Evan complains about LibreOffice
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Continuing the discussion from TRWTF is our corporate lodging provider:
(As an aside... God I hate OpenOffice. Anyone who says it matches MS Office obviously either hasn't used OpenOffice or hasn't used MSO.)
When making the semi-joking graph in the linked post, I ran across not one but two annoyances with LibreOffice Calc.The first is this wonderful bug:
I don't even know what is going on there. And it wasn't inherited from OpenOffice, or at least OpenOffice has fixed it and LibreOffice hasn't.
The second was I couldn't copy the graph as an image. I can't reproduce that now, so either they've fixed that in a pretty recent version or it doesn't work on Linux.
But instead of ranting about that I'll complain about Impress. Want to make a diagram with a right angle arrow like this?
Fine, Impress does that. But think that the arrow is too fat? Too bad, can't change it. Want to make it non-square?
<img src="/uploads/default/12737/25d3115bc3986cae.png" width="255 height="107">
Well, doesn't that look awful. (And no, that's not me messing with the width/height attributes to make it look screwy.)
For shits and giggles I installed Office 2002, which is the earliest version I have ready access to.
Let's see. Yep! PPT 2002 makes Impress latest look like crap:
(You can't copy an Excel graph as an image in that version though, sadly.)
And that's not even getting into the problems LO/OO have reading OOXML files.
I'm definitely not Blakeyrat in thinking that OSS is fundamentally flawed and all of it sucks and yadda yadda yadda, but man... I don't use office suites much, but every time I try to use Libre/OpenOffice it's just a stream of minor and not-so-minor frustrations.
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it's just a stream of minor and not-so-minor frustrations.
I think the monolithic project structure's not the right way to attract oss devs. If you're working in a program like that and there's a bug or missing feature, sure you could go to the source, but ugh.
Probably the better way would be for the core project to just specify a document model and a set of canvases that can be drawn to in a predictable way, and let everything else be provided as plugins.
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I don't use office suites much, but every time I try to use Libre/OpenOffice it's just a stream of minor and not-so-minor frustrations.
ditto here, although if i do need an office suite i tend to reach for Google Docs (for personal) or MS Office (for work, because work gave it to me on my computer)
sure Google docs isn't a complete replacement for MSOffice, but it is close enough to be going on with and i can't be bothered to install the multigigabyte binary that is libre/openoffice
or did they fix that finally? i know they had said they were going to get the binary size down a while back...
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There's even Office Web Apps, which is basically identical to Google Docs but made by Microsoft, thus slightly less likely to break your document layout when you load a .doc or .docx file (and also free).
I have given up on (Libre/Open)Office. 5 years ago I still hoped that the next update would be the one that fixed everything, but today I just accept that it will be a crappy tool with the same slow-ass interface from the 90s forever.
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sure Google docs isn't a complete replacement for MSOffice
Are there nominations in Discourse? Then I would like to nominate this in the category "understatement of the year".
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Sure, just convince @PJH to create a badge for it and flag the post as "understatement of the year".
It would be the same way as the pedantry and grammar nazi badges work.
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sure Google docs isn't a complete replacement for MSOffice, but it is close enough to be going on with
Maybe not a complete replacement, but it does everything that I need it to do. I have MS Office and almost never use it. The only thing I use it for with any regularity is sending invoices from QuickBooks through Outlook. Other than that, it is never used.
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Are there nominations in Discourse? Then I would like to nominate this in the category "understatement of the year".
If there was an understatement of the year competition, I'd do quite well