
LibreOffice 6.0 released - mksaunders
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2018/01/31/libreoffice-6/
======
wmccullough
This is wonderful to see, big fan of LibreOffice.

I am left questioning a few things based upon the feedback in this thread.
I'll preface this that I'm trying to be cordial and tactful here.

Why is it so bad that Microsoft charges for their product? I use Office in my
professional life and Libre+Office in my personal life. I think if you make a
decent product, it's perfectly okay to charge for it. Am I missing something
ideological?

I constantly read that Office is clunky and unstable, and I haven't
experienced that in years at this point, probably since Office 2007 after they
famously had to rip out CustomXML in a hurry. For me, both Office and
LibreOffice perform well, and I often only use one over the other when I find
support for one or the other is lacking because of some crazy scenario.

P.S. To those barking about "scary" warning for ODF files. It does the same
thing for Office 2003-2007 documents too...

~~~
nothis
It's more the fact that they hold a quasi-monopoly AND have severe interface
flaws that are now "standard". If it was just one of the two, I think people
would be more forgiving (see Adobe Photoshop/InDesign, which, while flawed,
understand user interface).

I have seen people waste _hours_ doing things in MS Office that should take 5
minutes because of how broken its UX is. They got a tiny little bit better but
then you try setting the print area for an Excel table again and spend a good
15 minutes and you know they still have the same problems at their core.

The problem with LibreOffice & Co is that they basically just copy Microsoft's
mistakes, making UX an afterthought with wobbly, unaligned buttons and
illogical grouping and hierarchies of different elements. We'll likely won't
escape that office software hell any time soon but projects like LibreOffice
at least have the freedom to chisel at its foundation.

~~~
yellow_postit
This really underestimates the amount of work that goes into UX for such a
massively used product. Look no further than the ribbon to see the type of
backlash that comes from any interface update. For any sufficiently large and
complex project nearly every new UI tweak willl help some and hurt others.
Measuring and walking that line is not to be underestimated.

~~~
awoeirl
So, I have a relative who worked Microsoft UI, and know a lot about it from
that. I understand all the design and user testing that was involved.

This is what I see:

With the ribbon, MS came up with something that was nice and innovative. But
it was also incomplete. Unlike the menu, which was consistent across all the
functions you might want to apply, the ribbon exists for some things, and then
you break into this totally different UI for other things.

Is this ok? My concern is that with Microsoft's monopoly (still) we could
argue until we were blue in the face about whether or not the ribbon as
implemented was worth it or not, and will never know because there were not
really any other options other than "ribbon or not." We can't tell if people
just habituated to the ribbon's flaws, or decided that the pros of upgrading
outweighed the cons, or were forced to upgrade, directly or indirectly, by the
legions of corporate decision makers who were afraid to be lagging behind, or
what.

Office has improved a lot since LibreOffice's predecessor, OO, emerged. In
some ways I think MS Office is superior. But I still have this nagging feeling
that we never know what we _could_ have had if there were more competition, in
terms of pricing, options, formats, etc. I also resent being forced to use MS
Office for things that absolutely do not require it at all (e.g., by certain
publishers, etc.). Because then I have to choose an OS that MS Office is on,
and then certain hardware, etc. It's not the cost of MS Cloud or whatever
anymore, it's that cost, plus the hardware infrastructure that's required to
run it.

At the moment LO, for me, is competitive with MS Office, and meets my needs,
and to me that's important.

I don't think there's anything wrong with MS charging for a product. What I do
think is wrong is everyone requiring it, explicitly or implicitly, and there
being lack of choice. At the moment I'm not even sure that's MS's fault--most
of the time I encounter it I attribute it to laziness or inconsiderateness.

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ilitirit
I like LibreOffice, but I really wish they would put more effort into their
UI, even just basic things like standardisation of controls and simple text
spacing and positioning. This is taken from their video summary of 6.0:

[https://imgur.com/a/LB1jt](https://imgur.com/a/LB1jt)

~~~
dhimes
So is your issue that the dropdown sizes and associated font sizes are
different?

~~~
ilitirit
No, I'm referring to the UI in general. The images just basic examples of poor
and inconsistent text spacing and positioning. I didn't even mention the more
important issues like the crowded dropdowns, poor layouts and use of space in
general.

As I said, I _like_ LibreOffice, but the UI needs work.

~~~
dhimes
My only issue is that it's hard sometimes to _find_ how to do something I'm
trying to do. But that's also a problem in MS Office.

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reacharavindh
It is rather unfortunate that MS Office sets the bar for office suite of
programs and so many people (not necessarily in CS/IT/Tech) can only think
Office == MS Office.

The only way for an Open Source equivalent to dethrone MS Office is to beat MS
Office at its own game WHILE retaining compatibility to it. Perhaps, retain a
MS Office compatible core, and invest mindshare in making an absurdly fast,
intuitive, and productive UI that is not necessarily the same as MS Office.
Show people why one would want to use LibreOffice instead of the only factor
being that it's free (as in beer and as in speech).

The day the suite of Libre Office impresses me enough to use it on my laptop
inspite of having MS Office installed is when the tide changes..

Sort of like the Mozilla of Office programs.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
You mean Google Docs / Sheets?

(Which incidentally I use 90% of the time despite having an Office 365
subscription)

~~~
reacharavindh
Honestly, I really like Google docs. I use it for drafting my blog posts which
will be public anyway on my website. But, Google is the reason I can't use it
for private/ personal documents.

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linopolus
And still it has a UI like in the nineties. Thousands of buttons, adding more
and more, without thinking about it, making it harder and harder with every
version for new users to learn using it.

Instead of adding more fonts by default, they should start thinking how they
can improve their UI, make it clean, discoverable and easy to use.

Microsoft has done it, and while initially it was hard for everyone familiar
with the old concept, I know nobody who prefers that now, after familiarizing
themselves with ribbons.

~~~
MagnumOpus
_Raises hand_ As a power user of Office before and after that change - the
menu bar was massively better. Now you know someone.

Seriously, who apart from utter novices would ever want to use a UI where the
keyboard shortcuts are non-obvious, the buttons take up half the screen, and
discoverability is non-existent (and not even Google can help half the time
because things jump around from version to version).

~~~
Nexxxeh
If there was an option to switch back from ribbons, I'd do it every time.

~~~
vetinari
Office for Mac has the original menus _and_ ribbon. Just the old toolbars
disappeared.

Best of both worlds.

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yeukhon
I like LibreOffice but what made me switch back to MS was the compatibility
problem. In particular in thr older version of LibreOffice thr fonts weren’t
even compatible for me... I didn’t look back since going back, to save the
overhead. FWIW, I did my thesis on LibreOffice but after that I switched away.
Same happened to Thunderbird to Outlook, but mainly due to performance issue
(handling tens of thousands of emails and searching through those emails),
otherwise I would love to keep Thunderbird (its UI and functionality is just
as good as Outlook by OSS standard).

MS isn’t perfect. It’s slow to open files, occasionally Outlook’s data file
will corrupt or too large to be usable, then I have to delete the file and
force Outlook download the emails again. I miss one license for life time
model, instead of subscription.

~~~
addicted
I want to use Thunderbird, and for whatever reason even thunderbird
performance is better on my computer.

The problem I have is that its junk filtering is absolutely messed up. It ends
up marking several important emails as junk.

Also it’s not very clever in auto completing email addresses.

------
pmontra
Did anybody here use LibreOffice online? How does it compare to Google Docs or
Office 365?

~~~
g105b
LibreOffice is worse in all ways.

~~~
ZenoArrow
I downvoted your comment as it was too lazy. If you're going to provide
feedback, at least try to give examples to back it up. For example, compare
one similar feature available in all three applications.

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teilo
When I installed this on macOS 10.13, it wouldn't run at all. Crashed on every
document it tried to open, including a new document based on the default
template, and then got stuck in a recovery loop. I had to force-quit it.

After deleting ~/Library/Application Support/LibreOffice it seems to be fine.
So there must be an issue installing with old preferences in place.

------
snowpanda
Wish they would use this in schools instead of getting kids accustomed to MS
office.

~~~
orf
Why? So kids can be even more unprepared when they enter the world of work,
where nobody uses LibreOffice?

~~~
dotancohen
Quite the opposite.

The idea is that children learn concepts, not individual implementations. And
since Writer is arguable better than MS Word I see lots of institutions moving
to LibreOffice.

Note, however, that Excel is better than Calc for anything non-trivial, and
Powerpoint just blows the LibreOffice counterpart away completely. Praise to
Writer is _not_ praise to the whole LibreOffice suite.

~~~
alok-g
I would not want my child to learn Excel/Calc at all, so that doesn't bother
me. :-) While spreadsheets have been very sticky, super-useful for quick
calculations, they are often abused for a variety of cases where alternative
tools would be better. If I could, I would ban installation of Excel and Calc
at my workplace!

Hope LibreOffice Impress improves over the time to catch up with PowerPoint.

~~~
baq
digital spreadsheets - without macros - are arguably the simplest form of
functional programming you could teach anyone, so i wouldn't be so quick to
dismiss them.

~~~
addicted
Spreadsheets are immensely useful. In many situations they are more useful in
specific tasks than software designed specifically for those tasks, because
their general nature means that they can be used to do things beyond what the
creator of the designed software intended.

People don’t use Excel for everything because they are masochists. Excel very
often really is the best solution available for a very wide variety of uses.

------
znpy
Just asking: did they, by any chance, fix or at least improve the usability of
the LibreOffice API?

Last time I tried live-updating a cell in a Calc worksheet it was a huge mess
and a total pita.

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mixmastamyk
Did it get outline mode yet? That’s what always held back my colleagues that
write documentation. I use it when I need an office suite, though not often.

------
singularity2001
release fail: sudo apt-get upgrade libreoffice libreoffice is already the
newest version (1:5)

~~~
cesarb
Distributions always lag a bit behind upstream releases, so don't expect a new
release of any upstream software to be available instantly in
Ubuntu/Debian/etc.

~~~
dragonwriter
To be fair, the LibreOffice Fresh PPA also doesn't (from it's website) have
6.0 yet. While OS vendor repositories naturally take time, I don't know that
there is a good reason for the PPA to get debs slower than the website.

~~~
Valmar
Arch has 6.0 in testing at the moment. :)

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rwx------
name one software feature that is better in LibreOffice than MSOffice.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Saving CSV files. In Excel you have to do a bunch of tricks to get quotes
around certain fields in the exported CSV (I end up using a custom field
format to force quotes, then doing a find and replace in a text editor, as
Excel likes to save "Text" as """Text"""), whereas in LibreOffice Calc there's
an option to 'Quote all text cells' when exporting the CSV, which is much
simpler.

~~~
danmaz74
Also importing CSV files works much better. I don't know how many times I had
to suggest friends or customers to use openoffice for that, it was just easier
than finding the right way to do it in Office.

