

LibreOffice 3.6.0: behind the scenes - unix-junkie
http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-08-08-libreoffice-3-6-0.html

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bergie
"German comments removal" sounds like a lot of work. It is always very
annoying when programmers comment (or even name their
variables/functions/whatever) using another language than English.

Most APIs are based on English so this makes a very messy combination. And yet
people do it often, hindering the possibility of foreigners to contribute.

A recent example I've run into is the WYSIWYG editing extension for ShareJS,
with all comments in Russian. I'd love to reuse it, but this just keeps me
away:

[https://github.com/rizzoma/ShareJS/blob/master/src/client/ri...](https://github.com/rizzoma/ShareJS/blob/master/src/client/rizzoma/editor/editor_v2.coffee#L199)

(note: I can read Cyrillic characters and do understand some Russian, but
still)

~~~
vhf

      as detected by Miklos' nice bin/find-german-comments script
    

Don't know why, but it made me laugh.

    
    
      bin/german-and-comment
    

would have been a great pun.

~~~
graue
I'm sorry, I've really tried and even said this out loud a couple times, but I
don't get the pun. Explain?

~~~
vhf
Ich bin <=> I am

Ich bin Deutscher <=> I'm german

ich bin german and comment <=> I am german and comment

or bin german and comment <=> am Deutscher und kommentiere

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chris_wot
I think it's remarkable how much the LibreOffice folks have achieved compared
to what was acheived when Sun was running this project!

~~~
greatquux
Absolutely. Given how much cruft we'd all heard was in there, it really is
amazing how they've cleaned it up. Too bad there are two competing projects,
but really LO looks like the winner so far.

~~~
skittles
Don't forget about IBM Lotus Symphony. I really wish IBM would merge their
efforts with the LibreOffice team, but I know it won't happen.

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cs702
As someone who's been using LibreOffice regularly since it was made the
default office suite in Ubuntu, I can attest personally to its ongoing
improvement in usability, performance, and looks. As of today, LibreOffice
feels smoother, faster, and prettier to me than OpenOffice ever did.

I can't wait to see what the talented LibreOffice developers decide to do once
they have finished cleaning up legacy code and can focus almost exclusively on
those things that impact user experience the most.

LibreOffice's usability, performance, and looks are likely to improve
dramatically over the next couple of years.

~~~
niels_olson
For me, LibreOffice has trumped NeoOffice on the Mac. I just have no reason to
support that project. Does anyone know if the NeOffice guys return code back
to the LibreOffice master? If so, I could see that as a reason to continue
supporting them.

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sandGorgon
Will pay _a lot of money_ for a Linux-compatible Excel feature-parity version
of a spreadsheet.

In fact, most spreadsheets today are created using OOXML, so it might be
easier (notionally speaking) than the binary XLS format.

I daresay, there is a very, very large market for this - especially in Asia. I
dont need the same for Word or Powerpoint - PDFs work fine in an emergency.
For spreadsheets, I dont have an alternative.

~~~
Spooky23
It's a tough thing to do -- particularly with Excel -- many spreadsheets
include VBA code and other stuff that has dependencies on other parts of the
Microsoft stack.

OOXML is a beastly specification, because it's not just a description of how
to create a document or spreadsheet -- it includes artifacts to maintain
compatibility with MS Office software from the early 90's.

~~~
sandGorgon
VBA is the big beast - but here is a question from me. What will it take to
implement VBA on top of Lua (or any other lightweight,embedded runtimes/VM).
Hell, what will it take to implement VBA on top of the V8 engine [1] ? If one
can achieve that, then you can pretty much build a spreadsheet as a browser
plugin for 80% of the cases. For the rest 20% pathological cases - fine,
reboot to windows.

Now, thats's an idea for a Kickstarter. This is the kind of thing that goes on
to transform businesses in third world countries - Excel is what prevents the
move to Linux more than ANYTHING else.

[1] <http://ramblings.mcpher.com/>

~~~
ehutch79
doesn't office on mac not even support vba?

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derleth
Not anymore: VBA came (back) to Office on Mac with Office 2011.

[http://www.macworld.com/article/1154785/welcomebackvisualbas...](http://www.macworld.com/article/1154785/welcomebackvisualbasic.html)

"According to Microsoft, Excel 2011 for Mac features a full port of the
Windows Office VBA environment; in most cases, the OS X and Windows versions
of VBA now mirror each other."

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graue
I'm completely confused by the second sentence here:

"Unfortunately, for one reason and another, despite a delay for a fourth
release candidate, there are still some circumstances where an upgrade will
not re-register some built-in extensions, and silently exit on first launch
(just re-run it). _On the down-side that can affect spell-checking
dictionaries, and (for some) on the up-side disables Auto-COrrection too._ "

I'm wondering if it is significant that the second letter in "COrrection" is
capitalized? Like, the feature that automatically corrects TWo INitial CAps
will be disabled? But some people find that auto-correction annoying and will
consider it an "up-side" that it's disabled? Doesn't really make sense to me,
but it's all I can think of here.

