
LibreOffice 4.1 New Features and Fixes - tlongren
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-1-new-features-and-fixes
======
interpol_p
Maybe I'm being overly fussy. But I think they should polish their UI.

For example [https://www.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/EN-
Project_images...](https://www.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/EN-
Project_images/4.1NewFeatures/Calc/ChartWizardSteppedLine.png) — the
"Properties" button and "Line Type" drop down are completely misaligned.

These design issues add up and end up giving a poor impression of the
software, regardless of its features.

~~~
jvm
It couldn't be any worse than inkscape's official website[1], targeting
designers no less!

I wonder how many thousands have chosen not to install Inkscape as a result of
this home page. The first time I went I assumed it was a URL squatter.

[1] [http://inkscape.org/](http://inkscape.org/)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _targeting designers no less!_ //

They're not targeting anyone, they're presenting their software and letting
you use it under a free-libre & free-gratis license. In many ways it doesn't
matter if you chose it or not. It's not being created in order to develop a
need in you it's created to meet a need the creators have.

Inkscape is functional. Of course there's no problem with the website being
worked on and perhaps made to answer questions one has more easily. But I
wouldn't really want to divert resources towards marketing it and away from
making it more usable and functional.

Maybe I've misunderstood the economics of FOSS but that's how I see it.

~~~
jvm
> In many ways it doesn't matter if you chose it or not.

Just to be clear, it doesn't matter to the project creators/authors. We don't
know that for a fact, but their behavior seems to imply that. I'll admit, I
find that a bit surprising, since I've never worked hard on a public-facing
project without hoping people would use it and find it useful.

However from a global welfare perspective it clearly matters a great deal. The
over-simplified but not-too-far-off math on the social benefit of a project is
that global_welfare_added == (value_added_per_user) * n_users, so a positive
multiplier on n_users is a positive multiplier on value so long as the value
added is positive.

In this case, making the website look like an actual website isn't about
"creaing a need", it's about informing people who have that need (designers
who need to edit vector graphics) that the product might fill that need.
Currently the site doesn't communicate that at all. Furthermore, that their
demonstrated indifference to communicating the nature of their product to
potential users makes me loathe to donate dev time or money to fund
development of a product that will be little used by those who might value it.

> But I wouldn't really want to divert resources towards marketing it and away
> from making it more usable and functional.

The tiny user base undoubtedly restricts the project's access to resources in
terms of donations of both time and money. Again, it's easy to imagine why the
authors would be indifferent to this, and my only point is that's a shame for
anybody who values a more widely-used project.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _I 've never worked hard on a public-facing project without hoping people
> would use it and find it useful_ //

This is not incompatible with what I said. You can desire people to find and
use a package without desiring to promote it in a standard marketing way.
Perhaps the Inkscape team are happy with the ecosystem they have of supporters
and users - that create such things as
[http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/](http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/),
[http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/](http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/),
[http://screencasters.heathenx.org/](http://screencasters.heathenx.org/) all
easily found and all providing advocacy for the project. Along with their part
in LGM.

> _global_welfare_added == (value_added_per_user)_ n_users* //

Like you said that's simplistic. If you encourage users that wouldn't benefit,
despite Inkscape being a great benefit for many, then you have a negative
addition to your "global welfare".

Sounds like you're ready to take the plunge though ...
[http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Editing_Inkscape%27s...](http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Editing_Inkscape%27s_website).

Perhaps you'd take inspiration from sk1 (also part of LGM) -
[http://sk1project.org/](http://sk1project.org/).

------
Jakob
Wow, much faster startup than 4.0.

I liked

> don't parse fourteen thousand lines of label descriptions on every startup,
> defer them until a sheet of labels is used

------
slacka
I would be happy if LibreOffice didn't add a single feature for the next year
and did the following:

* Improved MS Office Interoperability

* Fixed bugs

* Reduced memory usage/improved performance

In fact, those are the primary reasons my company abandoned our plans to
migrate from MSO to LO. I have filed several bug reports with both the AO/LO
teams on issues such with incorrectly importing NetSuite generated Excel
documents for our sales team. Most of the bugs were validated, opened, and
then ignored for the past year.

~~~
_pmf_
> Improved MS Office Interoperability

The problem is that this is a moving target (and event more in motion due to
Microsoft's need to port this to some mobile platform, so no matter how much
is invested in this issue, they will never get close to acceptable.

~~~
ZeroMinx
Yes, it is a moving target, but you can still get it to a very solid good
level. In the past it's always been a few years between updates, and they have
version details in the files, so you can say "Supports Word 2007 files" and
not worry about Word 2016.

I've written a bunch of Perl code (that I should open source.. maybe some day.
anyone here'd find that useful?) for creating and editing docx files. It's not
that hard -- it's all XML!

EDIT: I was using a LibreOffice daemon before, but I did this code just
because Libre had so many bugs / missing features when converting a document
to docx.

~~~
slacka
Agreed MS 97-2003 .doc is NOT a moving target. Back in 2008 when we were
considering moving from MSO 2003 to OO or SoftMaker Office, SoftMaker had near
perfect MSO import filters. 5 years later, and only 3 of the 14 .doc import
bugs that I filed with OO (now on AOO tracker) have been fixed.

It's too bad the Oracle didn't take OO under their wings. With their resources
they could have turned it into a true competitor to MSO. As it stands now,
volunteers enjoy adding new features not bug fixing or scouring the 200 page
OpenXML spec. sheet.

------
nonchalance
What is the state of the relationship between OpenOffice and LibreOffice? I
remember that there were some licensing issues that caused the fork in the
first place. Are they at feature parity? Any chance the two projects will
merge ?

~~~
ExpiredLink
> What is the state of the relationship between OpenOffice and LibreOffice?

LibreOffice won, Oracle lost. Game over.

~~~
synchronise
Apache is still in the game, and they're doing a pretty good job.

------
laurent123456
> Integration of libmwaw written by Laurent Alonso brings support for a
> multitude of pre-OSX Mac word-processing documents in different file-
> formats.

Although it's great to support very old formats, I wonder if it makes sense to
integrate this to the main distribution, and thus increase the code size with
features few people need. They should have some kind of plugin system to
support this.

~~~
mattst88
I'm not sure what you mean. It uses the external libmwaw library, like it
already uses libwpd (for WordPerfect) and libwps (for Microsoft Works).

~~~
laurent123456
Oh I see, I assumed it was compiled into the main binary, but in fact it's an
external library that's only loaded when opening the document, right?

------
chris_wot
"A very large number of bugs have been fixed at an estimate of around 3000
bugs, of which 400 came from authors with apache.org mail addresses."

I believe that the Apache OpenOffice developers have been complaining that the
LO guys just cherry-picks their changes and don't do anything. This should
hopefully put paid to that complaint!

------
mililani
I would forgo all of these new features if LibreOffice would create more
compatible MS Office docs. As it stands, I can no longer use LibreOffice in my
current work environment. Everyone complains my MS converted docs do not open
correctly, AND VICE VERSA, on their MS Office apps.

~~~
stephen_g
MS Office support has been coming a long way over the last few releases - some
massive improvements in this release and 4.1. You can see come examples of
what's been fixed in this version here - [http://vmiklos.hu/blog/lo-41-ooxml-
improvements.html](http://vmiklos.hu/blog/lo-41-ooxml-improvements.html) (and
there's a link there to what was fixed in the last version).

If you are having issues with it on work documents, you could really help out
in having them fixed by trying to replicate each problem you find in a sample
document, and attaching that to a bug report. Far better than just hoping
someone notices it and fixes it.

~~~
slacka
I've filed almost 40 MSO interop bugs with LO and 20 with AO over the past as
5 years. Far as I can tell only about 3 or 4 of them have been fixed.

This is a personal issue with me, because I lost some face with the owner. I
had pushed for OO instead of MSO 2007/2010, but after a partial migration, it
was clear OO was not up to the task.

------
shirederby
> Port Agenda Wizard from Java to python. Removed 11 files, 5345 lines of java
> code (Xisco Faulí)

> Port Web Wizard from Java to python. 140 files changed, 5076 (+), 11416 (-).
> Removed 55 files, 10426 lines of java code (Javier Fernandez)

So it looks like they're trying to scrub out the Java parts (except perhaps in
Base). Does anyone know if this is the case?

~~~
buovjaga
Yep, and even in Base: [http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/18322/is-there-
any-pl...](http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/18322/is-there-any-plan-to-
ditch-java-in-the-future-and-use-only-cc-code/)

~~~
mariuz
Firebird will be the default database instead of hsql in Base so yes java will
be removed in the future

[http://www.ahunt.org/2013/07/firebird-now-in-
master/](http://www.ahunt.org/2013/07/firebird-now-in-master/)

[http://www.ahunt.org/2013/05/gsoc-2013-libreoffice-
firebird-...](http://www.ahunt.org/2013/05/gsoc-2013-libreoffice-firebird-sql-
connector/)

------
mrng
Anyone use it along with Apache's OpenOffice? Which one is (in your
experience) less buggy/more stable in its current incarnation?

~~~
JohnTHaller
I much prefer LibreOffice. OpenOffice fell behind during the hiatus when a
majority of their development team quit to form LibreOffice. LibreOffice has a
big headstart on OO and a more active development team. Plus, they can pull
features and bug fixes from OpenOffice while the OpenOffice team can't pull
from LibreOffice due to licensing.

------
elchief
I would love to see LibreOffice Calc work with XMLA OLAP servers, like
Mondrian.

This would be a major competitive advantage to Excel, which can only talk to
SQL Server, or to others via very expensive plugins.

~~~
ygra
Excel can use any OLE DB driver or ODBC just fine to access other databases.
It's not restricted to Access and SQL Server. From the dated look of the
dialog windows involved I'd say it's been that way for a long time and isn't
new in 2010.

~~~
bkor
OLAP is not like SQL or ODBC. It shows things in a cube. OP is talking about
OLAP, not just SQL/some database (which is of course works perfectly fine).
Note: Aside from knowing that OLAP is different, not much practical knowledge.

~~~
ygra
Ah, then I got the wrong idea about them mentioning SQL Server.

------
mikemoka
I appreciate the effort of everyone involved in this complex project but I
think that we should see something like an opensource replacement to google
docs in our future

~~~
JohnTHaller
The problem with that is the issue of storage and functionality (aka, you have
to host it). No one is really going to pay to host it or roll their own when
there's a 'free' version already available. And the fact that while the word
processor in Google Docs is moderately functional, everything else in the
suite is nowhere near a replacement for the actual applications.

------
artagnon
Dinosaur. We're moving towards minimal formatting, and web-based solutions
(like Google Docs).

The ones who need typesetting are stuck with LaTeX anyway.

~~~
rimantas
I use Google Docs, but I dislike them. The worst part is, that this dislike is
pretty much irrational—Google Docs just seem extremely fragile to me. I don't
know why I get this feeling but it is there and I am not sure I will ever
trust any non-trivial documents editin within web browser. Are there other
feeling the same way? Maybe you have some idea why do I have this kind of
mistrust?

~~~
YZF
I feel the same way. Dislike. It just never seems to do what you want it to do
and things don't quite interoperate. In a previous life I could draw something
in Visio and copy paste that into e-mail (Outlook), make a graph in Excel and
copy that as well. Communicate; you know. In gmail you can try inserting an
image but more often than not it comes out as gibberish and forget about any
other form of interop.

There's no reason why you couldn't do everything within a browser but we don't
seem to quite be there yet.

------
qoo
Meh. I've been using their 4.1 RC. CSV filtering / sorting / manipulation is
still dog-slow for large files (>10MBytes).

------
analog31
Any faster? My one reason for clinging to Excel is the speed of computations
involving thousands of cells, including graphing.

~~~
chris_wot
Extremely fast. In some cases, they load Excel spreadsheets faster than Excel
2010.

~~~
Joeri
Loading != calculation. Excel has a multi-threaded calculation engine:
[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/office/bb687899.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/office/bb687899.aspx)

Apparently LO does not: [http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/5371/is-lo-
calc-capab...](http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/5371/is-lo-calc-capable-
for-smp/)

~~~
skriticos2
There is an effort on the way to use the GPU for computation, though that's
still some time off.

[http://www.datamation.com/applications/libreoffice-
accelerat...](http://www.datamation.com/applications/libreoffice-accelerates-
open-source-spreadsheets-thanks-to-amd.html)

------
mikevm
Has LibreOffice reached parity with MS Office 97 yet?

------
benatkin
When will Apache's OpenOffice be ready? I hate it when mean corporations like
Oracle set out to crush community projects, but I hate the GPL more.

~~~
bkor
If you Google or visit the website you'll notice that AOO released 4.0 a few
days ago.

~~~
benatkin
I meant when will it be good enough. I'm looking for anecdotes, not
particulars. Several people in this thread have expressed that at present
LibreOffice is much better than OpenOffice. I'm wondering how much better and
if enough work is being done on AOO that its expected to catch up anytime
soon.

~~~
takluyver
'Good enough' really depends what you need it for. I understand that LO has
more people working on it than AOO, so I wouldn't expect the latter to catch
up unless there's some big shift in the landscape.

~~~
brokenparser
StarOffice was already good enough over a decade ago for me to buy it. Back
then, WordPerfect was still around. Today, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are the
last of their kind but the latter has a much quicker development pace. They
could just box it up and ship it like OpenBSD does, 10/10 would buy again
regardless of how they call it.

