Evan complains about LibreOffice

EvanED

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:

http://youtu.be/MI_vHnWN7kw

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?

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.

Buddy

@EvanED said:

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.

accalia

@EvanED said:

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...

anonymous234

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.

Hanzo

@accalia said:

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".

aliceif

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.

Polygeekery

@accalia said:

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.

Luhmann

@EvanED said:

not one but two annoyances with LibreOffice Calc.

Only 2 ?

Jaloopa

@Hanzo said:

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