OnlyOffice treated to an update – and fresh plugins

There are new versions of both OnlyOffice and the Chinese WPS Office. If LibreOffice looks and feels clunky and old-fashioned to you, there are other options. Contrary to what some Microsoft-botherers might claim, there are actually quite a few office suites for Linux. Some are all-open-source, but there are also some …

[Downeaster]

To Each His Own

I also prefer the old fashioned pull down menu type program. I use SoftMaker Office and LibreOffice for most of my typing, slideshow, and spreadsheet work. SoftMaker Office, the version you buy, gives use a choice between a tabbed interfaced that is well implemented or a pull down menu interface. You can switch between one and the other. LibreOffice also has both kinds of interfaces. LibreOffice is a good product. I've also used OnlyOffice and WPS Office. Both I found decent. OnlyOffice has an online version and a downloadable version. It works well but I didn't find it the best with saving to Microsoft Word files. WPS Office did a little bit better when saving to MS Word file format. Use what you like but try the different programs. There are many good free office suites or low cost ones. Find what works for you.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Fans of OnlyOffice

Would Fans of OnlyOffice be...

OnlyFans

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: Fans of OnlyOffice

Phwoar, show more Ribbon

[man_iii]

Toolbar or Ribbon

The fact that there is no choice to switch between the two styles in MSOffice tells you all you need to know about it.

These days we are doing corporate docs in markdown and generating either ppt or pdf or xls from those files. Even the sales decks are automated in the same way.

So why pay for Office except for the PHBs ????

How relevant does Office need to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Toolbar or Ribbon

Well, not saying this is *good*, but... Due to regulatory compliance we have to have a document management system. And since this has to be compatible with everyone, from the PHBs to the people who actually do the work, a solution that uses only MS Word (and Excel and PowerPoint, of course) was apparently the only option. And yes, it is f*cking miserable writing in the horror after two decades of $EDITOR+LaTeX. But I have no choice in the matter.

And yes, everything has to be described in a managed document. We are around 60 people in my department, and have over 3000 such documents... Most of them written, reviewed and approved by three different people.

[Primus Secundus Tertius]

Re: Toolbar or Ribbon

1990s Latex was horrific, you had to remember all the codes and put them in manually. Tables were terribly tiresome. If you really lust after Latex, write it in Word (any old Word) and use pandoc to convert to Latex.

[keithpeter]

Re: Toolbar or Ribbon

@Primus:

"you had to remember all the codes and put them in manually"

The trick was/is to develop some style sheets for documents and just reuse them. Guaranteed consistency. Use a folding text editor and you can drag drop whole chapters &c.

LyX and Texmacs are available as well for a more visual point and click approach. Might help with the tag remembering. Texmacs isn't [La|TeX] native, but it exports reasonably well.

@All

OnlyOffice

You have to dig around the site to find the OnlyOffice Desktop version, they characterise it as an App. OnlyOffice docs appears to be cloudy. The Linux (64bit) rpm converts to a tgz fine on Slackware and is quite snappy on an ancient T60 core duo with iffy graphics, no name SSD and 3Gb ram. They do want you to go cloudy though. Big buttons on the home screen and all.

I have not found the LaTeX thingy yet. Native formula editor is sort of graphical and fiddly. Not bad overall. Worth playing with. Less annoying than Caligra which is not for me a demanding achievement.

Headings view brings up a right pane with an outline of your doc headings. You can promote/demote a given heading but you don't appear to be able to drag/drop or reorder headings which is a great shame.

Edit: you can export a writer document to LibreOffice .odt format. If using the native maths formula format the formula is editable in Open/LibreOffice which is very nice,

Icon: Troff for the win

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Toolbar or Ribbon

You think you have it bad, I have to write all my documentation in indesign.

[Mockup1974]

All I want is an identical Excel clone, maybe excluding the cloud stuff but including the same keyboard shortcuts, formatting options and formulas.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

Zoom and ChatGPT integration with a word processor? Why, oh why?

[David-M]

!! No to ribbons !!

Well I can't abide ribbons, they utterly destroy all productivity for me because things move about and they're generally not decently customisable.

I stick with MSOffice 2003 - whose menus and bars I have customised to death and now bear little resemblance to the originals - and when I need certain features, LibreOffice...

d

[John Brown (no body)]

the program looks old-fashioned to some.

Is it old fashioned or just not jumping on the arty farty hipster latest fad bandwagon?

I suppose to "some" that might well be "old fashioned, probably because the style was invented before they were born :-)