
Why I ditched Microsoft Word for LibreOffice and couldn't be happier - davidgerard
http://www.afr.com/p/technology/why_ditched_microsoft_word_and_couldn_VA5wEvmBiRkPmN23EDWnHJ
======
kstrauser
A previous company adopted OpenOffice for all internal uses, and our employees
quickly came to love it. We had a customer once who sent us particularly
tricky documents, and eventually we gave up and started using Word to manage
their stuff. They still complained at broken formatting after we'd edited
their docs and mailed them back, though. The conversation went like:

Us: That's really strange. We were using a different word processor, but
you're still seeing the same problems even after we went back to Word.

Them: Um, what word processor would that be?

Us: You probably haven't heard of it, but OpenOffice.

Them: Us too! Can we just send you ODT files directly?

The workflow on both ends had been to work natively in Writer, then export to
.doc for passing files around. All problems immediately went away once we
dropped the middle step.

~~~
melling
I outsource some of my translation work on oDesk and ask that all of the work
be done with OpenOffice. Many already have it but some need to install it. If
everyone works like this, we'll have a lot more people using Open Office.

------
cwyers
"It hasn't been feasible to uninstall Word, or abandon it entirely. Of course
there are times when we need to collaborate with Word users, and perhaps a
quarter of the time we work on that platform."

So you haven't ditched it at all.

------
Animats
I've used the StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice line for a decade. The last
Microsoft Office product I purchased was Word 97, and I ditched that when I
retired the Windows 2000 machine.

That said, LibreOffice is still too buggy for a 10-year-old product. The
article says "Writer has a couple of instabilities under Windows, such as
locking up if a new document isn't saved within a few minutes." That's
pathetic.

LibreOffice .doc import/export almost works now. You can usually import a
Microsoft Word document, although the margins are often wrong.

------
murbard2
LibreOffice attempts to replicate the MS Word "experience", which is good if
that's what you looking for, but which I find atrocious.

Do you have recommendations for a word processor which

\- Focuses on writing text documents, doesn't attempt to do everything

\- Is visual, because sometimes it's painful to go through cycle of
compilation with LaTeX

\- Has a minimalistic UI that focuses on semantics; which lets you mark things
as sections, titles, emphasis, etc. Fonts, colors, are handled separately
within a template editor

\- Ideally, allows for real-time collaborative editing

~~~
kot-behemoth
Have you tried LyX ([http://www.lyx.org](http://www.lyx.org))? It's a WYSIWYM
(your first point) graphical editor for LaTeX and as far as I remember shows
you a pretty good preview of your document as you're typing (your second
point).

~~~
louhike
Relative to LaTeX:

Has anyone heard of professional use of LaTeX outside of the scientific
fields?

I've seen a lot of good examples of the power of LaTeX but all seems ot have
been made by scientists. And I tried to convince my girlfriend who is in the
edition/layout field (not sure of the correct name). she already knew LaTeX
(at my surprise) and she thought the examples were unimpressives. She doesn't
anybody in her field using it professionally.

So I was wondering if her experience was specific or it was really unused
outsite science. Any feedback on this one?

~~~
dublinben
There's a lot of unprofessional behavior and software practices in the
"professional" publishing field. Many authors refuse to write in anything but
MS Word, and companies rely on Track Changes for version control of
manuscripts.

~~~
FireBeyond
I'm definitely not an everyday user of Track Changes, but isn't that the very
use case for it, version control inside a manuscript?

The biggest caveat I've seen to its use are ballooning file sizes (meh), and
(more importantly) leaking information. But I also thought recent versions of
Word made it more prominent to discard tracking information when doing a
Save/As.

------
fithisux
I use Windows x64 and for the past one and a half year have kept it MS-Office
clean. However my colleagues usually argue with me about this. Even If I try
to explain them the advantages, they keep insist on using MS-Office even for
scientific papers where I find Lyx superior. At work I installed it since I do
not pay for it. At home, never even If I am on windows.

My only complaint is the lack of recent builds of Abiword/Gnumeric.

Abiword is on 3.0.0. in mingw64 in OBS. Gnumeric is even older.

These problems have to be fixed. Does anyone know where I can find recent
builds for windows 7? x86/x64 makes no difference to me.

~~~
derekp7
What about the following combination: First, set up a Windows based X
implementation (Cygwin X, or Xming for example). Then run a stateless Linux
install in a VM (maybe based off a live CD), and then set up icons on your
Windows desktop to remotely launch the given apps on the Linux VM, displaying
them on your Windows desktop with your local X server.

The main problems I see with this would be automating the Linux VM startup,
and configuring the local icons (they would have to launch a script that ssh's
into the Linux VM after checking if a local X server and the Linux VM is
running, forwarding X connections).

~~~
fithisux
VM is not an option for me 😦 Even calligra is dead on windows. Maybe I should
consider dualboot again.

------
BrianEatWorld
I made a switch to LibreOffice when my work machine switched to Ubuntu. As the
post points out, switching for everything but Excel is feasible for most
users. There is a bit of a learning curve, but some things actually seem to
make more sense once you dive in.

As for Excel, as tumultuous a relationship as I have had with that software
over my working career, I never really appreciated its features and stability
until I tried to use the alternatives. That said, I haven't tried 4.4 but look
forward to giving it another shot.

------
jseliger
_We simply don 't apologise for jumping ship from MS Word. For us, the
productivity gains have been irresistible._

That's awesome. I wish I could. I'm a technical writing consultant who does
grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (www.seliger.com if you're
curious), and everything we get from clients and public agencies is a Word or
Excel file. Everything we send out has to be in the same formats.

We're in a situation similar to the graphic designers and photographers and so
on who say that everything they take in and send out has to be Photoshop /
InDesign / etc. compatible. The industry has standardized around these
programs and formats and perfect compatibility is mandatory.

LibreOffice is great. I've mentioned it in class (I adjunct on the side), but
I can't use it.

~~~
cm2187
Microsoft Office hasn't really evolved in 10 years, and even when it did (in
2007), it hasn't really evolved for the better.

I do think that there is a window opened for a competitor to disrupt this
monopoly.

~~~
cwyers
There WAS a window, but I think it's closed already though. Google Docs and a
host of Office-compatible Android/iOS apps made a go at it, and they made
headway for a while. But Microsoft went ahead and made web and Android/iOS
versions of Office that are at least as good as Google Docs and the various
Office for Android apps I've seen, with far better Office compatibility than
anyone else can offer (since they're running the same code as desktop Office
under the hood).

Meanwhile LibreOffice is fighting the last war, with a thick desktop client
using some custom cross-platform GUI toolkit that looks native on exactly
nothing, no web app version and no real effort on mobile[1]. And it's fighting
the last war badly at that -- not even people who write articles about
switching to LibreOffice can actually switch to LibreOffice because they keep
Word around for compatibility with everyone else in the world. Calc versus
Excel is in even worse shape than Writer versus Word.

1) There IS an Android version of OpenOffice:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.collabora....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.collabora.libreoffice)

It's read-only and the UI is... subpar, however.

------
megaman22
Does it finally do footnotes in a decent fashion? Literally the only reason I
kept a portable version of Word 2003 around during college was to do the final
formatting and citations for my papers. I nearly broke down and learned LaTex
instead, but that curve was just a little too steep.

~~~
Bedon292
That is the primary reason I keep office around for as well. No alternative
offers decent footnotes / endnotes / reference without going to latex (that I
have found). For something as simple as a two page paper for an undergrad
class, I do not want have to use latex just to get footnotes done correctly. I
would be interested to know if the latest version actually does any better.

~~~
voyou
What difficulties are you having with footnotes? I just finished working on a
200 and something page document in LibreOffice 4.3, with multiple footnotes on
most pages (and mildly complicated things like re-starting the numbering for
each chapter), and working with footnotes seemed pretty straightforward. I'd
be interested to find out how your (and the parent poster's) experience
differed from mine.

------
cm2187
What I miss, probably more as a PowerPoint competitor, is a Visual Studio/WPF-
style editor with WYSIWYG and mark-up side by side.

I don't even want to think about the amount of time I spent trying to select
some text I want to edit, buried under other transparent layers or empty,
invisible boxes. It would make it also very easy to introduce dynamic
references in the text of a textbox in powerpoint (something currently
impossible!).

It wouldn't hurt the basic experience for normal users and would make
PowerPoint infinitely more powerful for advanced users.

Word is less visual but this side by side approach would also be very useful.
Particularly since a lot of the visual formatting is "invisible" in a WYSIWYG
editor.

------
cicero
I'm not in a position to ditch Word, but I am happy to hear that there is a
more robust alternative for numbered paragraphs with multiple sub-levels. Word
appears to get confused when paragraphs change sub-levels.

------
smcg
LibreOffice crashes way too often for me to consider it a remotely acceptable
product. Frequently it will crash within 10 seconds of opening a document (on
Ubuntu).

~~~
davidgerard
If this is happening with the distro LO, then there's something seriously
wrong with your PC or your installation. This does not happen for almost
anyone else - whatever compatibility complaints people may have, LO is
_ridiculously_ stable. (The Coverity cleanup was seriously worth it.)

If you can reproduce this with a given document on a different PC, you have a
reportable bug.

------
DanBC
Most people can get by with Abiword and gnumeric. I often hear people say that
there is some feature of MS Office that they need and that isn't provided by
Abiword + gnumeric / OO / LO.

Is there a list of these features anywhere? And are the competitors to MS
Office working on them? Or are they focussed on different things? EG a
spreadsheet that focuses on correctness and auditing could probably be useful.

~~~
msandford
I've noticed that none of the FOSS spreadsheets do as well with some things as
Excel does.

For example if I put 1, 2, 4, 8 and I highlight that and drag it to continue
the series I get different results.

Excel gets it right and provides 16, 32, 64, etc

LibreOffice provides 2, 3, 5, 9, etc

OpenOffice doesn't do any better.

I haven't tried gnumeric in the last 10 years so I can't remember what it does
but I'm not optimistic.

There are a lot of these kinds of things where Excel really has polish and the
others don't and probably never will because the code to make it work right is
excruciatingly boring to write.

~~~
aw3c2
"Gets it right" is incredibly subjective, you cannot really expect a
spreadsheet to run some number series analysis to see if there is some logic
behind numbers except for some trivial cases (this one _might_ be one, but
that's debatable).

gnumeric does simply replicate the series, you get 1, 2, 4, 8, 1, 2, 4, 8, 1,
etc. It does offer a tool to fill series though.

~~~
schoen
Although I think of the powers of two as the natural completion, OEIS finds
about 1600 sequences that start 1, 2, 4, 8, and are of some mathematical or
cultural interest.

[http://oeis.org/search?q=1%2C2%2C4%2C8&sort=&language=&go=Se...](http://oeis.org/search?q=1%2C2%2C4%2C8&sort=&language=&go=Search)

------
yuhong
As a side note, I mentioned the OOXML fiasco in my poorly-written wishlist for
Satya.

------
aruggirello
IMHO it all boils down to habit. I switched from Excel to LO Calc and am quite
happy, too, though it does feel a bit awkward and sometimes it just gets in
the way. I managed writing a macro though, and it was surprisingly easier than
I thought.

~~~
jseliger
_IMHO it all boils down to habit_

No—it boils down to network effects and coordination. As I wrote here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9069761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9069761)
, in my business we use MS Office, our clients do, and funding agencies do.
There is no easy or simple way to move everyone from MS Office to an
alternative simultaneously. So it doesn't happen.

People who never or very rarely need to do document interchange may be okay
with Google Docs or LibreOffice, but people who interchange complex documents
on a regular basis must use MS Office.

