LibreOffice 7.2 Community is strong on interoperability

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/08/19/libreoffice-7-2-community/

by buovjaga • 5 years ago

61 54 5 years ago

blog.documentfoundation.org

Thank God. I'm a big fan of libre office but could never fully switch to it as 1/10 documents created in Word would just look broken when opened in libre.

Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by the ISO in April 2008, and not on the ISO approved standard, so they embed a large amount of hidden artificial complexity.

Why isn't there an anti-trust lawsuit against this artificial monopoly on office formats?

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

> Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by the ISO in April 2008, and not on the ISO approved standard, so they embed a large amount of hidden artificial complexity.
Why isn't there an anti-trust lawsuit against this artificial monopoly on office formats?

What? You want it to be illegal for Microsoft to use a file format of their own design when implementing their own software?

fsflover6• 5 years ago

Yes, if they use it unfairly against the competitors while being a monopoly.

marcodiego• 5 years ago

Microsoft pressured ISO to approve their format but NEVER implemented it according to the specification. In the meantime, many governments adopted MSO with the promise that compatibility would evetually be the norm. It never happened.

I don't know if an anti-trust lawsuit is adequate, but governments should ban adoption of proprietary formats entirely.

the_third_wave• 5 years ago

Microsoft produced the boondoggle 'Office Open XML' formwat in reaction to the moves made by several large organisations to standardise on the Open Document format as used by OpenOffice et al. Microsoft reacted like they often did: they created their own 'open' format, deceptively named 'Office Open XML' to make it easy to confuse with the OpenOffice XML-based format and submitted it to standardisation bodies in the hope that one would bite. ISO - which already standardised the Open Document format - did, giving Microsoft a weapon to wield in any bidding war on which file format should be adopted as a standard.

I called OOXML a boondoggle because that what it was. Microsoft's documentation of the format consisted of a several thousand pages long semi-binary dump of the files produced by Microsoft Office - which are not much more than memory dumps containing binary blobs, poured into an XML container with vague descriptions of what the data types actually were - often no more than 'as produced by Microsoft Office version x.y'. A large portion of the original OOXML files consisted of blobs of binary MS Office data, making it close to impossible to implement that version by non-Microsoft entities. When pressured Microsoft agreed that the current versions of Microsoft Office were not producing 'standard-compliant' OOXML but that this would change in newer versions. Well, the future came, the OOXML format was cleaned up and documented so as to be interoperable but Microsoft never adapted Microsoft Office to the standard, instead producing its own iteration of 'the standard'.

In short, the only reason why they every produced OOXML - the 'standard' - was to use it as a club to wield in negotiations. They never meant for it to be an actual data interchange standard, they never aimed at having third parties stand on a like footing with regard to which version of OOXML was meant to be canonical. It was, and still is, meant to be a box to tick on a compliance list for getting large contracts, not a file format standard to which their products would be tailored. Their vision is whatever is produced by the latest incarnation of Microsoft Office is 'the standard', just like before.

The real question to be answered here is why ISO went along with this charade when they already had a working file format standard in the Open Document format. They could just have said 'no' like other standards bodies did, Microsoft could have been made to implement the ODF format and the world would be a better, more interoperable place.

So indeed, Microsoft should not be allowed to use a file format of their own design when implementing their own software while selling it as if it abides by an ISO standard.

0zymandiass• 5 years ago

Ironically, Microsoft Office also fails to render most of my ODP/ODT files correctly, which are open standards. One might infer it's by design...

squarefoot• 5 years ago

1/10 documents created in Word would just look broken when opened in libre.

Versioning might play a role here. On Office I've often observed the tendency to use by default the latest format available, no matter if the poor guy on the other side will have to upgrade the suite to load it, therefore LibreOffice might come late since its developers for some time have to debug what Office already implements. I now set up all LO installations i do for me and other people to output where possible (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) in Office 97-2003 formats, so they hardly give problems on Windows machines. Nobody complained so far, as it is extremely unlikely that those "ancient" but well oiled formats don't support the features needed by 99.9% of users.

davidgerard4• 5 years ago

as 1/10 documents created in Word would just look broken when opened in libre.

I don't believe you. Bug report numbers?

tpoacher• 5 years ago

Whenever I'm in a situation where I predict compatibility complaints, I preemptively go on the offensive by turning the tables and say "Please be aware that MS Office has bad compatibility with open standards; if you need 100% certainty your document will render correctly, then use a different office suite to open this file."

owly2• 5 years ago

Has anyone here successfully migrated a large organization from MSFT to Libre? How was user adoption and feedback? Any specific issues to report when collaborating with external organizations using MSFT?

ChuckNorris892• 5 years ago

I saw the hospital in my hometown be fully on libre, although on Windows 10.

commoner3• 5 years ago

There are a ton of case studies listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_adoption that might be useful.

owly2• 5 years ago

Thanks all!

xcambar• 5 years ago

My current employer is a juggernaut (10k+ employees worldwide). I've had that discussion, and among answers I've received, the most prominent were:

* compatibility with external docs (incoming) and external systems (outgoing)

* the whole Office365 suite provides sharing out of the box

* preexisting knowledge of the Office suite

* Excel is just better

It looks like the most unfair advantage of Office is that it is already everywhere.

2Gkashmiri2• 5 years ago

I often had compatibility bugs with excel files around 2-3 years ago. What would happen is, I see a visual bug for example and the next update often fixed it.

For the last year or so I have switched completely to LO which has been a little rough but not difficult.

Calc has native =regex which is a killer feature

buovjaga3• 5 years ago

You might also enjoy this collection of deployments: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Migrations

sdze2• 5 years ago

Did they finally manage to render a nice UI for mac Retina displays?

commoner3• 5 years ago

Yes, the HiDPI bug on macOS was fixed in LibreOffice 7.1.2:

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138122

sdze2• 5 years ago

Thx

commoner3• 5 years ago

The most interesting new feature of LibreOffice 7.2 is the heads-up display, which can quickly search for any menu option. It resembles the command palette in Visual Studio Code. The keyboard shortcut to activate the HUD is Shift + Esc.

GIF demo: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/08/libreoffice-7-2-release-...

Squarex• 5 years ago

It's great but why does every app have to have a different shortcut. vscode, intllij idea and now libreoffice.

dsego2• 5 years ago

This is also known as a command palette in other programs, like sublime, vs code, win terminal and others.

I think Ubuntu had the right idea with building a similar feature into Unity, so every program could use it.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/131617/how-do-i-use-the-hud

ptx• 5 years ago

Didn't Mac OS X do this years ago?

Edit: Since 2007: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2007102708084461...

orangepanda• 5 years ago

Wouldnt Microsoft Office's Search box be a better comparison?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/find-what-you-need...

fartcannon3• 5 years ago

I was thinking it's a lot like AutoCAD.

ubermonkey3• 5 years ago

If they had focused on true interop with Office a decade ago, then they'd have more traction (and credibility) here.

Back when Office was absurdly expensive, the need for a free/Free option was pretty huge. I don't see that need now -- I mean, I get that there are free-as-in-freedom types who will always choose LO over MS Office, and good on them for it, but that's an uncommon position. In every collaborative business context I've ever been in, using something OTHER than true-blue MS Office was a recipe for sadness. This-or-that formatting wouldn't work. Macros wouldn't work. Templates and styles wouldn't work. It's always been a nightmare.

We'd put up with it if there was literally no other way, but now that Office is both affordable and much, much more broadly available, I don't see any reason to experiment with LO at all.

davidgerard4• 5 years ago

I sincerely believe this is actually a made-up problem. It has literally always been an excuse, not an actual issue.

My evidence: nobody EVER bags Google Docs over its terrible DOCX compatibility. It makes an absolute hash of DOCX.

Have you ever heard anyone complain of this? No you haven't.

The claim that this was the killer issue was always just an excuse.

fartcannon3• 5 years ago

FUD, to use the old term.

ubermonkey3• 5 years ago

My evidence: nobody EVER bags Google Docs over its terrible DOCX compatibility. It makes an absolute hash of DOCX.

This is probably because most orgs that use Google Docs don't care about DOCX compatibility. But the vast majority of offices use MS Office, so Docx compatibility is a big damn deal.

But! I will say that I absolutely HAVE heard many, many people reference the lack of docx compatibility as a reason NOT to use Google Docs -- or anything else that isn't Office.

Even if we entertain your idea, though, and this isn't really a reason people don't use LO (even though it is), what then is the REAL reason people don't use LO?

2Gkashmiri2• 5 years ago

The changelog lists a lot of compatibility bug fixes with ms office files in the recent updates including this one so one might say they are going in the right direction.

I have around a dozen bugs open on their bugs page which gets some attention but I suggest everyone to do bug reporting. Heck, I often write bug reports for lazy people which would get picked up.

roenxi• 5 years ago

Linux user, 100% LibreOffice, no choice & no complaints. But it is funny how MS office just always seems to have the edge.

Honestly this is one of the areas where I think a government sponsorship program to encourage open formats and the tools to work with them would be good. MS Office is one of the great productivity tools of the 21st century. It is unbelievable how much has been done with it. But the document locking will be long term harmful.

LibreOffice is competing with a software leviathan here. There aren't many beasts bigger than Office.

teilo• 5 years ago

This is the first LibreOffice in ages that made me trash my user preferences (on Mac). It was unusable after installing over 7.1. Completely locked up on almost everything.

zxspectrum1982• 5 years ago

LibreOffice Base is the only application I still use from time to time. I replaced Writer, Calc and Impress with WPS Office and never looked back.

https://linux.wps.com/

It's free but not open source but still it's so much lighter and fast and compatible than LibreOffice...

davidgerard4• 5 years ago

Do you have examples of documents that WPS Office handles correctly (like MS Word, presumably) that LibreOffice fails on?

(I see this claim a lot, but have never seen it substantiated checkably.)

_imnothere• 5 years ago

WPS is no good in term of privacy and openness tbh.

spacemanmatt• 5 years ago

I just wish I could get the DB form builder to work without crashing. I've become quite the Calc fan, due to needing to deal with Excel docs from my team constantly. (Also, csvkit is saving my bacon)

buovjaga3• 5 years ago

Please report the crashes and our QA team will do backtraces and bisects for them, so they can be quickly fixed. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugReport

orev2• 5 years ago

One thing I think LO should focus more advertising on is the PDF editing capabilities of Draw. It really works very well and I can pretty much get anything I need done without having to resort to Acrobat.

This could be a good way to get a foothold in companies who just want that, who then realize they can use it for other things too.

davidgerard4• 5 years ago

yep, I use this all the time

one thing to watch: you need exactly the same fonts installed, or the layout may go odd with the substitute font

orev2• 5 years ago

That’s the one issue I’ve had as well, and I think I’ve traced it to Firefox (this could easily be something that happens with other things as well) not using the correct font name when saving to PDF. Even if the CSS says “Arial”, it saves it with some strange name like “CFont+A2”. You can fix it by adding and entry to the font substitution table, but that definitely an area that still needs work.

LibreOffice 7.2 Community is strong on interoperability

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