I'm curious if anyone sees LibreOffice gaining any traction in a professional setting.<p>In my experience everyone uses MS Office or Google Docs, and LibreOffice still remains relegated to private individuals that don't happen to already have an Office license ... or Linux users.<p>I'm sure the situation is different in other parts of the world, where saving on license cost is more important.<p>It's a bit of a shame that eg governments aren't switching en masse.<p>But as a Linux user myself, I somehow tend to prefer using something like Google Docs in the (very rare) cases I need an office suite. Calc just isn't anywhere close to Excel, and the incompatabilities of Writer with Word make it problematic.
The Community/Enterprise language is confusing, if you don't know the backstory.<p>A big chunk of actual development of LibreOffice is done by a company called Collabora, that is also selling LibreOffice-based products for mobile and for cloud.<p><a href="https://www.collaboraoffice.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.collaboraoffice.com</a><p>They seem to be the major contributor to LibreOffice Online (even still have their logo there?). Which is actually including the iOS and Android apps.<p><a href="https://github.com/LibreOffice/online" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LibreOffice/online</a><p>On actual LibreOffice proper, which they call "LibreOffice Core", they seem to have 30% of commits, with RedHat also 30%.
I've been using LibreOffice and before that OpenOffice for as long as it's been open source. Writer, Impress and Calc are fantastic products and as capable as anything else on the market. That said, I fear the market for non-web based office software is going to slowly shrink.<p>The real competition is web based office suites like Google Docs, Zoho and Microsoft Office. The web based suites are missing lots of features, but they make up for it two ways: auto revisions/save and real-time collaboration. It's hard to go back to old-style local single-access files once you've had a team of four working on a document at the same time.<p>Finally, most of us have been frog-potted one too many times by software that switches to a community / paid enterprise license model. The name "community edition" tends to signal a bleak future. I've had to switch from SugarCRM, ElasticSearch and a few others because in the rush to create value in the "enterprise" version, eventually they just make the community one suck instead of making the enterprise one that much better. Also, the truth is I wouldn't have even bothered using Sugar or Elastic if the only option was to pay for it.
I keep looking at the changelog as the versions come and go and am generally disappointed that there's no concentrated effort to improve eye candy/defaults, especially in calc, but writer as well.<p>I use writer heavily at home, mostly for strict structured technical data and it serves my needs, though everything still looks awful in word. Given up on using calc though - still no tables, pivot tables are fugly and inintuitive - end up booting a VM 2-3 times a week to edit in excel for years now.<p>That said, I'm thankful for the contributors and everyone involved doing the best they can.
People have mentioned features which LibreOffice lacks and the poor state of the UI but what I haven't seen mentioned here is the reason I don't use LibreOffice anymore. It is slow. Whenever I used it I felt like I was stuck in molasses. Even the basic stuff like launching the applications, opening documents and scrolling through them always felt extremely slow.
Libreoffice is an amazing piece of software for writing and spreadsheets. However, it's inability to display written text beautifully has pushed me to Microsoft Word. Libreoffice made zero progress on this in over a decade.
> ScriptForge libraries: an extensible and robust collection of macro scripting resources for LibreOffice to be invoked from user Basic or Python scripts<p>The Python integration is the thing that should make LO go high.
Congrats on the release! LibreOffice was one of the first large applications I looked at, mostly due to my interest in spreadsheets generally. I generally have massive respect for anyone / anything that can parse a legacy Microsoft file format. [1]<p>My interest in spreadsheets lead to me making <a href="https://trymito.io" rel="nofollow">https://trymito.io</a>. Check it. We’re a spreadsheet that sits inside a Jupyer notebook, allowing you to write spreadsheet formulas and generate equivalent Python code. Feedback greatly appreciated!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...</a>
For folks using it on PCs without admin rights or wanting it installed to a synced cloud folder, I'm packaging up the portable version for PortableApps.com now.
I use LibreOffice Calc a couple of times a year for personal use. At work I have to use Excel. I donate a small sum to The Document Foundation (which develops and publishes LibreOffice) every year.<p>I have a few longstanding disagreements with the state of the application and its development approach over the years. The first is that the application loads slowly, but that's not quite as bad as the other gripes I have. The UI is quite ugly with poor fonts, cluttered (and ugly) menubar icons, not a well designed layout, etc. (on Windows and macOS). The fact that Calc uses keyboard shortcuts that aren't anywhere close to what Excel uses (even the Excel/Office 2003 version that's before the Ribbon Menu days) makes using Excel knowledge and Excel muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts quite useless when switching to Calc. For years, I've encountered some strange copy paste bugs in Calc where it doesn't seem to get the clipboard contents from the OS. If these were resolved, I'd be very thrilled to recommend it to others.
Hah! My friend has been asking for "outline mode" for 15 years before he'd consider using it!<p><a href="https://www.debugpoint.com/2020/11/libreoffice-7-1/" rel="nofollow">https://www.debugpoint.com/2020/11/libreoffice-7-1/</a><p>Probably too late but I'll bring it up with him. :-D
Long time user here. But not anymore, because it's veeeery slow on Retina Macbook Pro. That also prevents promoting it at work because it is so slow. Microsoft Office is a faster, sad to say. In general, everyone has access to Google Workspace and if functionality lacks, then Microsoft Office it is.
I have LibreOffice 7.0 installed, is not mentioned in the article what will happen to me, I guess I will be updated to 7.1 "Community" edition?<p>"LibreOffice" sans edition will not exist anymore? The editions will be "LibreOffice Community" and "LibreOffice Enterprise" from now one?
The biggest thing that I have an issue with in Writer is basically the performance.<p>Drop in an image or two, that particular page becomes slow as molasses.<p>This is yet to be fixed and it causes massive headache, when you're just trying to zoom through the content for quick edits.
I use Softmaker FreeOffice, which I find to be better than LibreOffice.<p>LibreOffice is a good faith project, but the legacy from Sun StarOffice is still there. Namely, a non-polished UI that in many aspects looks less-polished than other major office suites.<p>The project roadmaps also do not give me any hope that will be better in the future. There are shapes with physics simulation, but the most user facing aspect of the product, the UI, looks highly neglected.<p>I tried cloning the LibreOffice repo to tweak the UI to my satisfaction, but after witnessing the escheresque 4D spaghetti code that implements it I simply deleted the repo and continued doing something else.<p>Adding features will not change the fact the UI still looks like Sun StarOffice.
This monday I had to review and extend a proposal in a docx format, which is one of the rare cases I need an office suite for the job.
After hours of writing and commenting, I sent out the proposal to the project partner, who said he could not open the document at all. Turns out, libreoffice failed to properly save the document.xml, so that even libreoffice couldn't re-open the file itself. I had to put in extra hours and fix the document until late in the night by copy pasting parts of the broken XML or rewriting small bits. That was the last time I will use libreoffice.
I am also quite fond of Onlyoffice. We deployed the community edition alongside our nextcloud and I think we don't miss the Large Corporation Office suite much
I have personally found that OnlyOffice [0] has much better MS Word file compatibility than any other open source document editor.<p>Files created and saved in Word are being handled by OpenOffice without an issue and vice versa.<p>Haven't tried the spreadsheets, though.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.onlyoffice.com/en/" rel="nofollow">https://www.onlyoffice.com/en/</a>