In your opinion, what makes Libre/Open Office less capable than M$ Office? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: apelly
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 09:22:31 pm
content: OverhereI learned that some people reckon OO doesn't cut it for real stuff. (paraphrasing a bit)For many years I considered myself a power user of Word and Excel. They matured into products that were at least equal to, and sometimes superior to the ones they replaced (word perfect, 123, Ami Pro, et al.), and life was easy because everyone was using the same software.As I started enjoying the benefits of open source, and generally marvelling at the amazing stuff that was available for free, and not the pirate kind of free, I started using Open Office. It was, let's say, adequate. In my opinion suitable for average users who still don't even know how to use styles. But still easily good enough for the bulk of my stuff.These days I use libre office exclusively, and it's fine. Granted, my spreadsheets aren't nearly as complex as they used to be, but my writing is.My biggest gripe is occasional document munging when saving as a M$ file. And I haven't seen that for ages.So what gives? What are you doing in your documents that the open software can't handle?

author: ataradov
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 09:33:49 pm
content: I can't share examples of real documents, but here is a page from a typical document that is public anyway.I can't find anything I can publish with free-form comments added by humans, but there is plenty of this going as well.This is pretty much the only way to keep track of changes if you need to send the document for review and don't want to manually track minor changes in a 100+ page document.Edit: Found a page with actual edits.

author: suicidaleggroll
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 09:49:35 pm
content: OO/LO compatibility with MS Office formats is laughable at best. If you need to work with docx, xlsx, etc. in a professional environment, then OO/LO simply will not cut it. That's a show-stopper for many people, myself included, and is literally the only reason I keep a Windows VM around.

author: RGB255_0_0
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 10:03:13 pm
content: Well, in an office or professional environment, you're probably also using Outlook as well since there is no comparable package around. Outlook Web App is laughable also. And 90% compatibility doesn't cut it if you save something in Libre and the table formatting or some such is all bent out of shape. It's why de facto standards use the de facto packages such as Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator, Photoshop, Word, Powerpoint, inter alia, instead of opensource "options" which are good enough to write a letter and print, but to email your CV in ODT may end up in the end user being unable to open to read it in the first place.

author: apelly
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 10:51:26 pm
content: Quote from: ataradov on April 22, 2016, 09:33:49 pmYes. Word is much better at that. I stillreallywish it had some, even basic, version control though.Kind of academic for me though because I don't know anyone else who is a capable enough user to take advantage of it. Sigh.Quote from: suicidaleggroll on April 22, 2016, 09:49:35 pmStill hey? That's a bummer. My instinct is to say "fuck you microsoft" for not documenting your file formats properly. But it might not be their fault.Quote from: RGB255_0_0 on April 22, 2016, 10:03:13 pmOutlook is pretty good. It took me a long time to accept thunderbird, which is adequate at best. But as you say, still a gajillion times better than any web interface.I haven't used office for ages, but didn't they change to yet another look that was sort of webby? The ribbon was the beginning of the end for me. Can't marketing dickheads PLEASE STOP DUMBING DOWN MY FUCKING SOFTWARE? I've spoken to a surprising number of people who are quite happy with Google's web office thing, which amazes me, but jeezus, just because 90% of people are software luddites doesn't mean you should take features away from those that use them. M$ turned Office into Works in my opinion. And I'm sure that's because their marketing wankers could barely manage to comprehend the fiendish complexity of Works.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 10:57:26 pm
content: One of the largest issues using OO/LO in a professional environment is macro compatibility & support.I consult for the financial sector and Excel macros are ubiquitous there, for better or worse. One client catalogued their internal processes and found that in one Line of Business alone, on a day-to-day basis that LOB relied on over 3,000 spreadsheets that's been written & modified over years -- some containing sophisticated financial calculations -- all done in VBA macros.These are euphemistically called "End-User Computing" (EUC) spreadsheets; they are essentially applications and reports written using macros by business (financial) analysts instead of by IT / development staff. Many of them are critical to business operations.That particular client spentmillionstrying to reduce reliance on EUCs but there is no way for them (or any other large business) to get rid of EUCs entirely. So using something like OO/LO is just out of the question... there's too much EUC that they would have to convert.

author: ataradov
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 10:57:57 pm
content: Quote from: apelly on April 22, 2016, 10:51:26 pmDocuments get broken even between different Word versions, so it looks like it is just a very hard thing to do. Especially this is visible if you try to open something prepared in Word 97 with any modern version.

author: suicidaleggroll
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 11:02:18 pm
content: Quote from: ataradov on April 22, 2016, 10:57:57 pmIt's pretty sketchy between OSX and Windows versions too, even when using similar MS Office versions and recent formats. Nothing compared to trying to open it in OO/LO though.

author: rx8pilot
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 11:06:44 pm
content: I tried OO and gave up. It almost works but the little details were too frustrating. When I need Word, Excel, and PP I use Microsoft because it works and I don't have to learn anything new. I spent a ton of time building a huge spreadsheet in OO Calc and it wasn't compatible with Excel. Tiny differences. Office is too cheap to mess around. I got it (365 subscription) and now back to real work.

author: RGB255_0_0
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 11:07:02 pm
content: Haven't so much removed but changed how to find them. The search is pretty good in the help menu but if you spend a while customising the layout you can organise it to your liking. Really no different than in 2003 and prior with the toolbars.And this leads onto training. Schools and other organisations involved in training will offer Office training, which means they will expect to be using Office in their job. Not necessarily the version they were trained on... Ho hum.It's all a chicken and egg situation. While Libre and others are adequate, particularly if you use it almost exclusively in the workplace, if you have to retrain employees on it, cost wise you may as well have stuck to Office.Also Office is modifiable via Group Policy, deployable easily with ADM templates and all the fun stuff sys admins love when upgrading computers.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 11:12:11 pm
content: On recent versions of Word / Excel (recent == last 10 years) the officedocument formathas been standardized by Ecma & ISO.That means all the data from Office apps are written to the documents in a standards compliant way, and any 3rd party software including OO/OL can read them perfectly using a standards compliant manner.However,renderingof that data on screen (or in print) is a separate matter. Different applications can rightfully chose to render the same data in different ways. Unfortunately many variances between MS and third-party rendering engines mean documents written in Word might not look good viewed in LO Writer and vice versa. (Or as noted, even between Windows vs. OS X versions of MS Office).

author: apelly
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 11:44:28 pm
content: Quote from: ade on April 22, 2016, 10:57:26 pmFair enough. For anything beyond a simple formula a user defined function is highly preferable.They have created a compliance nightmare though. I know what I'm doing. And I'm careful. But still stupid copy/paste errors appear in my spreadsheets occasionally. I shudder to think of how broken 95% of that user "software" will be. There are just so many invisible ways to break a spreadsheet. Great tool for quick analysis, shit tool for a permanent solution.And no version control! It would be a thousand times better if it was easier to ship and share your macros separately from your spreadsheet.That's just a general rant though; I agree with you.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 11:48:44 pm
content: I have used Libre Office professionally in organisations. I have used Microsoft Office professionally in organisations. Both packages have done a fabulous job - both are not an impediment to professional quality of work. In one case, Libre Office was used in an animation studio for at least 5 years, and I cannot remember a single significant problem caused by the use of Libre Office during that time. There was no issue that was a show-stopper or that wasted a significant amount of time.The truth is that at least 99% of documents produced by most companies are so basic, you can use Libre Office or Microsoft. If companies use convoluted Headers and Footers that only work on one of the Office varieties, they are probably poorly written and should be cleaned up. Many companies rarely need to swap Office documents with complex formatting - some do, but most don't. For many companies, sending documents as a non-editable PDF's is preferable and Libre Office can write good PDFs.If you do absolutely need to regularly swap documents with other MS Office users, then going with MS Office is a good choice. If you make and share spreadsheets with VBA programming, then you want to use MS Office.It is not a question of capability - all these packages keep changing in capability and no-one ever uses more then a tiny fraction of the capabilities. If Libre Office does what you need, then it is fine, regardless of any comparison of its "capabilities". You can keep using Libre Office until you reach a point where you find you have to use Microsoft Office. Many people who use this strategy never reach that point at all. At least with Libre Office, you know you can always install it freely at any time to open a document.

author: apelly
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 11:52:15 pm
content: Quote from: ade on April 22, 2016, 11:12:11 pmIf I once knew that, I'd forgotten by now.Quote from: ade on April 22, 2016, 11:12:11 pmMaybe they can choose, but why the hell would they? Maybe you're saying that while all of the information is in the file, some companies change their interpretation of that data from version to version in order to create incompatibility?

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2016, 11:52:26 pm
content: OWA with Exchange 2013/Office 365 is no longer a laughable interface option. It's fully featured.Microsoft has spread the Office suite to other non-Windows platforms in a very complete and generally fully functional manner, and I suspect Linux versions may be forthcoming. The online versions are also amazingly complete.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 12:06:35 am
content: I am not yet proficient enough in OO to say what is definitively missing, but I have run into some problems that keep pushing me back towards MS.1. OO seems to have less flexibility in document formatting options. An example is image captioning, where the only way I have found to enter simple, un-numbered captions is to enter captions, then edit to remove the image numbers on each image.2. As said, compatibility with MS is poor. Even to the point that a document created in OO and saved in a MS format cannot be correctly opened by OO. Really! This is not on a complex document. Single column text with a few inserted images.3. The ability of OO to import CSV and txt files into a spreadsheet is far more limited and difficult to use than the MS versions.While some of these problems may be related to my relative lack of skill in OO, they haven't succumbed to the level of effort I remember putting into resolving these issues in MS. And as I do more and more in OO I keep encountering more of these things. None of them stop me from producing the documents I need, but they are irritating each time they are encountered. I accept the fact that none of the document automation I set up in MS is transferable and haven't started to automate OO documents so I am not in a position to compare the two systems yet.

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 12:21:25 am
content: Quote from: ade on April 22, 2016, 11:12:11 pmApparently the standards suck.http://en.libreofficeforum.org/node/7505https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/case/complex-singularity-versus-opennessThey're extremely complex and sometimes Microsoft does not follow them. Every new version of MS office changes something in the file format / how it's interpreted.EDIT: Presumably the only way to achieve perfect compatibility is to recreate MS office itself. Libreoffice has aconstant stream of compatibility improvementsthat are probably never going to end.

author: apelly
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 01:29:15 am
content: Quote from: wilfred on April 23, 2016, 12:05:55 amThat's OK.Quote from: wilfred on April 23, 2016, 12:05:55 amOK. Me too.Not this time though. That's why I included the word opinion. I thought LO was essentially feature complete these days so I was wondering why people are using the obvious commercial alternative. So far I've seen good reasons. But they're still opinions. I could argue they're all talking out of their arse by doing their stuff the wrong M$ way. I don't care to do that though.It's Saturday, mate. Have a cup of tea and relax.Edit:

author: vze1lryy
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 02:35:54 am
content: To me they are identical. Five years ago when I sold a lot on eBay, I used file exchange, which is a method of updating thousands of products at once with a CSV file. So if I want to change the price of 3000 products, or the description, or a picture, I can do so very simply. openoffice could never get the CSV right. I tried, I posted on their forum, I troubleshooted it a lot, and this it could never get right. It would work with magento import/export, but not eBay file exchange.There is a very large chance this has changed since it has been five years. I remember just last year several bugs existing in Libreoffice Impress' export to PDF that do not exist now.For everything else, libreoffice is great. If there are any industry specific functions like mine that simplydid not workin openoffice or libreoffice, I get it. But, for the casual user, I have no idea why people choose to pay for a typewriter year after year. All I can imagine is that people are used to it and afraid to change.If you have some very specific application that only works with M$ office, then use M$ office.If you are writing book reports or doing basic spreadsheets, then IMO M$ office is pissing away money. I would only use M$ office if I already knew that I needed it, and why I needed it.People react to getting libreoffice instead of M$ office as if I am suggesting they masturbate rather than have sex.I don't get it.

author: timb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 02:45:10 am
content: Quote from: vze1lryy on April 23, 2016, 02:35:54 amIt's more like they react as if you suggest they use a RealDoll instead of a having sex with a corpse.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 03:41:24 am
content: For myself, I just see MS Office 365 as costing $119 a year here in Australia - every single year for the rest of my life. If I need the business package, that is more like $150 a year. If you gave me a choice between MS Office for 3 years or Libre Office plus a 4 channel Rigol DSO, I would go for Libre Office plus a 4 channel Rigol DSO every time.I think I can use my own money much better then Microsoft can.

author: ataradov
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 03:51:20 am
content: There is a clear thing shows up from all the posts above - OO is fine for personal and small business use.You do need MSO if you want to seamlessly inter-operate with other people, potentially outside of your organization. And seamless operation is not necessarily just simple reading, where formatting may not matter all that much.Domain administration is also a good reason to go for MS products.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 04:01:31 am
content: QuoteIt's the other way around.If you go through those links you posted, you'll see that it's OpenOffice / LibreOffice which do not fully support the Ecma / ISO OOXML standards. Older versions of Office complied with the "Transitional" standard while newer versions of Office complies with the "Strict" standard.OO/LO are neither Transitional nor Strict compliant, largely due to old politics. Many of the original LO/OO developers supported another format called ODF which at the time was being pushed by Sun (now Oracle). Sun was Microsoft's biggest nemesis. But Sun sold out to MS in a big way, ODF lost, and there was a lot of bitterness especially amongst the GNU crowd who were vehemently anti-Microsoft.

author: sleemanj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 04:32:20 am
content: Quote from: ataradov on April 23, 2016, 03:51:20 amMy first reaction to this was "WTF, why on earth would you want to use anything MS for administering your Domain Name Server", then I realised it's Windows (NT) domains you are talking about, a thing which thankfully I havn't had to come within a million miles of in nearly 2 decades.

author: apelly
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 04:36:59 am
content: Quote from: ataradov on April 23, 2016, 03:51:20 amLooks like it. Which was pretty much the issue in the past too.I had a look at the document revision stuff in LO that you were talking about. You're right. It's crap.Quote from: ataradov on April 23, 2016, 03:51:20 amI don't know what that is. Domain like DNS, or domain like Active Directory?Quote from: ade on April 23, 2016, 04:01:31 amThat's a shame. And pity.Edit: Correct Freudian typo

author: ataradov
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 04:39:43 am
content: Quote from: apelly on April 23, 2016, 04:36:59 amThis. Automatic security updates are pretty much a must for an organization with more than 10 people. Office programs are routinely used to open documents from unknown sources and script malware is a real problem.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 05:56:28 am
content: Quote from: Whales on April 23, 2016, 12:21:25 amGoogle has a reasoned argument against the Microsoft OOXML standard as a replacement of the ODF standard.https://www.csun.edu/~hcmth008/odf/google_ooxml.pdfThere are a lot of problems with OOXML including its extraordinary size, impossibility to keep reviewed properly, and its legality as Microsoft's Open Specification Promise only covers the current OOXML standard, but not future versions of the standard. No-one is sure if it is even possible to fully support the current ISO OOXML standard.MS Office earns more money for Microsoft then the Windows Operating System, and Microsoft are going to absolutely everything in their power to fight against the widespread adoption of Libre Office and other alternatives. They could release a statement today that OOXML was totally open and unencumbered for all time, but as long as they do not, it isn't a great standard. Having a standard that is controlled by the company who wants to totally dominate the Office world is a problem.The thing that happens when you become a Libre Office user, is that you now give permission to others to be Libre Office users. If they want to collaborate with you, you no longer have to demand that they buy a Microsoft license. If you do use MS Office and are intolerant to occasional incompatibilities with Libre Office documents from others, then you are working for the benefit and prosperity of Microsoft - and paying for the privilege.

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 06:44:46 am
content: When a document, made with ms office, doesn't look right in Libreoffice, it's the fault of Libreoffice.When a document, made with Libreoffice, doesn't look right in ms office, it's the fault of Libreoffice.When a document, made with ms office version x, doesn't look right in ms office version z, it's ... normal!

author: JPortici
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 07:19:13 am
content: -Open/Libre writer still crashes randomly-Open/Libre is times slower than office in not so recent computers, so everything used in an office. Hell, this applies to almost every computer that hasn't got an ssd-Anything other than outlook is trash (Apple's mail not so much, but still sucks)-Anything other than power point is shite. period.All the above, plus the fact that you need a specialized tech to sort out whatever issues you have when using open source software that never happen with commercial ones... And microsoft give big businesses and PA licences for pennies so you pay very little for not having to bother

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 07:28:31 am
content: Quote from: JPortici on April 23, 2016, 07:19:13 amYes and that is the big problem. If big business and government are using MS Office after being offered a deal too good to be refuse, then every company working with those big business and government HAVE to use MS Office. All the smaller companies down the chain have to pay full price for their Office.It is very close to being corruption.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 07:47:08 am
content: Quote from: JPortici on April 23, 2016, 07:19:13 amI have been using Thunderbird for many years now with gigabyte of emails both locally and IMAP and it is incredibly solid - a great email package. Search is good. Pretty safe to use. It makes it very easy to see the email headers so I can work out if the email is genuine or not. Outlook doesn't. Most outlook users do not have a clue on how to see the email header. Calendar is now built in as standard in Thunderbird. Is there a specific problem, or is the problem "it is not the same as Outlook"? If you need something the same as Outlook, then you probably should use Outlook.Thunderbird is hugely superior to Outlook when it comes to backing up you email on a local machine. Unless you are running an Outlook backup program (that you have to pay for), you often end up having to copy the whole PST file plus several other files in different folders to your backup. In Thunderbird, you only copy the changes from a single folder. An rsync backup usually takes seconds. Restoring Thunderbird on a new system after your old PC has died is very much simpler. When people restore Outlook, they often loose things like the dropdown suggestion list as you start to type a name. You never loose that when you restore Thunderbird. Thunderbird doesn't have the stupid Microsoft Ribbon.

author: ataradov
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 07:52:56 am
content: Quote from: amspire on April 23, 2016, 07:47:08 amOnce again, for personal use there are lots of good clients. Nothing beats Outlook for enterprise use.How do I lookup someone's availability time? How do I lookup and reserve a conference room? In a corporate setting with people having to schedule meetings it is a necessity.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 08:00:16 am
content: Quote from: ataradov on April 23, 2016, 07:52:56 amIn other words, you get used to the features in one program and somehow you make those features totally vital features. If you didn't have those features, you would have done the same thing just as fast but another way. There really are a huge number of alternatives. Microsoft will have teams of people now inventing new features that you didn't know you needed. Makes you wonder - how did business run at all before Outlook?

author: ataradov
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 08:06:18 am
content: Quote from: amspire on April 23, 2016, 08:00:16 amHow did we get around before airplanes were invented? Very inefficiently.Try to schedule a meeting with 10 people using email exchange. It is not fun.And sure there may be some obscure open source tool that does just that. But administrative overhead of maintaining all this is huge.I'm not MS fanboy and I hate Outlook, but realistically my life would be way harder without it. Outlook just gets the job done.

author: RGB255_0_0
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 08:52:58 am
content: In a corp environment the end user needs not to worry about backing up or managing spam blocking. Exchange does everything needed. Out of Office and calendars particularly useful. There are calendar apps but nothing like OoO.For a home user there are plenty of options. For business there is only one.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2016, 09:13:02 am
content: Quote from: ataradov on April 23, 2016, 08:06:18 amBack in the 80's we had no email. No outlook. That meant we spent 0 hours a day of company time on Outlook - that is efficiency.Was it hard arranging a meeting and booking conference rooms?No.Every now and then there was a clash, but considering that very occasional 10 minutes of wasted time to all the overall company hours wasted on Outlook, we actually spent much more of our day doing real work. No engineer spent one second entering their days activities into an online calendar. Meetings are extremely expensive to a company, so the more a boss can avoid meetings, the better. A lot of time, a boss would gather a few people around a desk to talk about one aspect of a problem, then go to another set of people at their desks and talk to them. That was great - if there was a problem, you could often demonstrate it on the spot. Client meetings were usually coordinated by the receptionist, or by someone in the sales team. When component sales people came (vital when there was no Internet) , they usually came to our work desks - hardly ever used a conference room for something like that. It all worked out.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 04:51:10 am
content: QuoteGooglehada politically crafted argument against Microsoft OOXML standard as a replacement of the ODF standard.That is, until Google did a 180 degree turn.Today OOXML is the default for Google office applications (e.g., Docs) and Google no longer supports ODF on many of their products.(Look ma, no ODF!)

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 05:03:17 am
content: QuoteA typical daily meeting for me will have colleagues from at least 3-4 different States/Provinces in at least two countries and several time zones.Physically gathering people "around a desk" gets very expensive, very quickly. The 1990s are long behind us.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 12:06:28 pm
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on April 23, 2016, 12:06:35 amI'm regularly importing numerical text data from all sorts of obscure sources and OO does very well with it, even with Excel available I would switch between them for their import abilities (Matlab is the king of import if you can get access to it).Quote from: RGB255_0_0 on April 22, 2016, 10:03:13 pmPowerpoint is the worst possible pile of junk imaginable, the best presenters I know rely on full screen PDF as a presentation format which is very tidy. Send a CV in PDF then you can be quite sure of how it will look, an editable format that has no assurance of layout is a poor choice when you want a finished document or presentation.

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 02:10:39 pm
content: QuoteEven way back in the 90s, the communication device called "telephone" had already been invented. It could be used to do something known as "making a conference call". This enabled you to have conversations involving multiple people in multiple locations all at the same time. Amazing.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 04:15:30 pm
content: QuoteUmm, I think you completely missed the point.Hint:Quote

author: Iwanushka
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 05:42:24 pm
content: OO is cosntantly freezing on windows and is very slow, at least the OO app that we use to make pdf stuff

author: vze1lryy
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2016, 07:02:46 pm
content: Quote from: amspire on April 23, 2016, 09:13:02 amStop making sense, it will piss people off.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2016, 12:33:58 am
content: Quote from: vze1lryy on April 24, 2016, 07:02:46 pmWell when talking about the incredible efficiency in 70s, and the early 80s, I think I forgot to mention a few things. Like the 3 hour lunches we had on Fridays, and when we did get back to work, being a little "tired". The fact we had to draw up circuit diagrams with ink pens on a huge vellum sheet at a drawing board, and every time there was a circuit change, you would start from scratch. The PCB layouts done at 2:1 scale on a big transparent sheet with red transparent tape for one layer and blue tape on the other side of the sheet for the other layer. Remember that the components were through hole which meant the boards were big. At 2:1 scale, the PCB layout sheet was enormous. Every time an IC was moved 0.1", you had to rip up half the tracks and lay the corrected tracks again. We had no DRC checking, so more often then not, the first board would come back with faults. With the very high board costs at the time and the slow turn-around, it was usual to go to production with PCBs with faults. That is why so many of the boards from the 70s and 80s have bodged repairs.The early PCs were unbelievably slow. The classic was the first Microsoft C compiler. It came on about 10 floppy disks (so 14 MBytes in size) and took half an hour to install. Trouble was at the very end of that half hour install, it required you enter a port on the PC for some reason (no plug and play then). To find out the correct port, you had to abort the install (DOS was single threaded), get the port, and start the half hour install again.But we didn't waste time on Outlook.

author: rsjsouza
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2016, 02:07:31 am
content: Quote from: Someone on April 24, 2016, 12:06:28 pmOnce you get all the keyboard shortcuts, creating a presentation in Powerpoint can be fast. However, I have experienced numerous times where Powerpoint was incompatible even with itself.

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2016, 02:16:17 am
content: Quote from: amspire on April 25, 2016, 12:33:58 amStill better than installing Netware 3.1x from the pack of some 50 floppy disks, only to have the process fail on the 48th disk....

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 09:19:40 am
content: Quote from: apelly on April 22, 2016, 10:51:26 pmFor the most part it's not Microsoft's fault. Their document formats have been documented for years. The old binary formats were slightly tougher, because they resemble a disk image containing a fairly robust file system. Both the binary and XML formats ultimately encode the same object models. The Word object model, however, is radically different from how most word processors encode documents. Critically, it does not work by embedding inline tags in the text, as most formats do. Instead, text spans are objects, to which styles are linked. Another object maintains the order of the text spans in the document. But while converting to and from radically different object models is not trivial, it is absolutely a solvable problem.The really difficult, essentially insurmountable problem is that in order to 100% faithfully display every document all of the time, you mustflawlesslyreproduceeveryfeature, behavior, and bug that exists in the originating application. But even if you set out to do this, you could never catch up, because the originator has a long head start (and the easier task than you doing the reverse engineering!!!).

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 09:24:24 am
content: Quote from: tooki on April 26, 2016, 09:19:40 amThis is the primary problem. We have seen similar problems with web browsers until the organisation behind the web standards specified how elements should be rendered.

author: FrankE
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 10:06:23 am
content: Damn ribbon!

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 10:57:45 am
content: Quote from: tooki on April 26, 2016, 09:19:40 amI don't agree. Maybe you are younger than me (I don't know that) but I do remember very well all the dirty tricks they did (and still do)to kill the competition:Microsoft's Campaign To Destroy DR-DOSMicrosoft's Anticompetitive Per Processor License FeesMicrosoft's Retaliation And Price Discrimination Against IBMMicrosoft's Organized Collective Boycott Against IntelMicrosoft's Elimination Of Word PerfectMicrosoft's Deceptive WISE Software ProgramMicrosoft's Elimination Of NetscapeMicrosoft's Attempts To Extinguish JavaMicrosoft's Elimination Of Rival Media PlayersMicrosoft's Campaign Against Rival Server Operating SystemsMicrosoft's Failure To Comply With The Final JudgmentMicrosoft's Campaign of Patent FUD against Linux and Open Source SoftwareMicrosoft's False Promises of Interoperability

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 10:59:57 am
content: I prefer OpenOffice.org because it's easier to use. The shitty MS Office Ribbon interface is slow and difficult to use. In MS Office, when I want to open a file, the whole screen is obscured by the damn menu and then have to click another button to bring the file listing up! This is a step backwards, not forwards. It's the sort of thing which would happen with very old software.In OpenOffice, one click on the toolbar takes me to the file listing. It's much faster and more efficient to use.I can understand the interoperability issues between OpenOffice.org and MS Office and I can see why people choose MS Office because of it, but it doesn't mean one piece of software is better/inferior to the other. This sort of issue will always exist. If everyone used OpenOffice.org then using MS Office would be more difficult. The main reason why MS Office more widespread than OpenOffice.org is because it had a head start.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 12:06:39 pm
content: Quote from: Karel on April 26, 2016, 10:57:45 amMicrosoft had a lot of help from Digital Research. I was CP/M 2.2, CP/M 3 (yuck), and DR DOS user for many years, but the truth was that DR was heading downwards ever since CP/M 2.2. DR really frustrated me since Gary Kindall was really smart, but they just were continually trying to improve an obsolete operating system, and we really wanted a modern operating system. In the CP/M days, they had the lead on Microsoft, and IBM gave them the first chance for the PC operating system. They totally blew it. Yes, Microsoft did naughty things, but DR needed to go. The kind of innovation we needed was coming from Microsoft and not DR. Even when Microsoft started bringing out the first versions of Windows in the late 80's, the early Windows was totally useless and the market was open to anyone who could come out with a graphical software for PCs. Microsoft was still very vulnerable, but I don't think any other company had the vision and leadership.QuoteIn the late 1990's, Opera had easily the best web browser. They had a few years lead over every other browser in speed, performance and features. Netscape (before Firefox) was developing too slowly, and MS Explorer was pretty bad. Everybody had to use a browser to do their MS Updates, and Microsoft also owned other companies. In particular, Hotmail dominated the free email hosting in the 90's. Microsoft deliberately sabotaged the CSS formating when they detected the Opera browser so that Microsoft-owned sites were unusable in the Opera browser. If Opera was allowed to get the same CSS as Internet Explorer, the pages were fine, but instead Microsoft put text on top of other text, and changed to font sizes in Opera so that text was about 1mm high. If you showed a customer Opera, they would try their Hotmail account - they would say "Opera is complete crap" and they would never return. Microsoft were penalised in Europe for this years later, but by then Opera was on its knees and it missed its big chance of dominating the Browser space.

author: timb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 12:42:39 pm
content: Microsoft trying to push their own special HTML extensions didn't help compatibility. ActiveX was a huge, very insecure pain as well.It's funny, people absolutely hate Flash (and for good reason), but it really made life a lot easier and ultimately brought us the web as we know and rely on it today. It enabled YouTube. People forget that playing videos on the web was a massive pain just 10 years ago! You had to download a huge file on a slow connection, then hope you had the right codec installed to play it (DiVX, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV, RealVideo, AVI, QuickTime, ad nauseam).Flash also allowed web apps that, otherwise, would have required a special plugin, Java or ActiveX. It's a shame Microsoft was far too late with Silverlight, as it was actually very nice. But by the time they released it, Flash was already dying (oddly enough, thanks in large part to iPhone, which drove HTML5 development).That seems to be Microsoft's #1 problem for the last 15 years. They're always late to the party. No innovation, they just churn out a proprietary version of an existing product. You think they'd learn, but...

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 12:50:54 pm
content: Netscape has only themselves to blame. All the hullabaloo about Microsoft including IE - at the time, every install of Win 95 ALSO put an icon for AOL on the desktop. IE was HORRIBLE. Netscape grew fat, dumb, and happy, and while Microsoft went through 4 or 5 revisions of IE, improving each time, Netscape pretty much sat still. Until it was too late. Then they resorted to what I call "Innovation through litigation" where instead of making a better product, they just sued the competition. Every single time a company has resorted to that - they are pretty much doomed.Sadly, the developers have clearly learned nothing, as Firefox started out being what Netscape could have been, but has morphed into a giant bloated pig, so much so that there are spinoff projects making a 'lite' version and starting the cycle all over again.Novell/Wordperfect - same thing, they shot themselves in the foot. Novell OWNED PC networking in the 80's. Microsoft's options were ridiculously horrible. But between Noorda and Schmidt, they decided they MUST beat Gates in the Office environment too, so they wasted a whole lot of money on buying an already dead DR DOS and The utterly horrible WordPerfect products (DOS WordPerfect was the BEST PC word processor hands down, but their Windows versions - wow. True story, a document in WP for Windows format opened faster using the convertor in Microsoft Word than it did in actual WP for Windows!), instead of continue to focus on networking. Netware stagnated, Microsoft continually improved their networking capabilities, and when Novell finally got around to doing something about Netware it was too late. And anti-competitive? Let's not forget there was at least one Netware release that ONLY worked if you booted with DR DOS to install the server.This scenario has repeated itself many times. Initial releases from Microsoft are often very lacking, sometimes even in basic functionality (Edge browser anyone?), but instead of thrashing them, the competition tends to rest easy, knowing they currently have a better product. But it never stays that way, once Microsoft turns its attention to an area of deficit, the improvements come quickly. So many of these other companies that rush to cry foul are even Microsoft development partners and get early access to new versions, and yet fail to have their application ready for a new release of Windows. That's not Microsoft cheating, that's management incompetence.

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 01:03:00 pm
content: Quote from: rrinker on April 26, 2016, 12:50:54 pmYou seem to forget that, as an application developer, you have a huge advantage when you can use undocumented api's and have insight into the source code of the os.The big mistake the judge made in the anti-trust case against microsoft, was not to split microsoft into an os branch and an application branche.

author: RGB255_0_0
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 01:29:41 pm
content: Microsoft haven't always been late or lacked innovation. Microsoft showed off tablets years ago but were too inept to make it work; until Windows 8 touch on Windows was horrific and still was on Windows 8. Windows 8 didn't know what it was and so did both touch and mouse poorly.Kinect was good but they pushed it too much as Xbox 360 exclusive, and when it was officially given Windows drivers, Kinect was superseded by the oncoming VR. And doesn't look like Microsoft is supporting that directly - relying on HTC/Valve and Oculus/Facebook - on PC or Xbox. Their Xbox One was already behind the PS4 from day one. Christ, if you're behind Sony...

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 02:09:11 pm
content: Quote from: Karel on April 26, 2016, 01:03:00 pmSome truth in that, but a lot of DOS software companies just didn't have the right competence and mindset to write good Windows programs. Someone mention Wordperfect For Windows. I had Wordstar V1.0 for Windows! Good for a laugh. Probably the premier MS Dos wordprocessor used to be Multimate, but they made it hard for anyone outside corporations to buy Multimate. I remember contacting Multimate suppliers in the 80's and they just didn't want to talk to me. Multimate never even make it to Windows.Autocad was one of the star performing examples of software for the PC. Even in 1983, they had fast and stable CAD design running on 4.7MHz pcs with 4MBytes of RAM. When Windows 3.1 came out at the start of the 90's, they kept producing their rock-solid DOS versions until 1994 - that is just before Windows 95 came out. They didn't panic and release rubbish like Wordstar and Wordperfect.Other then that, one of the main reasons for the death of Wordperfect and Wordstar was they were too greedy. Very high prices, and they tried to have tough protection to stop pirating. Microsoft's Word became the most commonly used wordprocessor in the 80's simply due to the fact they had almost non-existant protection and so it was the wordprocessor of choice to pirate. University students in the 80's were using Microsoft Word. The same people were the ones choosing office packages in the 90's. For some reason, companies like Wordperfect could not even conceive a world where everybody would want to have a PC at home with a full-featured wordprocessor.There was nothing stopping companies with the right capabilities producing good, fast, easy to use Windows 3.11 software. I got an integrated Windows office package for my father called Ability, and it was really nice to use. Also very cheap. It unfortunately was totally incompatible with any other Office package, and so it disappeared. It was an example though of how easy, fast and enjoyable office programs could be written for Windows 3.11.

author: RGB255_0_0
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 02:15:29 pm
content: Lotus was another that soon died. I still see people needing to use it to open old stuff.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 05:25:59 pm
content: Quote from: rrinker on April 25, 2016, 02:16:17 amIs it bad that I still have the whole box complete with the discs and manuals sitting on a shelf? Haven’t had the heart to toss it out yet, though I might move it to another shelf soon high up when I run out of space on that shelf.

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 05:35:44 pm
content: I just tossed a set out that I found in one of my boxes of stuff in the garage when cleaning out my Mom's house. There's another oldie I did save to bring in and show off at work but as I stated in a different place, my helpers for moving the stuff were way too efficient and have all the boxes of stuff I DID save all stacked WAY too neatly in my basement and the things I most am looking for are likely all in the bottom of the stack.Best one in my professional (ie, post college) career at this was rebuilding the old Netware 2.0a server at my first job. That was Novell hardware as well as software, a 68000 CPU system. To reload a failed system disk, you put a boot floppy in the PC (and by PC - in this case I mean genuine original IBM PC - not even an XT) that was connected to port 0 on the first network card (it was a proprietary 2 twisted pair system that used DB9 connectors at each end, not Ethernet, not even Arcnet), and it loaded the Netware OS by flipping floppies in that machine. The reason it failed in the first place - it was in an oversize closet with no ventilation. I warned them this was not good, but nothing was done until the server crashed. Sourcing a replacement for the 5 1/4" full height 70MB I think it was SCSI hard drive even then was tough, 286 machines were common and the 386 was just around the corner. Even worse? The other use of this oversize closet was as an office for the company owner's daughter - yes, his own daughter worked in an 'office' that had no heat or ac vents into the office HVAC system, with a server, a loud dot matrix printer for multipart forms, and an early LaserJet. After they paid through the nose for the replacement hard drive, not to mention the down time, THEN they added a vent.

author: donmr
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 06:30:46 pm
content: Quote from: ade on April 22, 2016, 11:12:11 pmExcept that the Microsoft tools do not implement the standard as approved.

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 07:29:33 pm
content: Quote from: ade on April 24, 2016, 04:51:10 amODF is still supported on the spreadsheet and word processor and their drawing program doesn't support either MS or OOo formats.

author: botcrusher
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 09:27:45 pm
content: Going to say, OO / Linux just saved my arse.Presentation supposedly known about for weeks, us A/V technicians (of which I'm the only available one) get told of said presentation an hour before it starts.Ok, so. Presenter arrives 15min before scheduled start, sets up brand new windows laptop with an i7, and the full MS office suite. His damn powerpoint got stuck and wouldn't move past slide 14.So, i booted up a backup linux machine, loaded his presentation in OO impress, and stuck his slide clicker dongle in (thank you for the instant plug and play ubuntu)Needless to say, OO chewed through the slideshow flawlessly, and the clicker worked.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 09:55:37 pm
content: QuoteWhat?Ctrl-O. Done.(Like basically every single Windows app written by anyone in the past 20 years...)QuoteDoesn't change the fact that Google did a 180 from being vehemently anti OOXML to become one of the most visible supporters of the format.

author: eugenenine
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 09:59:39 pm
content: Quote from: RGB255_0_0 on April 26, 2016, 01:29:41 pmYou don't remember Windows for Pen computing for windows 3.1? Place I worked had this old Grid 486 tablet/notebook.Most don't remember that all the MSOffice products were bought out from someone else and the first versions were pretty crappy and not very well integrated. MS invested a lot of $$$ to copy features from their competition.I still remember when they bought visio and the next version which was the first MS branded refused to open the previous version's drawings. So we had to run two versions in parallel.I've had to use msoffice since 2007 at work and still can't make the ribbon be effective. Not to mention the countless hours lost when its crashed or simple turned my file into a .tmp file.I've had a couple crashes with OpenOffice and its always recovered.

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 10:00:55 pm
content: Quote from: ade on April 26, 2016, 09:55:37 pmThanks. It works on OOo too. How did you find about about that? Keyboard short cuts are not obvious.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 10:16:48 pm
content: That's actually a very old shortcut... along with Ctrl-S (Save), and of course Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V for Copy and Paste.The "new" preferred way (last 10 years) is to use Alt instead of Ctrl. In Office products if you press and release the Alt key, it will show you the keyboard shortcut to any menu item.The shortcuts mostly correspond to the menu item name. E.g., forFileOpen, the Alt shortcut would be Alt-F-O. But I still use Ctrl-O, Ctrl-S... although in newer versions of Word I think you have to change a preference default to re-enable these old shortcuts.Ribbon: if you double-click on any ribbon top-level-menu (Home, Insert, etc.), then it will auto-hide the ribbon, so it doesn't take any space.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 26, 2016, 10:44:50 pm
content: QuoteNot really. Microsoft Word and Excel (the two core Office products) were developed internally at Microsoft. MS Project was also an internal project but they outsourced the initial development to another team in Seattle. Microsoft Access was also internal project, originally written for Windows and OS/2.Word was ported from the DOS version, written by a couple Microsoft employees Bill Gates hired from Xerox.Excel was an all-new application derived from an earlier Microsoft spreadsheet (called Multiplan). Microsoft originally wrote Excel for the Macintosh, before later porting it to Windows.Outlook was another application that was originally written by Microsoft for MS DOS, to complement Exchange, before being completely rewritten for Windows.Among the major Office apps only PowerPoint was bought from a 3rd party. PowerPoint was originally a Mac app; the first Windows version was written at Microsoft.Visio was purchased from a 3rd party but was never offered as part of Office suite. Even today it remains a separate offering, not part of Office suite.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 01:00:11 am
content: Quote from: Karel on April 26, 2016, 10:57:45 amI'm well aware of Microsoft's aggressive and unethical past. But fair is fair, and in this instance, Microsoft is not to blame. All those incidents are absolutely irrelevant to the question of whose fault it is thatright now, OO/LO sometimes has trouble with MS Office documents. They've got the document formats, the object models, and other specs. Nonetheless, OO/LO have failed. I fail to see how Microsoft carries any culpability at this point.And besides, I already explained the main reason interoperability is hard: you only get flawless rendering if you flawlessly reproduce every single feature, behavior (documented and undocumented) and bug in the original software.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 01:33:36 am
content: Quote from: tooki on April 27, 2016, 01:00:11 amMy understanding is that most of the versions of Microsoft Office do not exactly comply with OOXML, and yet Libre Office is bagged if it does not correctly render documents produced by every version of Microsoft Office. Microsoft rushed out OOXML deliberately to kill ODF, and yet OOXML is not a truly open standard. As I mentioned, Microsoft only say the current OOXML spec can be used by anyone - there is no permission for future versions of the spec. This is important since OOXML involves a number of Microsoft Patents. ODF does include Sun/Oracle patents but the ODF license did give permissions for use of all versions of ODF into the future. OOXML due to its size is probably not a manageable standard, and it is not much of a standard if Microsoft can unilaterally change it any time it suits them. So absolutely you can bag Microsoft on several fronts.If Libre Office doesn't render a Microsoft Office document properly, why is Libre Office always blamed? You can just as easily blame Microsoft, and the only way to resolve the issue would be to dig into the document and the 6000 plus pages of the OOXML spec to see whose rendering is the more correct. I have never seen anyone do that. It is easier just to always blame Libre Office for not matching undocument aspects of Microsoft Office.One of the rendering issues is that the default fonts Microsoft Office uses are not open so when these fonts get substituted, the document appearance can change. A good open standard would probably push for the use of open fonts for archival documents. You definitely cannot blame Libre Office for not installing a Microsoft Calibri font - they cannot.There really needs to be a true open and unencumbered open document standard and Microsoft wants to stop that happening. A true standard would mean that just as in the case of browsers, other companies can come along and start making products that match the standard better then Microsoft without having to sign up to any license deal with Microsoft. Someone in 1000 years should be able to pick the spec - OOXML or ODF or whatever, and use it to allow them to open and render a historic document with 100% accuracy. They can do that with the archival versions of PDF. At a guess, it is pretty likely you cannot do that with the current OOXML.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 02:21:28 am
content: QuoteSorry but this is completely wrong.OOXMLis not a Microsoft spec. It is an International Standard, maintained by ISO and IEC. An industry consortium called Ecma publishes and distributes the same standard for free.Microsoft doesn't need to give permission to anyone to use any version of the OOXML spec, current or future. Again, OOXML is not a Microsoft standard -- no permission from Microsoft would be required. Furthermore under Ecma & ISO rules Microsoft must provide any implementer fair access to any Microsoft patents required to implement the standard. Microsoft has gone a step beyond and has agreed not to pursue any patent claim against any conforming implementation.ISO defined two levels of OOXML conformance: Transitional and Strict. Microsoft Office has been compliant at the Transitional level since Office 2010, and compliant at the Strict level since Office 2013.LibreOffice is not conformant at either level. LibreOffice developers made a political and financial decision not to be compliant, because they fear if OOXML is a success then there is no longer a reason to use LibreOffice. For years they lobbied governments to legislate the use of ODF instead.Of course LibreOffice backers / consultants makemillions of dollarsfrom government projects implementing ODF. It's all about $$$, in the end.

author: Red Squirrel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 02:59:07 am
content: I find anything after office 2003 feels too bloated and annoying to use. I actually prefer Libre Office over the newer versions for it's cleaner and simpler GUI. Microsoft has been butchering their GUIs for the past years and I find their stuff is actually unpleasant to use now.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 04:32:04 am
content: Quote from: ade on April 27, 2016, 02:21:28 amAnd that Ecma standards group is chaired by a Microsoft employee, the standard was developed and submitted without any public involvement, and there was only 30 days for the public to comment on the 6000 page standard.QuoteOK Lets say that Libre Office want to push for new features in the standard that will require a change to the OOXML standard. To do so, they probably have to develop the features first that will not be compatible with current standard. But the moment they do this, they are no longer covered by the Microsoft Promise and they no longer have any right to use any of the Microsoft Patents. Microsoft, on the other hand, can freely do any new development they want even if it diverges from the current standards. Microsoft could issue a new promise that is GPL compatible, but they choose not to. Have I got this wrong?QuoteIs this true? There seems to be a fair effort by OO/LO to comply to this incredibly complex standard, and there are continual projects to improve compatibility every year. It is not like you can get full OOXML conformance by just adding a line in your C++ codeCode:#define ABSOLUTE_OOXML_COMPATIBILITY trueThey don't just have to comply to one of the OOXML standards - they have to try and comply to all of them. If they complied to just the strict standard, that is no good since it is not even the default OOXML format used by Microsoft. It is much easier for Microsoft to comply since they wrote all the standards based on the way their own software works. All the Transitional standard complexity is all because different versions of MS Office can't even comply with each other.QuoteCome on. Microsoft earned almost 100 billion in revenue from MS Office in 2015 and they want to quickly double this figure. You are complaining against a competing group who might indirectly make millions for the crime of supporting a simpler, a more open and an easier to maintain standard?

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 04:44:39 am
content: Quote from: amspire on April 27, 2016, 01:33:36 amI don't fault them for not rendering a document produced by a Microsoft product properly. I do say that the ability to do this is necessary to exist in a Microsoft dominated world. If you must supply Microsoft format documents for your customer, if your customer supplies your contracts and specifications in Microsoft and so on you must be able to read them and write them. If OO/LO can't do that, you have to choose MS. May not be fair, but it is the way it is. Now you might be able to live with receiving documents that are not perfectly rendered by OO/LO. There is some risk of an error, but you don't need it pretty. And potentially you can restrict the documents you generate to types that OO/LO can properly produce in MS format. Depends on your situation and requirements.What I do fault OO/LO for is not properly rendering a document in MS format which was produced by OO/LO. It means I can't edit something I produce for a customer demanding MS, and it means I can't be sure that the customer will receive a correct document unless I also purchase the MS product and try it. Once I have done that, why bother with OO/LO?

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 06:22:19 am
content: Quote from: amspire on April 27, 2016, 01:33:36 amWhen a document, made with ms office, doesn't look right in Libreoffice, it's the fault of Libreoffice.When a document, made with Libreoffice, doesn't look right in ms office, it's the fault of Libreoffice.When a document, made with ms office version x, doesn't look right in ms office version z, it's ... normal!

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 07:06:27 am
content: Quote from: Karel on April 27, 2016, 06:22:19 amI think you meant to sayQuote

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 07:17:27 am
content: Quote from: amspire on April 27, 2016, 07:06:27 amI was meant ironically.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 01:55:06 pm
content: Quote from: Karel on April 27, 2016, 06:22:19 amWhen a document, made with ms office, doesn't look right in Libreoffice, it's the fault of Libreoffice.If the document was made by ms office in ODF it would be MS fault. As far as I know this doesn't happen. MS doesn't need to make ODF documents. Their dominance in the market makes it un-necessary. When a document in MS format cannot be read in OO/LO it IS a problem for OO/LO.When a document, made with Libreoffice, doesn't look right in ms office, it's the fault of Libreoffice.If the document is ODF, as far as I know MS cannot read it. It is MS fault, but not many care. If the document is MS format then it IS an OO/LO problem. Again, in the world as it exists today it is a necessity for OO/LO.When a document, made with ms office version x, doesn't look right in ms office version z, it's ... normal!At least there is no ambiguity about who to complain to in this situation. And Karel, as we know from your posts on other subjects you have entire confidence that any problem that you report to a vendor will be handled correctly and to your complete satisfaction. You have recommended that action to many.

author: suicidaleggroll
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 02:47:13 pm
content: Quote from: Karel on April 27, 2016, 06:22:19 amWho cares who's fault it is? When you need to interface with other people who use MS Office file formats, and OO/LO is incapable of reading OR writing those file formats so they can be properly interpreted by the people you're interfacing with, then OO/LO will not work for your application. It doesn't matter if it's Microsoft's fault or OO/LO's fault, MS Office does work for that application, OO/LO does not, end of story. That's the case for a HUGE group of people in professional environments, which is what keeps MS Office the de-facto standard. If the OO/LO developers want to change things, they need to start with being truly compatible with the MS Office file formats, regardless of who's "at fault" for the current incompatibilities. Microsoftdoesn'twant to change things, so you can't expect them to take the initiative to correct the problem.

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 03:43:26 pm
content: Quote from: suicidaleggroll on April 27, 2016, 02:47:13 pmDepends whether you are talking about exchanging documents inside an organization or between organizations.If you are talking about inside an organization, everybody can switch to LO.However, between (professional) organizations, one should never exchange office documents. Just pdf.If an organization insists on sending or receiving office documents, it's entirely their problem if something messes up.

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 04:04:03 pm
content: Quote from: Karel on April 27, 2016, 03:43:26 pmIn theory yes, in practice even if LO can do everything you need perfectly for new documents you still have the old documents to deal with. If LO can't handle them you either need to spend a fortune manually converting those old files or still have Office around just for them.QuoteThis I agree with. "Print to PDF" and there's no worries that they don't have the font I used installed or vice versa, I or they don't have the right software or right version of it, etc, etc...

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 04:06:07 pm
content: QuoteMicrosoft Office apps read/write ODF just fine.QuoteNo, it doesn't work that way in real-life. Companies need to collaborate all the time. E.g., with outside legal counsel, consulting firms, marketing partners, suppliers, external auditors, etc., etc., etc.Converting everything to/from PDFs constantly, especially when there are revision changes to track & import as is typical during collaboration, would be insane.

author: ciccio
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 08:31:40 pm
content: I'm not am Office "power user", but I remember using WordStar and Visicalc in DOS....What I do not like in recent (2007 and newer) versions of MS office is that the default format for saving a document is the "X" version (.DOCX, .XLSX etc) even when the new format is not needed.Inexperienced or simply lazy users don't take the effort to set their default to "old" .DOC, and I, as a customer or a supplier, receive the document in a format that my old Office 2003 cannot open (I have MS File format converter, obviously, but it's annoying...).In recent years many local administrations in Italy are transitioning to open source office suites, so as a supplier or a consultant in order to present a bid or a technical expertise I must edit the .ODT document they send to me.I've installed LO for this, and just by curiosity I opened a lot of documents I've created in MS Office 2003. No problems found. What I'll like is a replacement for MS Publisher (I used it a lot for for technical documents), capable of opening even the files I created with the 2000 version (they cannot be opened with 2003 version, and I do not have the 2000 version available anymore).Publisher absolute incompatibility between old (2000 and previous) and new (2003 and following) versions is an example the absolute disregard of customer's rights.When I installed Office 2003 it did not tell me : "hey, please do not uninstall Publisher 2000, or your precious documents will be lost..., and no, I do not have a converter"

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 09:07:15 pm
content: I do not know how you guys survive as a business, running such obsolete software and dealing with complications, when you can fully license the entire MS Office suite for less the price of one cheap lunch each month.It's just $8/mo for a full set of licenses which includes Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, OneNote.

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 09:32:31 pm
content: Not being able to open older documents in newer versions is absolutely bad, however I also recall how much complaining there was when various Office 2003 apps couldn't open files saved in Office 2007 - well DUH? Why should a reasonable person expect an older version to open newer files? The other way around, absolutely that should always be provided for, else how else can you upgrade to a newer version?They are darn near giving away Office now - given what you get with an E3 level subscription to Office 386 (Email, SharePoint, Lync (sorry, Skype for Business..) - AND full copies of Office apps - and not one per user, but FIVE. I have three computers at home plus my work laptop all using Office 2013/2016 from my work Office 365 license and it's completely legal. And I still have one install left. This is also self-managed, so if I get rid of one computer, I can remove the license from that machine and apply it to another without involving our support people (why we have support people when the majority of our employees are like me - people who install this stuff every day - still escapes me). We are entrusted with admin permissions to our clients, who are schools, banks, hospitals, etc. - but not as admins of our own internal infrastructure.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 10:35:05 pm
content: Quote from: rrinker on April 27, 2016, 09:32:31 pmTwo reasons for avoiding Office.1. They keep "improving" the interface. The new interfaces aren't all that bad, but are marginal improvements at best. It is in no way good enough to justify the time and effort retraining. ALL use of Office products is a secondary activity for me, so I resent the time spent keeping up.2. Many of us remember when Lotus, Wordperfect, Microsoft and to a lesser extent Wordstar were vying for the office business. Competition drove features up and prices down until you could buy a forever copy for far under $100 at the retail level. After the others fell by the wayside the price of Microsoft quickly spiked up at retail. Now it is back down, but it is an annual fee. The fee is low now, but will go up. The stock market demands year over year profit and volume improvements, and the market is saturated. Price increases are the only available variable.

author: apelly
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 10:52:35 pm
content: By now I've learned all I wanted about the issue. Conclusion: Suck it up and use office sometimes. Thanks for the info guys.Slightly related:This PDF showed up in my inbox this morningdhs.gov: Open Source Software in Governmen - Challenges and Opportunities_Final.pdf

author: Delta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 11:31:00 pm
content: Quote from: ciccio on April 27, 2016, 08:31:40 pmThat's very interesting, and encouraging! Who (ie at what level of government) made the decision? Was it mainly of cost grounds? Is there an estimate of how much taxpayers money they save by using open source software?

author: Delta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 11:35:18 pm
content: Quote from: amspire on April 26, 2016, 02:09:11 pmDo you think that was / still is a conscious decision by MS? I have never ever paid for a single piece of MS software for my own use - going back to copying 5-1/4" floppies of DOS as a kid, to now just visiting mySwedish Distributorfor a cracked version of anything I need.It would make financial sense for MS to turn a blind eye to piracy if it gets their software into millions of homes, as the more people are familiar with it, the more companies are going to buy it for work use.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2016, 11:55:05 pm
content: Quote from: Delta on April 27, 2016, 11:35:18 pmIt seemed so at the time. Microsoft Word was trying to enter a market dominated by Wordperfect, Wordstar, Multimate and a few others. In the DOS era, it was all about learning key combinations, so once someone mastered the Wordstar key combinations, you couldn't shift them to another wordprocessor. But good wordprocessors were very expensive - hundreds of dollars.Microsoft was just able to come in and largely through the pirated Word, grab the majority of users. Once people learnt the Word key combinations, they were hooked. Without the piracy, Microsoft Word didn't have a chance to break into the market.Autocad succeeded the exactly same way. They had the 2D cad system everybody could pirate, so they became the No1 CAD package.It is a game - you have to pretend to hate piracy, but you make it easy, and you do not aggressively hunt and prosecute infringers. Respectable companies who do not want to be accused of theft will be prepared to pay for licences. If you offer free software instead, everybody expects it to be free and they hate you when later you ask to be paid.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 12:32:56 am
content: QuoteFor enterprise it's usuallycheaperto just use Microsoft.Look at the experience Munich went through. They spent 30 million Euros to convert from Windows to Linux and OpenOffice. They had to pay $$$ to specialists for the original conversion and ongoing support, instead getting bids from the thousands of Microsoft partners available.Then they had so many issues with OpenOffice that they had to spend millions again to switch to LibreOffice. Then they had massive issues with LibreOffice 4.1.x and KDE 4. When they got new hardware, Linux didn't have the right kernel drivers...They supposedly "saved" money but an independent study showed they would have actually spent less of taxpayer's money had they stuck with Windows. The real cost of conversion might have been as high as 60 million Euros. Cost had they remained with Windows: 20-30 million Euros.A couple of years ago, the city employees were so dissatisfied that a study was proposed to see if Munich can switch back to Windows. But there's no switching back... they're in too deep, they just have to live with the mess.http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/08/linux-on-the-desktop-pioneer-munich-now-considering-a-switch-back-to-windows/

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 01:06:51 am
content: Quote from: ade on April 28, 2016, 12:32:56 amThat was a story going around a few years back, but Munich is still embracing Linux/Libre Office. They have 41 Windows-only applications left, and they are now going to get them replaced by 2019.http://news.softpedia.com/news/german-city-that-replaced-windows-with-linux-to-ditch-latest-windows-xp-2000-pcs-499160.shtmlI have supported many companies, and when people are looking at costs, they often don't realise how much it costs to support Windows. Windows support can be a massive time consumer. If you have to rebuild a PC from scratch, it can easily take a day with all the updates, licensing gymnastics, etc. With old hardware and sick MS web updates, it can take 2 days easily. If you have lots of similar hardware, you can make Sysprep images to make things more efficient, but it still is a lot of work. Running Windows servers can be a massive costs. In supporting a large PC infrastructure, you want to be able to rebuild any PC in 10 minutes. If there is even a hint of a virus, you do not want to waste time debugging it. You just wipe everything and put a new clean OS on the system. Without licencing issues, it is very easy in Linux.There are issues with Linux, but I can assure you there are no end of major problems with Windows too. Being in the Microsoft ecosystem is very claustrophobic, but to many it feels safe. Linux gives you a lot more room to move and freedom, but you also have the challenges of the Wild West. Accept the challenges and it is rewarding.

author: HackedFridgeMagnet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 01:45:54 am
content: Going Libre Office could also help avoid this sort of situation.http://www.infoworld.com/article/3060596/software/software-audits-how-high-tech-plays-hardball.html

author: vze1lryy
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 03:14:59 am
content: Quote from: Karel on April 26, 2016, 10:57:45 amI can't say that microsoft never did anything wrong. but the netscape thing, IMO, was wildly blown out of proportion.they included a browser with the operating system. netscape wasn't free. they said here, thanks for buying our operating system. we appreciate that. let's throw in a free browser to improve the user experience so you don't have to BUY one right after you pay for windows.no one complains about the fact that for ten years KDE tossed in konqueror that never rendered pages properly.

author: ciccio
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 07:25:22 am
content: Quote from: Delta on April 27, 2016, 11:31:00 pmActually I don't know. I don't think it is a government decision, but the various local administration are going this way.Years ago Mr. Gates bought Leonardo's "Leicester Codex"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Leicesterand made a deal with the Italian Goverment for lending it to an Italian museum for some time.I remember all the bells and whistles on TV and newspapers.But this was not a free lunch: the other side of the deal was that every public administration was forced to adopt Windows and Office, and they had to upgrade to the newer versions as soon as they were available, resulting in a lot of problems when they had to train the clerks to the new one.This deal was never clearly explained to the general public, and I believe it was not in the Government interest to inform us...

author: MrSlack
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 07:54:21 am
content: Chime in here. I've written products built on outlook and word. Complex ones. Big VSTO monsters that scare the shit out of mere mortals.I couldn't give a toss about standards and neither does anyone else other than governments. Delivery is more important.

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 08:46:40 am
content: Quote from: ade on April 26, 2016, 09:55:37 pmI've just tested it in MS Office and it's still rubbish. The whole screen is obscured by the menu which only shows the recently opened files. To open a file somewhere else, I have to click on computer, then browse.OpenOffice.org is much quicker. Pressing Ctr-O takes me straight to a list of files and directories and if I need to open a recent file, I can do so via the file menu. It doesn't blank out the whole screen either, as is the case with MS Office or really old software from the 80s.MS Office takes more clicks of the mouse than OpenOffice.org just to do the same thing!Quote from: rrinker on April 27, 2016, 09:32:31 pmI wouldn't use MS Office, even if it was free. I only use it at work because I'm paid to do so and the company policy prevents me from installing anything else on their computer.

author: MrSlack
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 08:50:04 am
content: No one uses Ctrl+O. Whack the start button and type the document name, then hit enter.

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 09:36:22 am
content: Quote from: ade on April 27, 2016, 09:07:15 pmMaybe because the pc's in our company run Linux?Regarding surviving, we do fine, thank you.

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 11:04:44 am
content: Quote from: MrSlack on April 28, 2016, 08:50:04 amThat's only any good if you know what file you want to open.

author: MrSlack
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 11:09:09 am
content: Well that's easily solved by thinking just after you press Ctrl+S...

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 11:22:20 am
content: Quote from: MrSlack on April 28, 2016, 11:09:09 amWhich is useless if it was someone else who saved the file.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 06:32:18 pm
content: Quote from: Hero999 on April 28, 2016, 11:22:20 amAnd also does not work too well on networked drives as search explicitly excludes them from indexing, unless you want to whack the server with all the machines on restart trying to index every accessible file. You have to know the share to search and select it, then wait while the network goes up to full utilisation till it recurses every directory in the tree and reads every file to build up the index. Time for tea.......File manager anybody? I am getting to like Cinnamon, a lot better at not hiding those things you might want to sort the view on.With Win7 open a directory with a few files that are media and it %$#@##%&*%$%$ insists on doing a preview in icons, despite the group policy and the local policy saying BLOODY DETAILED LIST ONLY AND WITH THE #$^^%*$^&% EXTENSION SHOWN. Then it adds a "helpful" 200 different types of display, and often then forgets the view on the next restart.Then Win10 and the #$^^#@@#&%&%^ windows key stops working till you restart. Really cheesing my sister off on her laptop.

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 07:12:24 pm
content: Quote from: ade on April 28, 2016, 12:32:56 amThat article isn't completely relevant here, since not only is it talking about switching OpenOffice.org but desktop Linux too. Here in the UK, OOo is installed on many PCs in job centres (presumably to save licensing costs) and it works quite well. Compatibility with MS Office is not a problem because jobseekers are always advised to avoid complex formatting which can create problems with different versions of MS Office too.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 28, 2016, 08:32:38 pm
content: It's more usual for open source desktop conversions to switch wholesale... not just Office and Windows but other commercial products as well (from Adobe, etc.)In most of these conversions the primary reason is political, not financial. In the Munich example, even their original projections acknowledged that it would be cheaper to simply stick with Microsoft products.So usually the justification for a switch is to be free from vendor lock-in. And that's a big reason why the OO/LO folks do not want OOXML to succeed, because then the vendor lock-in argument can't be used anymore to promote their services.In smaller cases, the reason for conversion is for security concerns (e.g., Department of Defense, in part to reduce malware exposure). Again it won't make sense to just switch Office to OO/LO in this case, so typically the whole desktop gets replaced.Aside from some niche industries (e.g., CG/animation), virtually all of the large open source conversion projects we've seen are by governmental or educational institutions. And among smaller companies which have switch away from Windows, most have switched to Macs instead of to Linux.

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2016, 06:38:45 am
content: Quote from: ade on April 28, 2016, 12:32:56 amhttp://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/03/french-police-saves-millions-of-euros-by-adopting-ubuntu/

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 29, 2016, 07:30:19 am
content: QuoteThat's a one-off that can't be repeated elsewhere, in part because the deal with the French gendarmerie is in effect subsidized by various parties including the company behind Ubuntu.E.g., Canonical only charges them something like $1/machine/year for support. That's less than $100,000 to support 90,000 machines... less than the salary of just one Canonical engineer!If the gendarmerie had to pay the same rates as everyone else, there would be no business case. The typical SMB customer can't get Ubuntu desktop support from Canonical for less than $150/machine/year... 150x price difference!

author: MrSlack
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2016, 07:34:13 am
content: Canonical support is boiled shit anyway. I mean really dire. Worse than Microsoft enterprise support which is bad. Not worth a thing. Plus the product is buggy as hell.We dumped them and moved to RHEL and CentOS 7 which has been flawless so far. We're 50% windows and 50% Linux and it works for us.All our Linux guys use office 2016 and windows 10 on the desktop out of choice so you've got to ask yourself a few questions there. I myself wouldn't put it near the desktop.

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2016, 07:42:19 am
content: Quote from: ade on April 29, 2016, 07:30:19 amThe same happens the other way around. When a big party ones to move away from microsoft, microsoft often offers them a deal they can't refuse.Open-source alternatives are also instruments to get a good deal from microsoft. Problem is, it only works for big organizations who know how to settle deals.In our case, microsoft has f*d us a couple of times too many and they have proofed us to be unreliable. Not to speak about their non-existing support.So, we don't bother with them anymore.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2016, 08:01:39 am
content: To make decisions to go away from Windows does need a really strong CEO just due to the political influence of the big companies. I remember when we were looking for a piece of electronics test gear worth half a million dollars and it was a choice between Company A and Company B (Company B started with H and ended with P).We chose the gear from Company A as it was more capable. The CEO of Company B invited our General Manager out to a game of golf somewhere very exclusive and during the game, he politely enquired if the engineering team was not particularly competent. In the nicest way we were told - it is not our fault if we were born stupid.This kind of pressure means that choices such a move to Linux/LO have to be total commitment all the way to the top, or forget it.

author: eugenenine
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2016, 11:12:42 pm
content: Quote from: MrSlack on April 28, 2016, 11:09:09 amIf your using Microsoft Office Excel and your spreadsheet is 277k rows long Ctrl+S brings up a dialog that says "not enough resources to complete" and then another that says "document not saved"

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2016, 11:27:43 pm
content: If I paste a visio drawing into OO, it embeds it as a bitmap and cannot be re-sized in a non-lossless way.If you open a word document that has an embedded visio file, it is blank.

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 08:06:05 am
content: The new LibreOffice also comes with improved document format support. Besides its support for Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2, LibreOffice 5.1 also boasts improved compatibility with Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format, Microsoft Office's default file format. Technically, Microsoft's OOXML format is an ISO standard. Technically.In practice, no version of Microsoft Office, including Office 2016 has ever used the "strict" version of the standard. Instead, Office saves documents using a "transitional" version of OOXML by default. As the Document Foundation's Italo Vignoli points out, this is a transition that's been going on nine years. The Document Foundation says this standard tends to change with each new release of Microsoft Office, often in big ways, making it a challenge for LibreOffice to keep up.For that matter it makes using the same document difficult between Office versions.So, if you think only Microsoft Office can fully support Microsoft Office document formats, think again.http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-best-desktop-office-suite-libreoffice-gets-better/

author: MrSlack
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 08:15:09 am
content: Quote from: eugenenine on April 29, 2016, 11:12:42 pmIf you're doing that, you're using the wrong tool for the job. You need a database.Also you can install 64-bit Excel and throw some more RAM in your box.

author: charlespax
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 10:49:45 am
content: Try opening a CSV file with 8,000 data points and graph it. LibreOffice will puke every time.

author: poorchava
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 11:04:27 am
content: I like how chapter and list numbering is more flexible in OO than MS, but on the other hand the image handling in OO sucks big time.Sent from my HTC One M8s using Tapatalk.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 11:24:50 am
content: Quote from: charlespax on April 30, 2016, 10:49:45 amHow long since you have tried Libre Calc?I just loaded a CSV table of GPS data - 15 columns x 14400 rows. Loaded in 3 seconds.Added a graph made from two of the columns (all 14400 rows) - 3 seconds.Saved and reopened spreadsheet with graph - 4 seconds.Libre Office has done a lot of work to speed up the Office packages in the last few years. They were slow.

author: HackedFridgeMagnet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 11:32:03 am
content: Quote from: charlespax on April 30, 2016, 10:49:45 amDid it straight away.Seriously you should check things before making statements like that.

author: charlespax
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 11:54:12 am
content: Quote from: amspire on April 30, 2016, 11:24:50 amI'm running LibreOffice 5.0.3.2 on OS X. I was able to generate a graph with time and four temperatures for 8,000 lines. I can open the same data extended to 20,000 lines. While trying to make a graph of the 20,000 lines LibreOffice hangs and I eventually have to force quite. Could be a memory allocation issue.

author: HackedFridgeMagnet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 12:06:07 pm
content: Yeah took a bit longer, about 5 seconds to make graph and then about 10 seconds to stretch it.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 12:10:35 pm
content: Quote from: charlespax on April 30, 2016, 11:54:12 amI am using the latest 5.1.2.2 which apparently has more speed improvements. Tried your 20,000 lines of data and it didn't hang. Data loaded very quickly. A graph showing all columns was sluggish, but it worked. I changed some data, and it showed up in the graph after a few seconds. It looks like the spreadsheet + graph is using 233MBytes of RAM to run.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 12:16:31 pm
content: Works for me...Version: 4.2.8.2Build ID: 420m0(Build:2)Able to do a line chart, but the Java can run slowwwwwwwwwwwww on the other types, running to 100% of 1 CPU, but not killing the rest of the machine. Going past 1.2G of virtual memory twiddling fingers and thumbs trying to make it 3D.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 01:33:46 pm
content: I have some spreadsheets from hell that I have never been able to open in Libre Office.This is a catalogue done in Excel - about 180 interlinked sheets and hundreds - perhaps over 1000 embedded jpg's of different sizes. The version written by Office 2007 is 100MBytes and the later version written by Office 2013 is 60MBytes. Both still fail under Libre Calc. Looking how Microsoft Excel Viewer works with the 100Meg file, it is interesting. The viewer is only using 150MBytes, so Excel is not expanding the sheets from a compressed form at all unless it is the current sheet. Libre Office looks like it is trying to expand everything on load and is crashing - perhaps with memory issues as Windows LO is 32 bit.I will try it on Linux next using 64 bit LO just after I finish my updates and install LO.I ran the Microsoft OOXML validator on both spreadsheets in the Microsoft Open XML SDK 2.0 kit. Both the Excel 2007 and Excel 2013 saved versions fail Microsoft's OOXML validator. I have seen exactly the same validation errors in files saved by Libre Calc, so it looks like Libre Office has to duplicate the same Transitional mode OOXML non-compliances as MS Office for compatibility.What a mess!Microsoft are stuck in the Transitional mode disaster for over 7 years, and there is no sign of then going to strict mode. Almost all the current documents written by the latest Office are all in transitional OOXML format.The purpose of a standard is that someone should be able to open a document using just the definitions in the standard. It would seem that is not true for OOXML. It is what we would call here a Claytons standard - the standard you have when you are not having a standard.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 03:23:18 pm
content: QuoteOffice 2013 is Strict compliant. Just select "Strict Open XML Spreadsheet" during File, Save As. Or change the default file format to Strict.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 03:48:52 pm
content: Quote from: ade on April 27, 2016, 09:07:15 pmPerhaps but that would mean having to learn to use the stupid ribbon interface. I'm sticking with Office 2003 and simply ask people to send me doc or xls files if I need to edit them. OTOH the Libre Office which comes with Debian does a good job opening docx and xlsx files so problem solved.

author: MrSlack
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 04:05:40 pm
content: The ribbon is awesome. Hide it (double click a tab handle) and use the discoverable keyboard shortcuts. Just whack alt once and follow it.

author: charlespax
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 04:16:50 pm
content: Quote from: amspire on April 30, 2016, 12:10:35 pmI downloaded the latest version of LibreOffice and can now successfully make a chart using the 20,000 line file. Thank you

author: eugenenine
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 06:02:20 pm
content: Quote from: MrSlack on April 30, 2016, 08:15:09 amIts an export from someone elses database who won't give me access to it and it has a couple duplicate columns so MSSQL fails to import it. Its a work provided laptop so I'm stuck with what they will support and the laptop only has 16G of ram so its pretty limited in what it can do since Windows 7 x64 wastes half of the ram.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 06:36:59 pm
content: To be fair: Libreoffice Calc does have very nice CSV import features which makes it very easy to deal with oscilloscope dumps.

author: VinzC
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 08:26:58 pm
content: Quote from: suicidaleggroll on April 22, 2016, 09:49:35 pmI'm not a Libre/Open Office fan. I just hate superficial deductions.This is the kind of disrespectful and superficial comment that's read almost everywhere from ignorant people. The background story is much more complex than that low quality observation.One has to know the people behind then Open Office, now Libre Office have submitted their document format specification to ISO. It was about600(six hundred) pages of work that took years to mature. Out of the blue Microsoft, as always, entered the scene and submitted their specification for all office documents; it was about6000pages — yes, six thousands, i.e. ten times more. And if that wasn't enough, they submitted their specs to [what I'd call *] the fast track, i.e. six months to approve the specification and make it a standard.* "I'd call" because I attended a conference in French about that very matter that was given by one of the French specialist in charge of the analysis of MS documents.Clearly Microsoft intentions were to put a mess in document specifications: one standard is best, two makes it a mess. And a lot of competent people dug into their specs — please try to imagine what it takes to approve and make 6000 pages of technical documentation a standard in six months only... They detected one or two mistakes and inconsistencies every two pages, light and serious as well.It is a pitty and a shame — though not a big surprise — such a load of crap has been accepted as... (it really hurts to call that horse shit) a «standard». And has been accepted at all!Only people who [prefer to] ignore what's behind Microsoft haste would — of course — bash the open source suite for "not respecting Microsoft standards", ironically.Moreover what Microsoft submitted to the ISO is *not* what they use with their documents but a subset of it. What they base their OOXML documents on is a non documented and obscure superset of the 6000 technical crap they submitted to the ISO.Ask yourself: what would you do when you're paid a year-worth salary to conceive a product when you know the datasheet are all wrong and spew utter garbage about a matter you know well? And you have only six days to complete your work when you know it would take you five weeks if you had perfectly valid and accurate information for ten times less work to do?So, before you lightly trash Libre Office for their lack of compatibility, consider yourself a more thorough analysis of the real issue. We all know Microsoft has always worked towards respecting standards and sharing their work for the better, don't we?To date theOpen Document Format(or ODF) is theonlyviable document standard.

author: suicidaleggroll
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 10:02:00 pm
content: Quote from: VinzC on April 30, 2016, 08:26:58 pmSo stating a fact makes me ignorant, superficial, and disrespectful? I never said the OO/LO developers were worthless idiots who can't implement a standard, I never even remotely implied it. I simply stated thefactthat OO/LO is a far cry from being compatible with MS Office documents, which keeps it from being used in professional environments where that compatibility is a prerequisite.This says nothing about who's at fault or who's to blame, it simply a statement of the current situation. You might not like it and you can point fingers at whoever you like, but it doesn't change the facts of the matter. This "low quality observation" is my opinion about what makes Libre/Open Office less capable than MS Office, which is exactly what the thread is asking for.Calm down and have a beer.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2016, 11:50:43 pm
content: I mentioned my "spreadsheet from hell" earlier -https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/in-your-opinion-what-makes-libreopen-office-less-capable-than-m$-office/msg930539/#msg930539I thought it was 180 sheets but it turned out it was 268 sheets.Excel does seem to be incredibly memory efficient with a huge multipage spreadsheet with JPEGs, but Libre Calc is not. This spreadsheet will not open in Windows 32 bit Libre Calc, so I tried 64 bit under Linux.It did open - sort of - after many hours. It was using 2.3G of RAM in Calc compared to 150M in Excel and it was a bit sick. That explains why 32bit Calc couldn't open it - there is probably a 2G RAM limit per spreadsheet.So if, say, you wanted to make a spreadsheet that was a catalogue for every test instrument in every instrument family from every instrument maker using a separate sheet for each of the families from the manufacturers, with a few thousand small photos, don't use Libre Calc.An obvious message is that Libre Office is fine on Windows as long as you are not making crazy huge documents. If you want to do huge, you have to go to the 64bit LO on Linux, but MS Office does look like it has the market sown up for now for people who want to make giant multisheet spreadsheets with photos. LO users will have to go to another solution - like using HTML pages, or a database.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 01:51:53 am
content: Quote from: VinzC on April 30, 2016, 08:26:58 pmI am not in position to evaluate your analysis of the proposed document standards. Nor, I suspect are thousands of other users of "Office" products. I and all of those other thousands also don't really care. All they care about is if the document they try to open works or not. Or whether the document they sent was readable by the one they sent it to. So all of the complaints you have seen in this thread are valid, whether they are due to compliance with a specification or not. Specifications are never an objective, they are a means to the objective, and you have widespread testimony that the objective has not been achieved. Opinions will vary as to the objectives of the specifications. Users, technologists and marketers will have very different objectives for a given specification. Opinions will also differ on who is to blame, who has the responsibility and who has the necessity. Those three attributes do not necessarily lie with the same party. I don't really have an opinion on blame or responsibility, but I do believe that OO/LO have a higher degree of necessity than MS. That is always the case for the entity that is not in first place in market share.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 04:07:28 am
content: QuoteLots of half-truths in that analysis.E.g., yes OOXML went through the ISO "fast track" process. But so did ODF. And the process ODF went through was not any more "open" than the process OOXML went through.It's typical of the ISO standardization process to first submit a proposed standard to a "friendly" industry consortium. Then once the "friendly" industry consortium adopts it, you bring it to ISO using the "Fast Track" process. Fast Track simply takes anexistingindustry standard, and makes it an international standard.Remember that back then the battle was being fought between severalproprietarysystems: Microsoft's Office suite, IBM's Lotus suite, and Sun Microsystem's StarOffice.Allhad proprietary binary formats.But IBM Lotus was getting nowhere, and StarOffice was crap (it was a freeware Sun acquired from a 3rd party). Losing the battle, Sun with IBM's backing decided to create a pseudo-standard XML version of their format (StarOffice XML) and push it through a "friendly" industry workgroup at OASIS.This was not an "open" process. OASIS was controlled by Sun and IBM. Together they ratified the specification -- which we now know as ODF -- and then Sun took it to ISO under the "fast track" process.Microsoft and their supporters did the same thing. They created OOXML and submitted it to another "friendly" industry workgroup (ECMA). Microsoft stacked the workgroup with allies from Apple, Intel, Novell, Canon and Toshiba. ECMA ratified OOXML, then Microsoft took it to ISO using the same "fast track" process.So on one hand you had an "open" specification pushed by Sun with help from IBM.And on the other hand you had an "open" specification pushed by Microsoft with help from Apple, Intel, Novell, Canon and Toshiba.Is one more "open" than the other? No. They are two standards created by two competing industry groups with their own self interests.StarOffice became OpenOffice before Oracle bought out Sun. Oracle then abandoned OpenOffice, to be picked up by IBM using the Apache umbrella. IBM wanted to merge OpenOffice with its own languishing Lotus suite. But then IBM basically abandoned OpenOffice as well, so it's a dying project. Many key OpenOffice developers defected to LibreOffice years ago.

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 08:43:18 am
content: New doubts about ISO's fast-track standardisation of Microsoft OOXMLhttps://wikileaks.org/wiki/New_doubts_about_ISO's_fast-track_standardisation_of_Microsoft_OOXML

author: VinzC
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 08:47:11 am
content: Duty calls...Quote from: VinzC on April 30, 2016, 08:26:58 pmQuote from: suicidaleggroll on April 30, 2016, 10:02:00 pmStating a fact makes no one an idiot [sorry: ignorant, superficial, and disrespectful]. Claiming "LibreOffice document compatibility with Microsoft document format(s) is laughable" makes you an ignorant about the background story. First because ODF had undergone a long standardisation process before Microsoft came. Second because 6000 pages with so many bugs doesn't make it a viable standard. Thirdly Microsoft attitude towards standards is known: they don't respect them.When you say Open/LibreOffice compatibility [with something that doesn't deserve the term "standard"] is *laughable*, it clearly denotes you had no idea what the story was. So it is disrespectful because you're only taking "what you see" into account. What you see may be a fact but the facts behind the standardisation process, which you decided to completely ignore [or not investigate], also exist.So no, I didnotsay *you* were disrespectful, I didnotsay *you* were superficial. I said your *observation* was superficial, your *comment* was disrespectful, both making *you* ignorant of many of the facts behind the OOXML standardisation masquerade.Quote from: suicidaleggroll on April 30, 2016, 10:02:00 pmI know. And agree. I just wonder where you fetched that from...Quote from: suicidaleggroll on April 30, 2016, 10:02:00 pmMS office doesn't handle ODF well either — up until a certain version you needed a plugin to convert OOXML to ODF. And that plugin was far from efficient. That's really weird, isn't it? A format specification that's ten times less in volume not implemented correctly... Hmmm.. could it be because MS management decided to spare no effort to screw document standards? (which was exactly my point, as was the conference tenant's, whom I talked about.)Imagine the situation being reversed. Just a few seconds. If ODF were the most used document format (forget about the usability of the interface, i.e. LibreOffice for a moment), who would *you* blame for not supporting the other «competitor»?Note that I based my observation upon what I saw of Office 2010 (IIRC). The situation might have improved since.Quote from: suicidaleggroll on April 30, 2016, 10:02:00 pmIt's all about what facts we decide to take into account...Quote from: suicidaleggroll on April 30, 2016, 10:02:00 pmAnd my opinion is that a "low quality observation" is not enough to make a valid point. But that's my opinion and you're not forced to agree with it either, right?Quote from: suicidaleggroll on April 30, 2016, 10:02:00 pmNot in the morning, thanks. Later maybe.Quote from: ade on May 01, 2016, 04:07:28 amThat's where it hurts. Had there been one standard (whichever, I don't care), it'd be all good. But Microsoft decided toscrew it all up, once again: more than one standard for the same topic makes them worthless. It's even worse when one of them has so many inconsistencies.What to say of this?Quote from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML#TechnicalEven the name "Office Open XML" that was chosen is a heavy hint at the kind of confusion Microsoft was meant to throw:Quote from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML#TechnicalThe process was highly suspected of being manipulated:Quote from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML#Process_manipulationAs a matter of fact, Microsoft representatives put quite a lot of pressure to have their document format approved and voted. What amazed was the number of abstentions in the voting process, which wasfar from reaching a consensus!Why was ECMA voting almost unanimous (with the Exception of IBM) while ISO members were so much divided?It's not a question whether one is more open than the other, no. The question is about one being a whole load of insanity and inconsistencies. One is viable, the other one not.Worth reading fromArsTechnica.The entire standardisation process was questionable and takes more of a farce than a fair procedure. *That* is unacceptable. Now that raises questions about our dearest standardisation organisations and their resilience against corruption. But that's quite another story.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 09:26:28 am
content: Stuff is in a different place. It is called differently. Excel functions are called differently.All in all, you dont save money using it, because you waste time. And sometimes when you send it to someone, and the least bit of tiny difference can cost you way more than the price of the software. I used free software for important documents. It was one of the biggest mistake I've ever made.

author: VinzC
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 12:09:55 pm
content: Quote from: NANDBlog on May 01, 2016, 09:26:28 amYou can blame it on the double-standard.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 02:23:28 pm
content: Quote from: NANDBlog on May 01, 2016, 09:26:28 amI think it is safe to say Microsoft managed to keep their vendor lock-in AND make interoperability worse by abusing semi-open standards. That is quite an achievement! Still I find some aspects of Libre/Open Office easier to use then Microsoft's counterparts so basically I use both depending on the job at hand.

author: suicidaleggroll
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 02:53:24 pm
content: Quote from: VinzC on May 01, 2016, 08:47:11 amAll of that is completely irrelevant to what I was saying. I'm not pointing fingers at anybody for the current situation, you are. In my mind OO/LO and MS Office are two completely different office packages with next to zero cross-compatibility. Just like Altium vs KiCAD. If you need to support Altium data formats for your job, you can't use KiCAD. Similiarly, if you need to support MS Office document formats, you can't use OO/LO. End of story. It doesn't really matter whose fault it is that they're not compatible with each other.Picking who's at fault only matters if you want to change things, but even then it's pretty irrelevant as well. Microsoft has zero incentive to make their formats truly open, the second they did that they would start losing customers. It's in Microsoft best interest to keep the situation exactly as it currently is. If OO/LO wants to change things, the onus is on them, regardless of who's to blame for the current mess.Quote from: VinzC on May 01, 2016, 08:47:11 amProbably.Quote from: VinzC on May 01, 2016, 08:47:11 amWhy would it matter who I "blame"? Why are you so caught up in blaming somebody?If the industry primarily uses company "X"'s software and its native file format to remotely collaborate and deliver end-products, and company "Y" wants to gain market share, then company "Y" either needs to make their software support company "X"'s native file format as well as company "X"'s software does so it can be used as a drop-in replacement, or company "Y" needs to make their product good enough that it incentivizes the entire industry to switch over. It makes no difference if company "X"'s software's native file format is truly compatible with an open standard or not. If it was it would make company "Y"'s job easier, but that's about it.

author: VinzC
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 03:31:44 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on May 01, 2016, 02:23:28 pmMost definitely, yes!.Quote from: nctnico on May 01, 2016, 02:23:28 pmSomeone talked about CSV earlier, which is (of course just) one example Open/LibreOffice handles some things better — been more than 15 years Excel expects CSV to be... "semi-colon separated values"... just don't put line breaks in cells though.In many situation, yes, you may have to handle both suites.

author: Synthetase
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 03:48:49 pm
content: Quote from: suicidaleggroll on April 27, 2016, 02:47:13 pm^This. Some odd responses in this thread about what the 'right' tools are, what any given tool 'should' or 'should not' be doing, etc. So completely and utterly irrelevant to anyone trying to get work done in a business environment. Nobody in the business gives a crap about open source software politics or compatibility or who's fault it is for x or y. We're trying to get work done. All I want is for my colleagues on the other side of the planet to be able to read and add track changes to my documents. I want the scientific journals to be able to read and alter my drafts. I want my students to be able to submit their papers. For better or worse my industry runs on MS Office and we don't care because it works. Changing over would cost us millions of hours in productivity that could be better spentdoing our jobs. We are not alone.

author: VinzC
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 07:22:04 pm
content: Quote from: suicidaleggroll on April 27, 2016, 02:47:13 pmQuote from: Synthetase on May 01, 2016, 03:48:49 pmI thought I had clearly explained why that "^this" is impossible. The current state of document formats defined by Microsoft makes it technically and humanly impossible for anyone else than Microsoft to build tools that are [what you call] "truly" compatible .And this:Quote from: Synthetase on May 01, 2016, 03:48:49 pm*is* a problem on its own.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 08:44:19 pm
content: QuotePure FUD, comparing apples to oranges. The whole point of ISO "Fast Track" is that the proposed spec for consideration isalreadyan industry standard from a recognized consortium.So the Fast Track process is mainlyprocedural. The number of pages the spec has makes no significant difference. At the ISO level, the underlying industry standard isn't going to be majorly revised.The timeline for approval is simply the time required to go through all the Fast Track phases (contra phase, ballot phase, resolution phase, etc.), most of which havefixedtimelines.Accordingly both ODF and OOXML went through the Fast Track process in similar time frames, about 18 months.QuoteThat one is easy: politics. The major objections were from countries like Brazil, India and South Africa which were against Microsoft's dominance. But that's a political argument, not a technical one, and certainly not one which would derail the ISO Fast Track process.QuoteAlready discussed in an earlier post.OASIS didn't produce ODF. Sun did.ECMA didn't produce OOXML. Microsoft did.What's the difference? Nothing. Objecting to one but not the other is simply hypocritical.QuoteNot viable according to you. But in reality, OOXML today enjoys wider support than ODF.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_supports_Office_Open_XMLQuoteYou're quoting theinterim ballot, which is irrelevant. In the final ballot OOXML passed with 75% approval, far higher than required. The objection percentage (14%) was also far lower than the threshold.Consensus was reached.QuoteDid you check the date? That was new in2008.Welcome to 2016!

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 10:36:45 pm
content: It is not as simple as blaming Microsoft. I have been using OO off and on for years in an effort to avoid MS, putting perhaps 15-20% of my documents in OO. In reading this thread I found that development is more active in LO, so I downloaded it and tried it. Generally nice, and faster than older versions of OO, though same or slower than the current version.The zinger was that a relatively simple document, generated in the most recent version of OO and saved in ODF did not render completely correctly in LO. The "much simpler" ODF standard was apparently too difficult on one end of that exchange or another.So now it is not about blame, but it should not be about excuses either. If the ODF "standard" cannot be consistently rendered it is not any more useful than any other "standard".

author: HackedFridgeMagnet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2016, 10:59:40 pm
content: It is probably not too difficult to post an example of the "Zinger".So pls do.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 01:36:17 am
content: I won't post the Zinger because it is a document with family information I don't care to share. But I am happy to describe the nature of the problem.The document is a family history, and contains a narrative text with embedded jpeg maps, photos and diagrams. The embedded objects have captions, and the frame property is set to have text wrapping. There are a couple dozen of these items embedded in the document at the current state of completion, the total document runs a couple of dozen pages. There are major sections and other simple formats of the text, but overall the document is quite simple. Single column. No headers, footnotes, endnotes, table of contents, index or any other complications.When read in LO, ONE of the embedded images lost the text wrapping property. It was easy to edit and fix, and I haven't taken the time to see if the edited document now goes back and forth. This problem was easy to see, and easy to fix in this small document. The larger documents often created in business environments make this sort of thing much more challenging, and detection of the errors usually occurs at the most in-opportune moment.

author: HackedFridgeMagnet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 01:53:24 am
content: More like a fizzer then?Quote from: CatalinaWOW on May 01, 2016, 10:36:45 pmLO renders the standard for me, or at least until you can demonstrate otherwise.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 03:08:55 am
content: Quote from: HackedFridgeMagnet on May 02, 2016, 01:53:24 amOk, it didn't happen. After the edits I mentioned in the previous post it renders the same in both free office products. That does make the problem difficult to debug. I haven't been able to regenerate a version of the document that shows the problem.Since what I reported didn't happen you and others will just have find some other reason to explain why I and others are leery of these products. Since we are obviously lying when we report them. Thank you for your vote of confidence. (By the way I have no connection in any way with any of the products being discussed, other than as a user, and as someone who would like to get off the Microsoft bandwagon.)

author: HackedFridgeMagnet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 04:41:01 am
content: Sorry I didn't mean to imply you were lying and I really don't doubt what you say happened, did indeed happen.But I would say a Zinger would be easily reproducible and hence possible to apportion the error to either one version of LO or one version of OO.I was also thinking that maybe the error may have originated as an import from MS Office.I must admit I am somewhat leery of MS products for similar reasons. ie. weird errors. that and its own standard not properly supported.

author: Synthetase
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 06:51:44 am
content: Quote from: VinzC on May 01, 2016, 07:22:04 pmAnd since everyone in my industry uses up-to-date MSO applications, this is a problem because...?I've never had an issue with document incompatibility between different MSO products that in any way affected the way we do business. But apparently my industry should spend millions of hours re-training and learning to use different pieces of software that do not actually have all the functionality we need because 'reasons'.Quote from: VinzC on May 01, 2016, 07:22:04 pmNo, it isn't. Because I was hired by my employer to perform a specific role with the goal ofmaking more money for the business. Wasting time worrying about whether other software products may or may not be able to do the same job I already do does not in any way further that goal. And since no-one else in my industry is going to change, the point is moot anyway. The tools we have do the job.

author: HackedFridgeMagnet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 07:14:26 am
content: Quote from: Synthetase on May 02, 2016, 06:51:44 amPlease don't exaggerate, everyone in your industry does not use up-to-date MSO applications.I think the problem he's talking about is that a lack of competition does interfere with one of the building blocks of capitalism, the free market.Whereas a good Standard (well thought out and well written ) and an open standard would encourage competition between venders, saving your company money.As an example, notice how much better HTML is these days than in the early days when IE dominated.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 09:16:30 am
content: QuoteThat's not much of an argument. IE dominated in large part because it was better than earlier (open) browsers like the original CERN browser and NCSA Mosaic.We make fun of IE today, but core concepts of the modern web were Microsoft innovations. Dynamic HTML, modern event handling, IFRAMEs, AJAX, CSS, drag and drop, etc., were all first implemented in IE.

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 12:01:22 pm
content: Quote from: ade on May 02, 2016, 09:16:30 amNo, IE dominated in large part because it was bundled with windows. Microsoft is convicted for abuse of their dominant marketposition.The mistake the judge made was to not split up microsoft in two companies, one for the OS, one for applications.

author: HackedFridgeMagnet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 12:02:57 pm
content: Quote from: ade on May 02, 2016, 09:16:30 amSorry, you said you disagreed with my argument but you forgot to refute it??To further explain my example:-I feel we are better off now under Html 5 because it is a well accepted standard. In the bad old days there was a Html standard but MS decided it knew better and proceeded to disregard it. It could do this from a position of power as it had maybe 90% of installed browsers.Some examples of CSS selector hacks from stack overflow. In the bad old days you had to write separate selectors for IE. I'm fairly sure these days are gone.Code:/***** Selector Hacks ******//* IE6 and below */* html #uno { color: red }/* IE7 */*:first-child+html #dos { color: red }/* IE8 (Everything but IE 6,7) */html>/**/body #cuatro { color: red }In regards to web technologies, what about JScript?Was that MS trying to mess up International standards again?The gist of what I am saying is that we the consumers are better off without one player controlling the field.

author: ade
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 06:53:32 pm
content: QuoteBut before Microsoft adopted CSS in IE3, we didn't haveanyCSS selectors.That's my whole point. Back then, there were various specs for competing style sheet mechanisms floating around, but no commercial browser supported any of them.Netscape had their own style sheet solution called JSSS (JavaScript Style Sheets) which they tried to push via the W3C standards process.Microsoft backed a competing spec which later became CSS. (CSS became a W3C Recommendation four monthsafterMicrosoft implemented it in IE3).Netscape tried to kill CSS by making it second class to JSSS in Navigator, but was unsuccessful.Microsoft then implemented Dynamic HTML on top of CSS. The rest is history.

author: eugenenine
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 10:15:32 pm
content: Quote from: Karel on May 02, 2016, 12:01:22 pmI still run into people who refuse to use anything because its not IE/Microsoft. It took me years to convince my parents to quit using IE. Finally my mother started asking why I had to clean up her pc every time I came to visit. 6 months later of changing nothing but IE to Firefox and no ad/spyware yet.

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 10:35:26 pm
content: I ran into an issue today. A research paper I was writing. We were given a template to use and just had to delete the stuff and replace it. I worked on it in Word, but in class, the computers had Open Office. When I opened it, the page headers showed someone else's name. Apparently there was a hidden header that somehow enabled itself.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 11:01:40 pm
content: Quote from: Stonent on May 02, 2016, 10:35:26 pmThat is why you should distribute PDFs! Sometimes you can discover the most interesting information from a Word document by looking at the change history. When I need to distribute a Word document I create it from scratch and copy existing text into it -hoping this avoids copying old changes-.

author: HackedFridgeMagnet
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2016, 11:21:46 pm
content: Quote from: ade on May 02, 2016, 06:53:32 pmSo MS finds somebody else's standard implements parts of it, adds its own undocumented hacks and deserves congratulations?I repeat that,what I am saying is that we the consumers are better off without one player controlling the field.In this case I no longer use MS Office because.The standard is close to incomprehensible ( to me anyway) , so it's hard to say if a document is compliant.The overview also contains the following phrase.QuoteWhich is why it is such a long crappy standard.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2016, 06:55:56 am
content: Again, the Microsoft Word file formats are far more complex than ordinary tagged text, because the object model in Word is radically different from the tagged text people assume it to be. This is an ancient design decision made back in the days of computers with 64KB of RAM and slow storage. In a tagged text object model, to determine the formatting of a given character, you necessarilymustload and parse theentire textbefore the character in question, because some tag 230 pages ago is still open and thus affects the current character. If the document exceeds available RAM… well, crap.Word's model of atomic text chunk objects (arranged hierarchically into sections and paragraphs) which arealwaysassociated with a style (hence the "normal" style as a default; styles themselves are atomic objects) allows for document size to exceed available RAM, because all that must be loaded is the text chunk objects for the pages on the screen, the styles used by those chunks, and the data that retains the order of the chunks and their associations to styles. Additionally, to mitigate slow storage, edited objects could simply be appended to the end of the file (and merely the associations changed), with the old versions of those objects left in place in the file but unused. This was the "fast save" option that Word had for ages. Tagged text necessarily requires rewriting the entire file from the first place any character is inserted in the source code.Now, if one was going to design Word today, we might make different design decisions. But those decisions made sense in the early 1980s, and now they live on in the Word object model, which cannot be significantly changed without risking compatibility.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2016, 07:08:39 am
content: Quote from: Karel on April 27, 2016, 03:43:26 pmMany office tasks simply cannot be shoehorned into such a restrictive workflow. For one thing, as others have said, organizations do not live in bubbles; interoperability with external organizations is usually critical. And equally critically, this must often beread-writecompatibility. PDF is ideal for distribution of final documents, but documents frequently go back and forth for editing. PDF was not designed for editing (quite the contrary, it was originally designed precisely to prevent it), but rather for document display fidelity without needing to have the originating application around (digital printouts, in essence). If you want to edit, and even more so if you use change tracking (which is usually highly advisable), then you need source document compatibility. (As an aside, LO's change tracking is literally years behind MS Office's. LO's simply does not meet the needs of professional writers/editors.)And more broadly, you imply that LO can do everything MS Office can. But to put it bluntly, it can't. LO doesn't come close to having the features of MS Office. And while everyone speaks of bloat in MS Office, MS's own user studies have found that while any given user uses less than 20% of the available features, the MS Office user baseas a wholeregularly uses essentiallyallthe features. You can't strip any of those features from MS Office, and if LO never put them in to begin with, it necessarily cannot be a viable substitute toallMS Office users.

author: MrSlack
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2016, 07:45:39 am
content: Yep. LO doesn't do SharePoint. You'd be surprised what you can cram into that pile of crap. I'm no fan myself but it solves complex document workflow problems relatively better than anything else out there.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2016, 08:46:46 am
content: Quote from: tooki on May 03, 2016, 07:08:39 amThis whole argument just comes down to a difference in philsosophy. In your world, MS Office is the only choice for ever, and everyone should have to pay a price that has no relationship to Microsoft's development costs for the rest of their lives - the MS Office tax, for the reason that Microsoft will always do all it can to make sure that no-one can ever claim to be totally identical to MS Office. If LO catch up, MS will have added new features ensuring that LO is still not compatible.Some of us think that this is a bleak future.So when you talk above about the features necessary to match MS Office, some of us think just in terms of "Office", and then we can see the features missing from MS Office that are also very important. Some of them are:LO supports more platformsLO can be installed and run where there is no Internet accessLO can be installed and run without needing permission from a companyLO can run from a USB stick without installationLO is free which is a democratising factor around the world where incomes differ dramaticallyLO supports 111 languages compared to MS Offices 96LO supports Right-to-Left languages like Arabic on all platforms. MS Office has only supported this very recently in Office 2016 on OS/X. Previous versions do not.LO has a more powerful PDF printing supportLO has much greater support for CMIS protocol for Document Management Systems. MS tends to support this for other MS products only.LO can import many legacy formats that MS Office cannot including MS Works and old MS Word for Mac documentsand so on.Of course you can make a similar list for MS Office, but the list above is impressive. It does show that MS office really falls down in some areas.As a class of programs, I am unimpressed by all Office packages including MS Office and LO in that I do not see the kind of brilliance in the structure, and the extensibility that I see in other software areas such as many of the Internet RFCs. Office packages seem more like layer upon layer of hacks that somehow work, rather then a clean simple concept with ideas that are genius. Where are the big concepts - such as "How do future generations read the documentation of today?". Microsoft absolutely do not care less about this as they use proprietary copyright fonts by default, and these fonts are not defined in the OOXML standard. Microsoft is earning over 100 Billion dollars a year from MS Office, and yet they refuse to act like a visionary with a concern for the future of the world. Microsoft's vision is "Let's get every household in the world paying us $10 a month".If I can make choices that will allow for the concept of "Office" rather then "MS Office", I am happy to make those choices. From the point of view of "Office", I think that Microsoft could and should do much more then it is doing now. I also think that ensuring the viability of the alternatives is essential, and the only way I can help there is to use an alternative. Even if MS Office is better in some ways.

author: MrSlack
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2016, 09:09:30 am
content: For 99% of people none of the features matter other than whether or not you can get trained monkeys to drive it which is almost certain with Office...

author: eugenenine
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2016, 12:42:06 am
content: I'd bet that most people and businesses don't think about their office documents being readable a decade from now. I have adobe pdf's that were created around y2k which give errors in current versions of adobe reader so even their so-called portable format isn't all that portable. Its been over 10 years now since I converted everything of mine at home from MSOffice to OpenDocument and everything still works fine.I got burned by an MSMoney upgrade when it wouldn't read the file from the old version and my paid call to tech support concluded my document was corrupted. I had to run the two versions on two separate PC's so I could use the two files.

author: Tailgate
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: May 05, 2016, 01:40:24 am
content: I don't like Open Office as much as the Gates-ware product, but mainly because I have used the other office suite for 20+ years. There are lots of little things that bug me, especially on the spreadsheets and presentation programs. Things like the ease of doing sum calculations, or editing photos.But for free...I use Open Office at home, as it's mainly the annoyances versus any real functionality that makes me dislike it some. Like most humans, I hate changes from "what I know."

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2016, 04:23:05 am
content: Quote from: blueskull on May 05, 2016, 03:08:21 amThis is a known bug that seemed to be the result of a code update on Dec 9th 2015. This was code that used the GetScanlineSize call instead of calculating the Scanline Size (whatever that is). Obviously, the GetScanlineSize call did not work exactly as the programmer intended. The problem has been fixed and I gather the fixed code will come in Libre Office 5.2.0.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2016, 05:17:39 am
content: Quote from: amspire on May 03, 2016, 08:46:46 amThose things are all true, but I was simply disputing the implication that LO could replace MS Office for everyone. It can for many people, but decidedly not for all, especially in many professional workflows.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2016, 05:32:28 am
content: Quote from: tooki on May 05, 2016, 05:17:39 amAbsolutely. There are not many people who thinks there shouldn't be MS Office, and choosing MS Office is a good safe choice. Things would be better if the Office world was oriented more to standards that make it easier for companies to have compatibility and standards that would accept new ideas if they are good ones equally from anywhere.Genuine competition has been great for the web browsers. It is unfortunate that the Office market hasn't gone the same way.

author: MrSlack
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2016, 09:44:25 am
content: Quote from: amspire on May 05, 2016, 05:32:28 amThank goodness. Last thing we need is a whole load of crap piled on business critical infrastructure randomly. I'd rather stick with the monoculture than have to hire someone to frig my documents so they work on every office package. That's where we would end up.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 05, 2016, 01:54:52 pm
content: Quote from: amspire on May 05, 2016, 04:23:05 amCalling it a known bug doesn't make it all right. It is very good that the bug has been found, and good that an update fixing it will be available shortly. But this sounds like the argument between early Apple users and MS folks. A system crash on MS caused the screen to turn blue with an obscure code reference. On Apple a polite box with an image of an old fashioned bomb appeared saying that Error XXXX had occurred. One was somehow better than the other.The point is that all of these Office systems are huge constructs that will in the very nature of large software have bugs. The number of bugs and the pain they cause to the user are what are up for debate, and whether it is due to nefarious action on MS part, or some other factor, bugs in opening the other guys format seem to be more frequent with the non-MS products. The relative pain and importance of these bugs depends on the market share, an area that hugely favors MS.

author: eugenenine
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2016, 12:05:09 am
content: What about all the known bugs in MSOffice. I reported several major bugs when my company rolled out Office 2010 only to receive a nasty e-mail back telling my I was crazy because Microsoft has tested it and the company tested it. I rolled back to office 2007 and then a while later when Sp1 for 2010 came out I read the list of fixes and spotted a couple of the ones I reported so I requested Office 2010 and they requested Sp1.The big difference here is it costs a lot of $ to get buggy versions of Office but I can get a less buggy version of Open/Libre Office for free.Excel turned one of my spreadsheets into a .tmp file today. This time though it was at least able to open it again.

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 11, 2016, 08:46:05 pm
content: Italian military to save 26-29 million Euro by migrating to LibreOfficehttps://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/italian-military-save-26-29-million-euro-migrating-libreoffice

author: JPortici
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 11, 2016, 09:40:42 pm
content: my mother works in PA, have been forced to use OO for i think 4 or 5 years now and almost every week she have a new episode of "what document got corrupted after today's nth calc/write crash" to share

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 12, 2016, 10:44:29 am
content: Quote from: Karel on May 11, 2016, 08:46:05 pmWow that is almost the price of a MIM-23 Hawk firing unit! Surely it is worth saving that over several years, with a lot of effort!

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 18, 2016, 06:05:11 pm
content: Quote from: Karel on May 11, 2016, 08:46:05 pmYeah they should probably ask Munich about that...