LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab LibreOffice is a big, mature chunk of code now, but that doesn't make it impossible to teach it impressive new tricks. Some of them could make it more important than ever. The open-source office suite had its own program stream at FOSDEM, including the pre-announcement of the new LibreOffice release 25.2. It has been around in …
I've worked with hundreds of companies over the last 20+ years (more if you go back further). I've never seen anything other than MS Office running on a client PC. I do a lot of work with Open Source, so that's not the issue.
Maybe if I moved in with my parents and lived in their basement, I could have a pure life and use LibreOffice. Until then, I'll keep earning a living with the software I need to do my job.
Earlier versions of Office are not too bad. The reason open source tools were not adopted is that they were unable to display documents produced by Office in a consistent way. So if customer sends Office document and you can't read it properly, you are in the pickle. It's like a virus.
It's necessary evil.
I was more referring to things like Teams, OneDrive, ShartPoint etc.
IME Office was not able to display documents produced by Office in a consistent way.
Indeed successive earlier versions of Office produced documents which couldn't be opened, let alone displayed, by even earlier versions so that users were forced onto the upgrade path as soon as they received a document from a user of a later version. The only Word document I've encountered which LO couldn't open could only be opened by the specific version of Word that created it - any other, including later versions, would hang Windows completely.
Any inability of LO to display them correctly is not due to the inability of LO developers but to the deliberate customer abuse by Microsoft. Whether Office users care very much about document appearance let alone consistency is an open question; PDF should produce a frozen version of a document's appearance when the PDF was generated and many published PDFs show a complete indifference to good layout.
A few times a year, someone will bring a completely knackered spreadsheet to my attention (not always the same one). It will be 17MB and be un-renderable / unusable in any version of excel that I try, causing glitches, crashing etc.
Backups won't be an option because the inherent buggyness has been creeping in over time. There was no 'worked fine' point close enough to not have a massive overhead of trying to re-input the data. Granted, these are often those dreaded spreadsheets that really-should-be-a-bloody-database that departments love to create and then rely on.
It looks like a lot of work ahead....
And this is where it's worth having LibreOffice: Open the sheet. Save-as an ODS. Close. Open the ODS, save out as Excel format.
You now have a 120KB spreadsheet that Excel opens in an instant with all the data in tact. Parties are thrown, gifts are lavished upon you and a statue is erected in your honour.
I've gotten less and less diplomatic about Excel. It's always been the worst of the lot. Somehow users give MS Office a free pass in their head and assume the PC in general is at fault and I'm starting to just say 'nope, it's just excel being shit'.
I wouldn't know about the parties and statues :), but there is one thing that is very much classic Microsoft:
You know CVS files, where the "c" stands for comma? Guess what the one separator is that Excel will not handle unless you follow a tortuous route of Data Import (and export is no fun either)?
OK, I know that doing anything outside the English language and localisation has always been a challenge for Microsoft, but LO proves time and time again that it is WAY more mature when it comes to internationalisation, and so treats CSVs as CSVs and has no problem importing and exporting with any separator you care to choose (it treats you like an adult, so if you want to separate by the letter 'a' it will still do as you ask, no nannying).
As for doc rescue, I already did that with early versions of OO. Worked every time.
And still no parties..
***** You know CSV files, where the "c" stands for comma? Guess what the one separator is that Excel will not handle unless you follow a tortuous route of Data Import (and export is no fun either)?
And FSM forbid you have any data that even looks remotely like a time/date stamp, upon which Excel will, in it's most helpful way, convert it to something completely useless. Oh, and you can't disable that particular "feature" either.
A couple more fun ways Excel likes to "help":
* Enter in a long string (yes, dammit, it's a STRING) of numbers, like if you're tracking serial numbers, and Excel sometimes decides that this should be in scientific notation.
* We sometimes create Excel files that include barcodes that we will print out for an operator to scan as a job aid. Simplest way is to enter the desired data and change the font to a Code39 font. Nice, until Excel decides you forgot to include a space and "helpfully" adds one. Now your scans don't work properly. Change back to Courier... huh, the right data is there? WTH?
My record was 630Mb in Excel, that was constantly crashing the file server, reduced to 500kb after the round trip. Just because Excel lets two people edit a worksheet at the same time, doesn't mean you should actually try it. Only had to do it once mind, once I realized what they were storing in the file I added it as an SQL table in their main bespoke application & told them never to use Excel as a database ever again.
> I'll keep earning a living with the software I need to do my job.
When I have local admin rights, I just install and use superior FOSS tools like Firefox and LibreOffice. I find that constantly swearing loudly at your computer, for instance when trying to use Office 365, is discouraged in most corporate environments.
I have to use Word at work to set up and print labels. I do the same here but with LO. LO sometimes does weird things like not properly grouping items or aligning things you don’t want aligned but I have always managed to work around those. With Word that is much more difficult.
BTW the HSE website lets you download all the chemical warning symbols in colour. You just select one, copy it, past it in, resize and move it and those labels in colour for impact make the kids that bit more careful.
Oh I don't know - I use Debian and I regularly swear at my computer!
Only yesterday I was thwarted by my Dymo Labelwriter 450 that refuses to change orientation. I gave up and ran a Windows VM. What's recently changed? I decided to update/upgrade to Trixie, and a few things are now broken. Mea Culpa.
And how many perfectly functional computers will be running Linux once M$ kill off W10 without allowing those machines to install W11? My token Windows machine will just stay with the last working version of W10 ... and LibreOffice is all it's ever had Office wise anyway which I presume WILL still take updates. My main desktop has been Linux from before LibreOffice appeared :)
When I have local admin rights, I just install
I've got people with admin rights just like you here. They believe there is no system that can't be improved by installing 1 or 2 more applications for everything -- DNS, DHCP, LDAP, Backkup, copy, SSL, SSH, VPN, browser, and yes, another Office suite.
It doesn't matter. I hate them all, but I have to use them. I'm trying to move to LibreOffice, but... no email. And it doesn't work on iOS. Thunderbird is also not available on iOS. We don't use Android very much and will not be moving. OneDrive is actually useful, as long as you ignore MS Hype and use it to transfer files. Teams should die slowly, preferably in fire, but I must use it to talk to some people.
Now, if LibreOffice had email, and worked on iOS, MS Office would be gone, gone, GONE from here. For whatever reason, LO is not available on iOS and does not have an email client. Outlook, and Apple Mail, stink, but Outlook works on Windows, Mac, and iOS which is what we need. Note that Outlook works on Android but not, for reasons of Microsoft, on Linux. The day that LO is truly cross-platform and supports iOS, and gets email, is the day that MS Office is consigned to the Outer Darkness Forever. That day is not yet here, and may never come, not with the attitudes of certain coders who hate Crapple and think that email is obsolete.
Other email clients are available. Outlook is not the only email client in the world. I use Thunderbird here at home. I have multiple accounts open on it. It’s absolutely fine. I have to use Outlook at work. I have no control of what’s on my office computer, or the emails I get. I’m the Science Technician and I get a huge slew of emails for the teachers. I delete unread the vast majority of emails I get at work.
That's closer than virtually every other email client. it's a pain, but it can be done. Thunderbird can't be done, period, on iOS. it's been _eighteen years_ and Thunderbird is not available in the Apple Store, and I suspect will never be available in the Apple Store. Period. I suspect that this is so because they don't want to make it available, not because of any technical issue. This is their right, of course. It just means that Thunderbird will not be selected to replace Outlook, while Outlook works where I need it. And nothing else is as cross-platform in even as limited way as Outlook, unless someone in the commentariat can point me to an email client which I may have missed and which allows multiple accounts (so not Zoho, for example) and is not tied to annoyances (so not Gmail) and is not web-based (Zoho, Gmail, others) (yes, Zoho and Gmail have real email clients. No, they're not as good as Outlook, and given how bad Outlook is, that's not really a good look. Gmail's app is a highly modified version of the web app. It really stinks up the place. Zoho's app is just bad. it is quite clear that Zoho, Gmail, and others, including Microsoft, really want you to use the web interface, not an actual app. I hate webmail.)
Note that in the final extremity users can use the Outlook web interface and get most of what the Outlook app provides. I have webmail, but the Outlook web interface works on almost all web browsers on almost all platforms. it is _truly_ cross-platform. _Nothing else comes close_. Outlook sucks. Webmail sucks worse. But it works cross-platform and no-one else cares enough to even try. I get a _lot_ of email, some of which is actually useful. One major advantage of Outlook being cross-platform is that when i kill the non-useful email on one system, it dies everywhere. I don't care if it has Microsoft cooties. I do care that it works where-ever I want it to, something that no other client is capable of. Until this changes, Outlook will be installed on systems at home and the office. After 18 years I don't think that the various other clients are going to bring their apps to iOS, so Outlook it is.
For various reasons, I’m running Apple Mail, Gmail and Outlook on iOS. The latter because the org I’m supporting uses MS365 shared mailboxes and Oulook is (sadly) the only way to access them,
If I wasn’t using shared mailboxes Apple Mail, Calendar, Contacts and Reminders would be just fine, and in fact are superior to Outlook in many ways. They just work.
Android Gmail and associates were just awful with an Exchange server; calendar invites only updated at midnight, and mails randomly arrived. Gmail does not claim to be functional with anything other than Google Mail, the small print says, and that’s definitely correct.
It can run on Linux, either as the web app or, with some effort, as the actual app. I know this because I can get it to run on Linux. See, for example, https://thelinuxcode.com/install-microsoft-office-linux/ or don't. Your choice. Just don't try to tell me that it's not possible when it is.
Regarding https://thelinuxcode.com/install-microsoft-office-linux/
At least where I work, the "web apps" are not an option.
The other choices according to that site are:
* Run it on windows in in VM.
* Run it on Wine.
I don't count either of those as being "cross platform".
A good while back when Mozilla in their infinite wisdom were pushing TBird adrift and there was at least one well argued proposition that the Document Foundation should give it a home. They turned it down on the basis that users should be free to choose their own email client. I thought then, and you have just confirmed it, that they should have done this on the basis that there are users who don't see an office suite as being complete without it.
I doubt they could have been integrated (the various LO applications are all the same executable called with the application name as a parameter). Nevertheless it wouldn't be a bad idea for the two projects to get together and draw up a combined installation bundle.
As for availability on Apple platforms, I wonder how much of that might be due to Apple's sense of amour propre.
I suspect that it's more likely a matter of FOSS ideology, the way that VLC was pulled from the Apple Store (it's back, now) because of GPL licensing. https://www.techspot.com/news/41908-apple-removes-vlc-app-from-app-store-gpl-to-blame.html If VLC can be back, why not Thunderbird?
"If VLC can be back, why not Thunderbird?"
You'd need to ask Apple. At a guess Apple aren't content with a 30% cut of free. But as you can download and install LO and TB for Macs for free it's a little extreme to claim they're not available just because you can't pay Apple for them and to then somehow blame it on the projects that developed them.
I have used Outlook in both business and personally for over 20 years. I have also tried various open source applications - some of them quite extensively. Nothing out there comes close to what Office365/Exchange and Outlook does for business. They'll implement pieces, but they're buggy in others, and then the good pieces break and make everything a mess. With outlook and Office365 I can just get my work done and I don't have to lose a whole day figuring out why the latest update suddenly broke everything.
Do I like paying a monthly feel for it? No. Would I lose way more money than I spend otherwise? Absolutely.
I took the comment to mean 'core' office suite.
If someone you worth with is using a siloed collaboration or file sharing tool then, yes, you'll often need the client for it (or just use the web version). Teams and Onedrive are both stand-alone and free to use if you're working with a 3rd party that's licenced for it.
> Except for Outlook, Teams, OneDrive.
I've worked mostly with FOSS in two 100% MS-centric companies in the last decade and a half.
In one I used Windows, but I had local admin rights. In the other I ran Linux. They never noticed.
Outlook: in one, I just tolerated Outlook. In another, I ran Thunderbird and pointed it at the MS OMAP server, with a free plugin. Worked perfectly, diaries and contacts and all, and was _much_ more pleasant to use.
Teams: runs as well -- that is, not well at all -- in Chrome or Edge as using the client.
OneDrive: I just mounted mine with the FOSS `onedrive` client.
https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive
Worked but I had issues so I switched to `rclone`.
https://rclone.org/
The point being, it _is_ possible, and the defeatist attitude is not a universal truth.
Outlook: in one, I just tolerated Outlook. In another, I ran Thunderbird and pointed it at the MS OMAP server, with a free plugin. Worked perfectly, diaries and contacts and all, and was _much_ more pleasant to use.
Thunderbird is far easier to use than Outlook.
If you don't have OMAP but OWA is enabled you can use the Owl plugin for Thunderbird. You do have to pay a trivial amount for it, but it's definitely worth it. It just works (including contacts and calendar), and the support is fantastic.
I have one of those environments. And was also stuck with the web version of outlook since I'm 100% on linux (I'm a scientist and like to have a functional data toolchain). Then the Owl extension appeared and suddenly Thunderbird Just Works again with even the most locked-down of outlook server environments.
I just tried the plugin, it looks like there are three methods. For Outlook Web Access (web scraping?) it logs in, seems to get to e-mail, then loops back round to logging in again, repeating this several times before giving an error saying it can't log in. For Exchange Web Services and Exchange Active Sync it allows login but then it says that you can't continue unless an organisation administrator grants permission for www.beonix.com... therein lies the problem.
Yikes. If you work somewhere they refuse to enable the even the Outlook web UI, then maybe it's time to look for another job.
I mean sure, that's certainly an option. But I think this thread generally does not recognise that in many (most?) corporate environments you do not get to choose what software you use to do your job.
And there are usually valid reasons for that - someone will be legally responsible for ensuring the organisation remains compliant with everything it's required to compy with (Cyber Essentials in the UK, probably other things), and most employees are not that person.
We may not like that or agree with the decisions made, but they're not usually ours to make. To be clear, in general I lean more towards the "try not to get in the way" approach, but regulations and compliance make that difficult in practice.
I have to use Teams for meetings with the Digital Champions team, because that's what the local authority uses. Ditto Mrs 6 for School governor meetings for the same reason. It's horrible. But also it refuses to run on our main PC- I haven't been able to find out why (probably it's because I've locked down or removed something it wants- like the Edge browser). So we just use the web version. Which means I don't have to have the thing installed.
We do have Office, because,as I've noted on previous occasions, the horribly produced forms from Girl Guiding (she's Brown Owl) don't work well with LO formatting.
OTOH LO Calc handles percentages much better for casual users. Excel hasn't got a proper % function [ as in 100- 13% = 87].
Teams => Zoom
OneDrive, there are tons of options around. GDrive, Box, Dropbox... In fact Dropbox was the OG before OneDrive was a thing.
Even easier (as in lazy) options available. Have been using (as in "earning income". Yes, really.) Ismael Martinez' "Unofficial Microsoft Teams for Linux" for ever since MS decided they couldn't be arsed to deliver Teams for Linux themselves. It works brilliant. When working with "MS only" organisations it works seamless. My Evolution plugs into their email, calendars and so on. Ismaels Teams does the same: everything just works™, calendars, VOIP, chat. People can even see whether you're online or not (you can also "appear offline" ;))) and you can do your direct calls. And, if you click one of the files while browsing the OneDrive/ Share point... the corresponding MS application starts up, whether it is Word, Excel, PowerPoint. And yes, you can work in that document "collaboratively". And then share/ signal others.
And perhaps the best thing? That there are deb and rpm repos available (THX Nils Büchner) so you can let your Teams for Linux update automagically with all your other *nix software sudo apt update.
So guess who this pint is for..?
You ignore the important part of the comment you are replying to, that being the need to work with clients.
"Except for Outlook, Teams, OneDrive. I use and need all three to be able to work with my clients."
Substituting Zoom for Teams, or Dropbox for OneDrive, would require convincing all clients to stop using the Microsoft stuff they already paid for and use daily, and learn (and probably pay for) new software. Good luck with that.
I agree, to me the absence of Outlook and Visio have been major issues.
Yes, I know there are standalone email clients and broadly equivalent (but not necessarily compatible) drawing packages, but it has always struck me as odd that the opensource office suites didn’t embrace particular projects and so include them in their development, in the way MS has broadly kept it’s Office family together.
Except for Outlook, Teams, OneDrive. I use and need all three to be able to work with my clients.
I took out a 365 subscription because I needed access to the Word, Excel and Powerpoint as something of a business necessitity. I recently realised that the subscription also includes Teams, so I was able to bin my monthly Zoom subscription. As a video conferencing tool I prefer Zoom, but when it's effectively free then I prefer Teams more.
When something is free as in beer there's not much room for "soft" "marketing". That has always been the dirty little secret of proprietary anything and the millstone attached to Free Software.
No-one seems to get sacked for not choosing the option with the minimum cost function
This plague of proprietary form over function was sort of highlighted by Taylor Swift of all people. When invited to give Apple her music for free she is said to have responded by pointing out she doesn't ask for free iPhones.
At least 99% of users can do everything they need in LO. It may be 100% by now.
However, Calc has a different name for a few functions so you may need to learn the new one, and different scripting languages so if you rely on macros you'd need to port them to one of Basic, Python, JS or BeanShell.
If you're in that last group then the cost of transition is higher, though the benefits are also likely to be much greater. Python is huge in data analysis, there's a lot of really nice stuff out there that Excel can only dream of.
Which is of course why VBA is being replaced by Python in Excel as well...
If there's one application there is literally no substitute for, it's Excel. I practically live in it. Power query, power pivot, dynamic functions, better charts, Power Bi. It's streets ahead. The rest of the office suite only just beats the competition due to online collaboration features.
Also, 90% of my work clients are on Microsoft 365. The 10% on Google Workspace still have old copies of Office installed just for Excel. I have Google Workspace too just so I can easily collaborate with my Googley clients.
Libre Office is good for some jobs though and have a copy sitting around for unruly CSVs, some other large datasets and ironically to open some older Excel sheets that Excel can't (even the odd corrupt Excel sheet). It's python support is often better than Excel's but that's job dependent.
LibreOffice but MSOffice is a lot better for actual work. Mail Merge in Word takes little effort, doing it in LibreOffice requires convoluted steps that complicates an everyday task. I love LibreOffice but if I ran a business i'd be using MSOffice as it's cost is easily covered by the time it saves.
> Am I wrong?
Yes you are.
SUN offered StarOffice for money -- not much -- and OpenOffice for free.
Oracle bought SUN.
Oracle wanted to use and control the OpenOffice trademark. The team didn't want it to. So they quit, forked it, and set up The Document Foundation and LibreOffice.
(This is also what happened with Hudson/Jenkins, broadly.)
Oracle tried to go it alone, failed, and dumped OpenOffice on the Apache Foundation, which still sort of maintains it.
SUN is blameless on this one. Oracle is the baddie here.
StarOffice was proprietary software that took the users freedom, that also happened to be quite expensive (US$70).
OpenOffice was free software, that also happened to be gratis.
SUN did attack people with proprietary software and they are to blame for that.
It's almost twenty years since I moved from OS/2 (eComStation) to Linux (Ubuntu 6.06) but I am pretty sure that StarOffice was, or had become, free for OS/2 then. It was good, apart from its irritating insistence on replacing the PM desktop with is open inferior one.
For a brief period Sun offered StarOffice for free, sending it out on CD-ROM to those that wanted it. This was a few years before they bought Star Division who made StarOffice. I don't recall whether it was for more platforms, but definitely Linux. It was the first version to support Linux, 3,.1, and it was the version with an interface based on the Motif GUI toolkit. It was lean and fast, with a very clean and uncluttered appearance. A couple of years later it had been ported to a new GUI toolkit and had a weird portal thing that was trying to be a sort of replacement desktop. Thankfully the portal was eventually junked, probably with the first version Sun released after acquiring Star Division.
It was in 1996, as I can recall which company I was working for at the time and they had allowed me to experiment with Linux as a possible platform to port our in house SunOS applications to. I can't find a mention of Sun sending out CD-ROMs, but I did find an article about the beta being free to download from Star Division themselves. I can only assume Star Division and Sun were keen to encourage desktop use of Unix and Unix like platforms at a time when Windows NT was starting to take off:
https://linuxgazette.net/issue09/staroffice.html
Contrary to the accusation from weirdo commenter GNU Enjoyer that Sun supposedly "attack[ed] people with [their] proprietary software", I remember them being extremely encouraging towards open source software. For instance, they gave John Ousterhout free office space to work on his Tcl scripting language and Tk graphical toolkit. Another example would be their NFS code that was then integrated into several open source Unix like operating systems.
>that Sun supposedly "attack[ed] people with [their] proprietary software"
Every distribution of a proprietary program that takes the users freedom is an attack.
>I remember them being extremely encouraging towards open source software.
Of course they were encouraged by the possibility of people writing their proprietary software for them gratis, but they certainly weren't encouraged about free software.
>they gave John Ousterhout free office space to work on his Tcl scripting language and Tk graphical toolkit. Another example would be their NFS code that was then integrated into several open source Unix like operating systems.
Yes, gratis office space for the development of free software and NFS code released under a free license were laudable contributions, but I'm not sure if that made up for the negativity of all the proprietary attacks Sun carried out, thus freedom wise, Sun appears to have put humanity in the negative.
> SUN never release LibreOffice
Correct.
> as the article claims
Er... not exactly, but studying the closing para, yes, I see where you got that impression. I will ask the editors if they could maybe insert a couple of words to clarify the closing paragraph.
But you originally said:
> My memory is that LibreOffice was created by those who walked away from OpenOffice when Sun stuck it's oar in?
Which means that it seems to me that you're rewriting history a bit here -- no? Your first comment said that as you recalled LO was a result of Sun. It wasn't. It was a result of Oracle.
This post has been deleted by its author
"Er... not exactly, but studying the closing para, yes, I see where you got that impression. I will ask the editors if they could maybe insert a couple of words to clarify the closing paragraph."
The summary is the sort of thing I am seeing in my playing with the current generation of Advanced Idiots. It is the subtleties such as this which then get fed back into the 'training models' and distort history? I think I AM right with the title of this post, my mistake was with the "when Sun stuck it's oar in?" forgetting that by then it was Oracle who was 'in control', or rather not hence LibreOffice ... Sun only sewed a seed in that development.
OpenOffice was at least open source I can't remember if if was free software too. If Oracle hadn't tried to take future releases proprietary there would have been no need for a fork of the project.
So in strict vocabulary terms you are correct but Sun were not the problem.
The part of the story no-one seems to be mentioning is that Sun bought the company (Victor Kiam eat your heart out) because the relicensing deal for Microsoft Office would have been more expensive. Sun initially made Star Office free as in beer and subsequently as in speech.
> SUN offered StarOffice for money -- not much -- and OpenOffice for free.
Not really. Star Division, which created StarOffice, made it free for personal use. Sun later bought Star Division, and with it StarOffice, and shortly after made it a free for commercial use as well.
Eventually, Sun made StarOffice open source as OpenOffice.
How is this in any way acceptable? A gigabyte download just to view some formatted text? Something has gone very wrong when nobody looked at this and said that this is insane and they need to go back to the drawing board and design something sensible instead. A 2 page libre office produced document with formatted text and colour is 12 Kb on my machine. At the very least the code to display it should sit in the browser if you insist on viewing it there, rather than downloading it with each document
> How is this in any way acceptable? A gigabyte download just to view some formatted text?
Oh come on. Be nice, play fair.
Wasm is a whole new platform, in essence. It's taken something like 3-4 years of work to get to this point where it works, and IMHO it's impressive that it does work. Yes, I was looking at a 16-core laptop with 64GB of RAM, but it was sitting on a coffee shop table in the ULB cafe. It was silent and cool, not labouring at all.
Step 1, get the tools working, as in our 1st story (before my time).
Step 2, get some proof of concept code working, as in the 2022 story.
Step 3, get it to run and work. We are here.
Step 4, work out how to load on demand only the bits it needs at that time.
And all this is being upstreamed so it will benefit the main app as well.
LibreOffice looks like MS Office but it functions more like MS Works: it's largely one big binary that presents different UIs according to the selected file or task.
Making that less monolithic would be a good thing IMHO.
>"Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast."
In my experience of the software industry it’s more like, “Ok, we made it work. We’ve made it right. Now we need to make it fas-OOH SHINY! SQUIRREL! LETS REWRITE THE WHOLE THING IN [RUST/PYTHON/LANGUAGE-DU-JOUR] AND ADD MORE FEATURES! DEBUG AND OPTIMIZATION IS BORING!”
But I respect your optimism.
Ah, now *there* is the Agile mindset!
(Because optimisation attempts might not work, debugging takes an unknown amount of time and the "number of days card game" is useless on it; but we can always just spend 5 days on a new feature and if it isn't finished we can just say we did the MVP version and need to pass it by the user rep).
Agile guys?
Sod off.
That was the mantra from at least the 1980s.[1]
Gawd, those guys will try to claim everything as theirs!
And too few of the "Agile guys" knew what the profiler is to ever locate the *correct* bits of the code that are actually worth speeding up. (Exit stage left, pursued by a barely controlled urge to rant how mind boggingly slow some code was).
[1] and before then we were more about trying to get it all to fit into the machine in the first place, so "fast" was fourth on the list.
> Maybe componentizing it and letting it run in-browser will give it a new lease of life
I think it will be the other way round. Once Microsoft no longer provides a desktop version of Office, then LibreOffice might win by default. Working entirely within a web browser is a very poor experience.
The only reason anyone uses Office is due to Microsoft's handcuffs and not knowing better and people aren't suddenly going to know better just because there's no desktop version anymore.
Even how different versions produce documents that are incompatible and how no version can render ODF correctly doesn't stop people from using Office.
LibreOffice won from the start freedom-wise, but people are very bad at selecting things that aren't malware.
In the late 1990's I regularly used Star Office to fix MS Excel spread sheets.
Back then it was a frequent occurrence that a user's precious spread sheet became corrupt to the point Excel couldn't open it - but Star Office could, so 3 to 5 times a week I had to load one into Star Office and save as to a new .xls file then they could continue using it.
I've been using LO for over 20 years now, indeed since it was Open Office and one of my old legacy machines dating from 2000 still has OO on it.
The latest versions of LO are capable of rendering .docx files perfectly for relatively straightforward documents, and almost perfectly for more complicated documents. This has improved as LO versions have been updated. Most of the issue is the usual M$ *dog in the manger* [one of my gran's sayings] attitude of having a proprietary format to screw everyone else over. Thus M$ have never released all the details of the .docx file format.
Mostly I issue my documents as PDFs and LO does a better job of creating PDFs than Word does. Regardless of this, some of my clients are wedded to Word/Office and hence I retain a copy of Office 2010 for the times when I need to work on or issue a collaborative document.
My documents are typically anything up to 150 pages long and have tables of contents, captions, coloured headings, pictures, drawings and miscellaneous tables in A4 portrait, A4 landscape and A3 landscape all in the same document. LO can handle this perfectly - in fact better the Word which is a PITA when you want to change page size or orientation part way through a document.
Edited to add that I utterly detest the screen hogging M$ ribbon and still use the traditional menus in LO.
I don't have any current need to use it in a browser, but I might do one day!
You've confused "Office XML was not a complete specification" with "docx is not fully specified".
Docx is a container format. Like PDF, it can contain almost anything. It can contain some MS stuff, which is fully specified elsewhere.. Office XML (which preceded OOXML), certainly did contain MS stuff that was specified elsewhere, but even then, it was fully specified: it was just that the ODF people really really didn't like the specification.
Not that there was anything unusual about this: the well known Word DOC formats were also fully specified, and really really unpopular with other people.
To be fair, the fact that MS specification documents cost as much as ISO specifications in the 1980s, and were just as dense, made it difficult for unpaid competition. (The OLE documentation for DOC ran to 50cm thick or more)
For example, it segfaults every other time it exits. It doesn't lose any data, but that seems low-hanging fruit to fix.
How about a proper set of Python bindings, that actually includes the ability to exit LO? I use pylocalc and I have to modify the Document class to have a working "terminate" method.
I've almost never known LO to crash. The only time it has done was very recently - last week in fact. I was drawing something very simple which at that point consisted of a rectangle with a smaller rectangle inside and a triangle above it(*). For some reason I forget I decided to copy/paste it to a different page and when I hit paste LO Draw just hung. That was weird because I've used copy/paste on some far more complicated drawings (often as a way to duplicate something) so I've no idea what happened there.
I occasionally whinge about Draw because it's sometimes not obvious how to do something but that's largely because it is fundamentally different to Windows Paint. As long as you can grasp the concept of objects rather than just thinking about pixels most things become clearer. Although I would still use Paint to open an image and resize it as can't remember how to do that in Draw. I'm a recent convert to Draw's crop tool as well now that I now where it is :)
But there's some mileage in suggesting that if you're working with images rather than drawings Paint is probably a better choice for most use cases.
(*)If you must know I was drawing an image to be used for an access doorway in a building on my model railway ;)
If Linux, graphics card/driver, desktop environment and LO version number would help with that one.
Some releases ago the drawing tools generally had issues in some desktops with accelerated graphics. Like moving a shape a small distance took ages and caused very high CPU use. In recent releases that seems to have been resolved.
The drawing tools when used in the Writer application/view work quite differently to when used in the Impress/Draw view to the extent that I copy drawings from Impress slides to Writer as GDI metafiles.
One day they'll refactor this lot out I'm sure.
Icon: all involved with [ Star| Open| Libre]Office over the years.
Somewhere along the line I've used all three of those packages. I'm not a wordsmith. For my wife it was trying to print mailing labels with Word that did it. I printed them off with no problem using openoffice(?) or libreoffice(?). Within days I was formatting her Windows computer (along with all the paid for software) and installing linux.
mictosoft word has a stranglehold on the PC market because mictosoft has bribed, coerced, threatened and otherwise strong-armed manufacturers into preloading it. I have a couple niggling complaints about LibreOffice (envelope printing, location of some menu items, setting margins) but over all, I prefer using it to word. I do wish they'd port it over to Fire OS.
My first acquaintance with word-processing was via Borland Sprint. I have fond memories of it; indeed, it made preparing text for a book a far less tedious business than getting handwritten drafts typed, editing with a pencil, and so on back and forth to the typist.
Next to gain my attention were MS Word and WordPerfect. Each was serviceable for my needs. Along came OpenOffice, and later its cousin, LibreOffice.
The suites of programs in LibreOffice and its in commercial competitors are impressive. However, by becoming all-encompassing tools for collaborative groups, they have GUIs of considerable complexity. Yes, one can switch off many unwanted features, but that entails exploration of lengthy manuals and/or Byzantine 'help' facilities. Ideal for my anticipated uses, would be a basically configured LibreOffice for which I could unlock features and appropriate GUI commands if or when later required.
I suspect the next stage of office software convergence entails the introduction of AI facilities; these either consuming several gigabytes of memory or requiring Internet connection to a large-scale 'subscription' or 'free' AIs; each of the latter two a gift to knicker-twisted surveillance wallahs.
Ctrl-1 should format a cell in Excel, and not what Teams does.
Ctrl-F should find a string in Excel, not what Teams does.
Whatever you come up with, don't do it like Teams does.
Nobody should do what Teams does.
Teams shouldn't do what Teams does.
Teams DOESN'T team up with the rest of Office tools. You need a local license to run the proper keyboard shortcuts, WHY OH HEAVENS, WHY???
Teams doesn't integrate with Explorer, and won't let me CHOOSE the download folder, it will dump the file on the default download folder and make me go get it and move the file to the proper place.
Why is Teams so janky? Who coded this crap?
I think even GOD DAMN BLOODY DISCORD is more compatible with Windows than Teams.
I ordered Turbo Pascal 1.0 from Borland the minute I saw the ad in BYTE: $49 for a compiler including a WordStar compatible editor was just too good a value to pass off, my Apple ][ clone (with Z-80 SoftCard and Videx 80-column card for the "professional" stuff) was way more than an RTX 5090 would be in today's money.
If you weren't programming 40 years ago, you just can't imagine the productivity boost it provided at an age, when the edit/compile/debug cycle was measured in coffee cups, not milliseconds: ever wondered why BASIC was so popular?
Anyhow, only two years later Borland offered a functional equivalent of their editor as Pascal source code in a package called Turbo Editor Toolbox, at a similar price, I believe.
That gave you a WordStar equivalent editor you could change and extend any way you wanted, without any constraints as to redistribution of the results: basically even less restrictive than a BSD license AFAIK.
And that's exactly what the first release of StarWriter was: a simple compile of the Turbo Text Toolbox, sold on diskettes with a StarWriter label at I believe more than the Turbo Toolbox would cost for the full source code.
I know, because it was bug-for-bug compatible: it had exactly the same annoying little differences from the "real" WordStar (a $500 product) the compiled editor had, which kept me from using the Text Toolbox myself, instead of the real WordStar or the Turbo Pascal internal editor, both of which didn't have those annoying quirks (around end-of-line handling, as far as I remember).
Today that type of behavior is more likely to results in public adoration than what it deserves and I distinctly remember sharing none of the Wunderkind reverence the press gave Marco Börries, because he was only 16 years old: they didn't know he had written none of what he sold.
He did eventually invest some of the money he made as a cheap rip-off artist that way into completely refactored variants of StarDivion's office suite, but every version I tried, always fell short of the "originals", it was supposed to be compatible with: every existing document I loaded, was somehow off or mangled, so the evaluations typically stopped after much less time it took to install them.
But with 365 snooping every keystroke and gesture to feed the AI monster Microsoft believes their own, there is little choice or alternative: cheap copycat turned into salvation, who would have thought!
It still has to go a long way to become compatible with MS Office: https://eylenburg.github.io/excel.htm
Unfortunately, if it's not 100% compatible, it's just not viable for any business that exchanges documents/spreadsheets with external parties. Which is most of them.
For basic home use, it's good enough of course.
Not using MSO if I can help it but once I do that it's because LO cannot open or read something at all. Or badly.
The one time last few months I received a big Excel spreadsheet, LO on Linux crashes. Various conversation tools crash, online and offline. LO on windows crashes.
Sigh, lingering deactivated MSO to the rescue. Opens the fairly large spreadsheet and all is well.
This is why people are not going to waste their life with LO. Not if your time is seen as not cheap or well paid. Nobody to blame though in my opinion. Maybe lack of diversification in the 90's. Like with the Internet Explorer at some point. And at some point nothing could even touch Excel. Nothing. So blame open source on not working hard enough then? Of course not.
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