

How to affordably own your office software: LibreOffice - CrankyBear
http://www.zdnet.com/how-to-affordably-own-your-office-software-7000011449/

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dworin
I've actually tried to run a business on LibreOffice instead of MS Office, and
it lasted about two days. If you're in a general business profession that
relies on an office suite, not a developer or journalist where you're making
simple unformatted documents or basic lists in Excel, LibreOffice doesn't even
come close. The same goes for Google Apps, and even Microsoft's own Live Apps.
The user interface in MS Office is so much more refined, there's a greater
depth of time saving features, and it runs so much faster that spending money
on MS Office paid for itself right away.

I've found that I personally have a great deal of cognitive dissonance when it
comes to pricing for MS Office. On the one hand, I hate the idea that software
that I used to pay for once and have forever I now rent for a potentially
greater sum over time. On the other hand, I spend more time in MS Office than
any other software I own, except for a web browser (which is usually
productivity-detracting, not enhancing). People don't mind paying similar
amounts for cloud CRM or project management systems that offer pretty basic
functionality, but don't like the idea that Microsoft would move to that model
with a much richer offering.

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DanBC
I agree that some users will have a need for MS Office over LibreOffice.

I'm not trying to convert you. But what, apart from the interface, did you
find missing in LibreOffice?

I see people saying that the free Office suites don't do what they need, but I
don't see what is missing. And I think that might be useful information for
the free Office teams.

(Personally: I found search and replace for formatting characters much harder
in LibreOffice than it needed to be.)

~~~
Joeri
My employer at some point decided to save money by mandating openoffice
instead of ms office for anyone who only made documents for internal use
(documents, spreadsheets and presentations). I ended up using openoffice for a
little over a year, until our team demanded ms office licenses, and it turned
me off of the product. I even switched from openoffice to ms office at home,
out of sheer frustration with the product.

Simply speaking, openoffice's problem was not a lack of features, it was a
lack of quality. Using it was a constant exercise in working around bugs and
poorly thought out user interface design. The lasting impression openoffice
made on me was a feature-complete product handicapped by decades worth of
technical debt. I am glad libreoffice are trying to reverse the trend, and I
keep a regular eye on the progress they're making, but I really "get it" now
why ms office has no competition.

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mcherm
Do you recall any examples of these bugs and poorly thought out user interface
design?

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Joeri
Bullets constantly got confused when you were copy-pasting text (word is no
champion here either, but it's a bit more sane). Image paste tended to
minutely resize images to be just not a 1 to 1 pixel mapping at 100% zoom,
which coupled with a poor image scaling algorithm produced horribly artifacted
images on screen no matter what you did. Images were a pain in general,
positioning them and putting borders around them never worked right and I
opened many a document to find broken images. The change tracking and review
tools were painful to use. There were many issues, too many to cover in a
comment.

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rthomas6
LibreOffice isn't as good as MS Office, especially for anything that ever
needs to be touched by MS Office, ever. Sure, writer is great (if you don't
expect the exact same formatting in Word), but God forbid you need to use the
LibreOffice Powerpoint equivalent to do ANYTHING with a Powerpoint created
slideshow. Or Calc to edit a large and complex Excel spreadsheet.

~~~
nathan_long
If the main problem you have with LibreOffice is "it sucks for editing MS
Office files", that's a shortcoming of MS Office files.

Practically speaking, if you need to interchange files, you'd still need MS
Office. But direct your grumbles at MS lock-in, not at LibreOffice.

~~~
rthomas6
What MS lock-in? Nobody's forcing the world to use MS Office. They just
already do. And since sometimes people will give me MS Office files, I need
programs that can edit them correctly. I don't see how it's MS Office's fault
that LibreOffice incorrectly formats Office documents. Microsoft doesn't seem
to be taking steps to lock others out from editing Office format files.

~~~
nathan_long
Whether they are actively trying to lock you in, I don't know. But neither are
they making great efforts at interoperability.

I've had personal files becomes inaccessible before because they were in
proprietary formats and the program no longer ran on my OS. That "lock-in" may
or may not have been intentional by the software maker, but the effect on me
was the same regardless. Now I use explicitly open formats and maintain my
ability to change software.

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adieulot
Though I don’t fully trust LibreOffice to be compatible with any Word
document, I’ve been impressed with the progress in the last one or two years.
Some Word documents with a tad advanced formatting that failed miserably two
years ago render perfectly today in LibreOffice.

If you haven’t used LibreOffice for a while, you might be pleasantly
surprised.

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chestnut-tree
There are other (paid-for) office alternatives if you don't want to use MS
Office or Libre Office. Corel's Wordperfect suite is one
(<http://www.corel.com>). Or the very cheap Ability Office
(<http://www.ability.com>) which brazenly copies the MS Office interface as
closely as possible.

The German software company Ashampoo (<http://www.ashampoo.com>) has a cheap
Office Suite too (in English, as well as other languages).

So if you're looking for an MS Office alternative, it's not a simply a case of
Office vs the free or open-source alternatives. There are other paid-for
options too, some of which are very cheap.

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jlarocco
The outrage over Office's new licensing seems overblown, IMO. Don't most
people voluntarily buy a new copy of Office with each PC anyway?

It's hard to buy the vendor lock-in arguments, either, because Office has used
proprietary formats from the very beginning.

I don't use Office, though, so maybe I'm missing something.

~~~
Ergomane
I buy a new Office when a new version gives me something I want. I buy new
PC's on an entirely different schedule.

~~~
jlarocco
Yes, _you_ do, but most people don't - they click the "Install Office for
$200" checkbox when ordering a computer, then they never think about it again.

~~~
mcherm
Do you have any data on that? Because I've seen a few (sample size ~4... so
mine isn't useful data either) non-technical people doing this and in pretty
much all of the cases what they wanted was to keep using the same software
they'd been using for the past X years. Getting their "computer guy" (usually
me, or some local teenager) to copy files over for them was their preferred
way to move onto a new computer.

~~~
jlarocco
No hard data, but it's what I've seen the people I know doing. Lately they buy
Macs, but when they buy Windows machines, they usually choose the pre-
installed Office because it's easier than installing it later.

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mistermcgruff
Big fan of libreoffice. The Solver in Calc is great. And Calc can do most of
the complicated stuff MS Office can. But man is it uggo. They need to get some
UX volunteers. On the other hand, there's Google Drive, which is a completely
steaming pile of garbage for an analytics guy.

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niggler
LibreOffice is a subpar replacement for Excel (it gets some things right, but
can't do stuff like Bloomberg integration)

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pwthornton
How is the reliability of it? This professor had a data loss issue with the
last version:
[https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z135fbjhswilyzfui23...](https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z135fbjhswilyzfui23tzvbqwynufz5n2)

Owning software is much less important to me than keeping my creative works
safe.

I personally haven't used it in a few years. I do some writing in Google Docs,
but have begun to do more writing in .txt file programs. They are lightweight
and it's a format that will be around for a long time to come. Byword on OS X
is just awesome btw.

On Linux or Windows, Google Docs and plain text editors. On a Chromebook,
Google Docs works pretty well. I do wish there was s prettier version of Docs
just for writing text ala Byword.

~~~
beagle3
> Owning software is much less important to me than keeping my creative works
> safe.

I've lost so much time to MS Word version incompatibility issues, that I've
stopped using it almost completely back in 1999. I've had to use Word
occasionally at work, and had met some 2003<->2007 incompatibility issues as
well.

If you care about keeping your creative works safe, then relying on any
software you can't reinstall at will -- even if it is 10 years from now -- is
the wrong answer. Seems like MS office falls under that "wrong answer"
definition.

.txt, .html or latex files are the way to go. You'll be able to read them
until the sun goes out (although perhaps the "blink" attribute won't be
supported)

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gamblor956
LibreOffice is great, so long as you do not plan on ever exporting styled
documents back into MS Office. This of course means that you cannot use
LibreOffice for documents that will be sent to customers in MS Office formats.

~~~
mimiflynn
So long as no one needs to edit the original file, you could make a PDF out of
it.

I agree, though, seems like LibreOffice has a way to go.

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cpursley
As much as I love open source and as far as LibreOffice has come, the UX/UI is
just terrible. I'd rather pay to use the new Office or just Google docs just
so my eyes aren't raped over and over.

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cooldeal
>Call me old-fashioned, but I like "owning" my software. I like picking and
choosing where I can install it and how I use it. And, also call me sensible.
I can pay $150 a year for Office 365 Small Business Premium forever and a day
or I can use LibreOffice for free forever and use it anyway and anywhere I
want.

All that is fine, but I find it curious that SJVN likes Chromebooks a lot,
which are the ultimate in forcing people into a rental model. The 100GB of
free cloud storage that you get with Chromebooks is only free for two years.

From one of his previous articles:

>When you buy a Chromebook, you don't get just a standalone device with Chrome
OS. You get cloud storage, the Google Docs office suite, Gmail, and on and on.
In short, for one low price a Chromebook gives you everything you need from a
basic computer.

Not just that, but one of this other articles reads like a PR release from CDW
and Google. [http://www.zdnet.com/cdw-to-offer-enterprise-chromebook-
supp...](http://www.zdnet.com/cdw-to-offer-enterprise-chromebook-
support-7000010875/)

The only conclusion that I can gather from this is that SJVN likes to toe the
anti-Microsoft line, perhaps for pageviews and is willing to dance on either
side of the fence for it.

~~~
Meai
That's not the only conclusion, the average technophile user buys a new laptop
every ~2 years anyway. When I heard about Chromebooks, I didn't worry about
the 2 year limit on them at all. It's like saying "in 2 years you will still
be able to use your Chromebook but you have to transfer most of your files to
an external harddrive".

~~~
sliverstorm
Chromebooks are hardly targeted at the technophile.

I mean, sure, they want technophiles to buy them too, but Chromebooks were not
intended to be a technophile-only novelty.

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thoughtcriminal
Actually, I _like_ renting the latest MS Office. I don't have to pony up $300
to have the best office software anymore. I just pay $10 a month and it runs
seamless with Outlook, SkyDrive and Skype.

~~~
mtgx
Renting it sounds like a poor choice in the long term. I think people usually
keep one Office software for about a decade or so, or close to that. Paying
$100 every year for 10 years is a lot more than paying $300 at once. Also for
small businesses it's $150, and probably more for bigger companies.

What functionality are you missing from the free LibreOffice? Or are you
willing to pay that much just because you're "used to it"?

~~~
pavel_lishin
> What functionality are you missing from the free LibreOffice?

I'm not sure if LibreOffice deals with this better than OpenOffice, but being
able to open documents with "track changes" enabled, and not having them come
out like garbage, would be nice. (I tried finding the specific document in
question, but I guess I've erased it since then.)

> are you willing to pay that much just because you're "used to it"?

Depending on how much time it takes you to ramp up to your productivity in a
paid version, it might make a lot of sense to pay that much "because you're
used to it".

~~~
runevault
I haven't used LibreOffice since the true OS version was still OpenOffice,
does it even have Track Changes itself, or is that part of why files w/track
changes on look like garbage?

TT is probably the most useful feature for me in word, both for technical
documents going out for review and my personal fiction writing things when it
is time for me to deal with an editor (haven't yet, but EVERY writer I know
says you need track changes to be able to effectively work with an editor).

~~~
Shorel
As a coder who have used CVS, SVN and now Git to manage changes in my
codebases, I honestly can't understand the appeal of Word change tracking.

I disable it with haste if I ever open a document with those ugly colors
popping out.

