old 486 to the coffee shop amongst the Mac hipsters but getting stuff done.
I always knew I was out of step with most people, but I actually find the start centre useful in my post-retirement mental haze! Click on the launcher, and up comes a page of things I've been working on since last time - most of which I'd forgotten what I'd called them or where I'd filed them. I agree its useless other than that, but I will admit to liking that one feature as it shows a preview of each file.
As I run Debian with Gnome3 and Wayland, every program looks a bit naff font-wise, but I find it a worthwhile trade-off compared to Win10, not to mention the fact that everything stays put where I left it.
I am trying to be fair here (used to use Libre office, but have to use MS Office now, as a lot of my work involves Exchange, plus I get MS office for free as well, and have to spend almost no time getting it to work with our servers at work, so I use MS Office out of laziness as much as anything).
So, I haven't used Libre office in a while.
But I question the need for a "launcher" . Maybe it helped with ease of use in the DOS days, when it just provided a menu that replaced the commands the user would otherwise need, but anyone using any recent OS already has a more than capable launcher already installed (be it Finder, Windows Explorer or any Linux desktop).
I'm not too concerned about the "bloat" factor, after all, most launchers are only a few megabytes, and most computers have gigabytes of RAM and potentially terabytes of drive space, so a few megabytes is insignificant. My concern is security, and particularly bugs. Especially if the launcher includes components that run on startup.
maybe I looked at it all wrong but seemed to me this "launcher" was just a manner (on windows) to load the suite on startup for a faster application startup when called for.
I don't use the launcher itself but have it installed and set to load on windows startup and it seems to hasten specific app start times.
or I could be way off base.
The Draw module is far (far far) superior to anything in the MS-Office suite. It's even possible to produce semi-technical drawings to scale. It's my #1 reason to use LibreOffice. Stability is #2.
As #3, LibreOffice UI is conservative, the commands are where they have always been, no need to re-learn everything at each release.
As #3, LibreOffice UI is conservative, the commands are where they have always been, no need to re-learn everything at each release.
That one is my primary reason for using it (alongside my hate for the ribbon in Office). I have the MS option at work but use LibreOffice out of preference these days.
"LibreOffice UI is conservative, the commands are where they have always been, no need to re-learn everything at each release"
I am a massive fan of Libreoffice and before that I used to use OpenOffice. But I do have to disagree about the commands are where they have always been. I cant comment on all the different programs in the LO suite. But certainly in the Draw package - which I used nearly every day - they did move some commands in the menus to sub-menus or different menu completely, if you upgraded from V5.x to V6.x
I know as its taken me a few weeks to retrain myself to find them in their new locations as muscle memory meant i kept looking for them in their old menus.
But generally speaking apart from this little bit of movement in the menu structure I have no issue with the look of the UI. Should you not like the style and colours of the default icons on the LO taskbar you can change them for a few alternative designs from the options or even download additional icon themes to make them look like MS Office should you feel the need to.
If you enable experimental features you can also get icons grouped by contextual or tabbed as well. No doubt this will become a full feature in a future release once the code is more stable.
https://libreofficehelp.com/change-libreoffice-default-look-and-feel/
Many years ago, I was working on a project where I had to open a document in Office 2007. What is the very first thing I needed to do? Print it of course. Having never seen the ribbon before, I couldn't find the print button. So I asked the system admin and he admitted he didn't know either. But he gave me a trick: The old DOS shortcut Control-P still worked, along with other standbys like Control-S for save and Control-O for open.
I have been using these ever since, and the work in LibreOffice and practically every other program. I have been ignoring the ribbon ever since. Best productivity gain ever!
Stability...can anyone here remember the last time an MS Office product crashed at random? Same with the OS itself? Not a dig - I am genuinely curious - The last time I can bring a crash of, say, Word, to mind was around 13 years ago on a very specific project, and would've been Word 2003.
The ribbon - it always slightly bemuses me that people here hate it so much, yet I have never heard an average user, anywhere, say they wish they could go back to the way the menus used to look.
And does LO still give you the abiolity to enable a ribbon? It was put in (as beta, I believe) a couple of versions or so back
I had a problem at a customer site with one Excel spreadsheet that would crash Excel at every load.
Customer was unhappy because the problem was in his backup as well (let's not talk about that, the day would not be enough to explain).
No solution other than to recreate the spreadsheet from scratch. Thankfully, since he used it so much, he knew what was in it, so it didn't take all that long.
Still don't know what he did to corrupt the file.
"..This morning. Excel 2010. Twice..."
Out of interest, tried starting it in safe mode without any plugins running? My recent experiences over the last few years would suggest that it tends to be badly written plugins (or macros) that cause most issues when they do occur.
Or Excel isn't the correct tool and they're running their entire finance department on a 20-year old sheet. :)
"I have never heard an average user, anywhere, say they wish they could go back to the way the menus used to look."
may-be you can help me then: where in MS-Word (2017 I think, not sure, where do you find the "About MS-Word" menu ?) do I find the command "Add field" to add the content of a custom field into my document (like : release version) ? Also: where can I define and edit such custom fields ?
Seriously, I need that a lot and I don't know. Please. In LibreOffice it's Menu > Insert > Field
"I have never heard an average user, anywhere, say they wish they could go back to the way the menus used to look."
"may-be you can help me then: where in MS-Word (2017 I think, not sure, where do you find the "About MS-Word" menu ?) do I find the command "Add field" to add the content of a custom field into my document (like : release version) ? Also: where can I define and edit such custom fields ?
Seriously, I need that a lot and I don't know. Please. In LibreOffice it's Menu > Insert > Field
The product about ifnormation really is in a silly place and has been for some time - click File, Account and the version is there.
To insert a field - on my current 365 ProPlus I'm looking at, Click Insert then it's under Text - the icon just to the right of the Text box graphic and text. You have autotext, document properties and fields as an option.
>I'm never concerned about what an interface looks like as long as it is clear and reasonably intuitive to use.
What it looks like obviously affects how clear the UI is, and also how intuitive it is to an extent... do the icons make sense, are they grouped in the places I might expect to find them, etc.
TBH I never found Ribbon unintuitive except for more advanced features. People put more effort into deliberately not understanding it than in just figuring it out and getting on with their work, in my view. People using Word every day and ranting for hours about something they could just google in 2s.
My major problem with ribbon remains that it's enhanced the practice of clicking menus until you find the option you want by replacing the text (which I started learning to read when I was 4) by arbitrary hieroglyphics (which I never learnt to read as I wasn't educated in ancient Egypt, and not all concepts easily translate to a 4mm square picture). It's not utterly awful, but has it improved my life? No. Has it made things slightly more awkward in exchange for making them slightly prettier? Yes.
As for googling, it's not two seconds, is it? It's a couple of seconds to open a browser window and type some appropriate string (maybe), followed by at least half a minute of looking through the results, reading something that looks appropriate, refining your search and then trying to find the bit you want in a rambling CNET article written in 2008 for an older version of Word. That's not the best productivity trade-off.
Spot on. Last night I tried to use a couple of FOSS video editors.*
Simple controls, like putting a marker/handle where I wanted to end/fade a clip couldn't be found. And the help file said something to the effect "place the handle where you want to...... " ( which was what I was trying to do), without any explanation/picture about how to find or move said handle.
*Small one-off job that can't justify buying a programme.
>A smart teenager who like usability and doesn't care for needless change? I'm good with that.
No. Coders do NOT as a rule understand usability. Interfaces put together by coders are generally horrible for anyone who isn't a coder, sometimes for anyone but THE coder who wrote it. They take the view "just learn how it works" or "once you learn these 35 key shortcuts it'll be fine".
The Libre interface is mainly only dated stylistically but most FOSS projects are far worse.
As a coder myself, I understand the value of using someone skilled at UI/UX and using graphic designers to make the functionality usable by casual users.
As a coder myself, I understand the value of using someone skilled at UI/UX and using graphic designers to make the functionality usable by casual users.
GRAPHICS designers? Nope, they just like making things fancy, not usable. If they were capable of usability, we wouldn't end up with the sort of crap Jony Ive and his ilk come up with.
You've been able to easily include QR codes in LO for some years now; just install the goQR.me extension (there are probably others if you go looking). Alternatively, just use one of the various QR tools and cut-and-paste the resulting png/jpg image into your LO document.
So I don't actually see the point of this enhancement, other than to p*ss off third-party extension developers.
... the interface looks like it was coded by a teenager in 2006 ...
Maybe ...
But quite honestly, that's the least of it.
I use it all the time (v5.2.7.2), primarily as a substitute for MSWord and MSExcel but my main complaint is with long standing bugs/usability issues and this never ending bloat.
I think they should have stopped at v6.0 and instead concentrated on pending matters and thining down the code instead of chasing after being fat, shiny, and new like Office.
O.
In MS Office I regularly use One Note to prepare the first draft of a document where I am initially not sure what the shape of the final document will be. Its structure of sections and pages allows snippets from many other sources to be parked in a convenient way for later consideration. It has other party tricks. But LO has nothing like it.
Access is much more powerful than LO Base.
These days I do not exchange documents with many other people. But where that is a requirement - e.g. the city of Munich and other parts of the German government - the different styles and fonts between MSO and LO are a nuisance.
The last of couple times I used Access, I found it to be a pain to use but then I have used various RDMSes and can write my own SQL. I haven't really used Base but I remember you could connect it to MySQL or MariaDB. One Note and similar applications strike me as something you use a great deal or not at all unlike say a Writer/Calc or Word/Excel which many do lightly use for personal needs.
Please, please, can we change the default ...
Hmmm ...
Maybe at LibreOffice Support or LibreOffice Feedback?
O.
Also possible with a keyboard (Shift-Ctl-Alt-V) which you can change and pick unformatted via Paste Special via right click
Thunderbird is Shift-Ctl-V for unformatted, Ctl-V for Formatted.
I agree, I'd like Ctrl-V to be unformated if from external app, but to be formated if clipboard was Copied from the same document.
So it's not simple.
The only things that annoy me about Writer:
1) Search & Replace can grab focus on autosave.
2) Save As & later open of Doc or DOCX can do strange things to paper breaks or change levels to body text. Save in ODT, SAVEAS in DOCX but don't reopen the DOCX in Writer.
3) It forgets any floating toolbars you have next time you open, even opening a second document.
4) Each document is a full set of windows. I like KATE and Notepad++ sessions with each open doc on a tab.
However after 16 years of Word For Windows, I now only use Writer. I used it on Windows for a while before moving entirely to Linux due to Win10 and even evil updates on Win7.
I used Linux for servers from 1999, but had no incentive to replace NT4.0 and then from April 2002, XP with Desktop Linux. On Desktop Linux only now for laptop and Netbook for 2+ years.
>Please, please, can we change the default when pasting from a Web page to Writer to be "plain text."?
But thats how MS Word works...
It p*sses me off that in Word, when importing from external sources eg. web and other peoples 'creations' the default isn't paste as plain text.
"The Liberation Serif font, which is the default, does not look good on screen, in Windows at least. The kerning is not quite right, which affects readability."
It's not just Liberation Serif ... LibreOffice cannot kern ANY font correctly: Arial, Times New Roman, etc etc.
I dearly wish they would fix this instead of playing about with things like auto-redaction. And yes, I know we have to forgive LO all its rough edges because it's an open source project, but do none of the code contributors care about the poor typeface rendering?
Biggest complain I get from people I try to introduce Libreoffice to is 1. Macros won't run, and 2. The formatting on Word documents run, badly.
Number 2 seems to be the biggest beef, most people complain that if they fix the layout here (or even if they don't), the formatting will invariably be damaged when the document is sent back to our clients (ie images run off the page or to the bottom, text flows are broken, table sizes wrong, etc.). Lesser complains are that the macros for spreadsheets prepared in Excel by the clients fail to run.
One more issue is related to the Office Automation engine. Lots of third party programs we use (ie PV Elite) for some strange reason fires up word and then proceed to put on a flashy show with words and pictures appearing in the document as if it's being typed out by a ghost. However only two people in the office uses that software package. It'll refuse to generate the report if Word isn't present on the system.
The only praise I've heard of LibreOffice so far is that it's darn powerful when used to edit PDF files in Draw.
We're trying to switch people over to Libreoffice at where I work. Half of them want Office back because of the above three issues.
That Word macros don't run is pretty logical, it's LibreOffice.
That the page formatting is not good is because Microsoft is not respecting the Open Office format (even when it says it does).
And if you're opening a Word document saved as docx, well, it was saved in Microsoft format, not LibreOffice, so it's obvious that it's not going to play well with the competition. Microsoft does not play with the competition, it kills it when it can.
Now I know that people cannot choose what format they receive documents in, but there's no avoiding such issues when you have different programs to open the same documents.
On my professional laptop, I have Office 2013 and LibreOffice. I use LO by preference, but when I receive Office documents I open them in Office.
On my personal PC, it's obviously LO all the way.
The only praise I've heard of LibreOffice so far is that it's darn powerful when used to edit PDF files in Draw.
This sort of makes sense: either your users don’t notice it is LO and not MSO, in which case they don’t praise it, or they do in which case they grumble because feature $X is missing or wrong or whatever.
There aren’t many features LO has where they do it far better than MSO.
... when an Microsoft Office update installed an always-on Windows Service which then, if disabled, prevented Microsoft Office applications from starting up.
I for one will not tolerate M$ spyware, especilly if it is hoisted upon you after an initial standalone, non-backdoored purchase.
I use LibreOffice, Microsoft Office and WordPerfect at work, if you are writing a new document and care about the formatting then WordPerfect still beats them all. But at work everyone uses Microsoft Office because we need an email client on each desk so a lot of time I have to try and figure out why the Microsoft Office document formatting is weird and fix it for them.
Imagine if every country were to sponsor one or a few top notch programmers to Libreoffice and Thunderbird, similar to what companies are contributing to Linux kernel. In no time, libreoffice will surpass msoffice. No need to pay millions for proprietary format and vendor lock-in.
I may be alone but I find the launcher useful.
On an OS which pins applications to a quick launch bar of some kind (Ubuntu and Windows are my own two use cases), pinning the launcher gives me quick access to LO without needing space for several LO icons for individual functions.
Sure, if you're launching from a Start menu or command line then the launcher is pointless (you're already using a launcher to launch it) but that doesn't mean it has no application, and I can't believe it adds much bloat to the application overall.
What I would *really* like to see, though, is a unified document format. Think Calc multiple sheets, but where some of the sheets aren't spreadsheets but (eg) Writer docs with full access to the data in the other sheets. Eg a sheet of calculations for a quote, and a document sheet that pulls it all together into a fully fledged proposal document ready for PDFing.
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