LibreOffice hits 4.0

You have to keep things in perspective.<p>LibreOffice does not look nice but it is functional. What is its main function? <i>For many people, it has completely replaced Microsoft Office.</i><p>Of course MS Office has an even larger feature set, but few people max it out. Likewise, there are people who will prefer LaTeX but that's a small group. The advocates of web based office systems tend to ignore that desktop systems provide much more privacy. LibreOffice sits right in between those groups and is useful to many.

LibreOffice has now left OpenOffice in the dust, and is a viable replacement of Microsoft Office for all but a tiny minority of users. LibreOffice Calc may not yet be as shiny as Microsoft Excel, but it works well and reliably -- I use it regularly with fairly large spreadsheets chock-full of array functions that manipulate vectors and matrices.[1]<p>--<p>[1] Yes, LibreOffice forumals can manipulate and return vectors and matrices, not just single values -- see <a href="https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Array_Functions#What_is_an_Array.3F" rel="nofollow">https://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Array_Functions#What_is_an...</a>

I try to stay away from *Office suites as much as possible. It seems that whenever I use them to do anything more complicated than typing a short letter, everything starts to fall apart and I wish I had used Latex/R/python instead.<p>On the other hand, LibreOffice is a very helpful piece of software to edit the occasional .doc attachment.

Not much to say other than "I love LibreOffice" I'm by no means a power user but it gets the job done. For everything I do it is a 100% viable MS-Office replacement. Converting people to Linux would be a lot harder without it as well :)<p>I use Writer for basic writing, nothing fancy. Same for Calc and I hold my lecture using Impress. I use Draw every now and then for quick and dirty stuff.<p>Never used Base or Math explicitly.<p>Keep up the good work it is appreciated.<p>Edit: I have Googled for this a couple of times but never find anything. Is there an "Advanced LibreOffice" type book that anyone could recommend? I always make resolutions to use my office suite more efficient but never get around to it.

I am really surprised that no one mentioned the lack of OneNote, yet. Although it might not actually apply to libreoffice, if their ultimate goal is to replace ms office though then some really really good OneNote alternative has to be developed. OneNote and esp. Excel have to have an extremely good alternative for MS Office to become somewhat less important.

I can't believe they wasted time on "themes" for an office suite instead of coming up with a standard, clean look.

The website looks terrible for 2013.

I still think this should've arrived with a more modern interface. At least I hope they get to that by the time port it to Android devices.

For the past 23 years I have only very occasionally had the need to use Office-type applications. Today the typical uses of Office applications implies an outdated way of working.<p>For example, my company lives and breathes through its internal wiki -- which is quite an accomplishment since we are owned by a company that still lives in the dark ages: mailing Office attachments to each other.<p>Sure, the wiki software could have been a lot better. For one it needs an order of magnitude better performance. And it would be nice if the install wasn't such a messy affair. But it beats the alternative hands down. It beats mailing documents. It beats juggling multiple versions of documents. It beats overflowing mailserver quotas.<p>Most of all it beats not having to run Windows XP because the people who came before you were stupid fuckups who decided to tie everything so closely to a single platform that they can only afford to move the company to a new OS version every 10 years. And then only after a herculean effort. Inbetween everyone runs on outdated software. For a whole decade.<p>Real change doesn't come from offering marginal compatibility. Real change comes from not having stupid problems.<p>LibreOffice is a solution to a problem you should not be having.

While I think LibreOffice has its uses, I think the world is sort of moving away from desktop-based office software. I can't even remember the last time I used Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, it's probably more than 2-3 years ago.<p>Then again, if you're a hardcore Word user, then the professional office suites still offer more functionality.<p>(Additionally, not everybody is lucky enough to "work in the cloud" due to various constraints or restrictions).

Nice work.<p>- "Reduce Java code:" good, an unnecessary dependency, please continue.<p>- "Themes" ? I don't understand why anyone would want their office suite to look different than other desktop apps? I sort of understand with a music player, but a word processor?<p>Every time I see the blue gradient toolbars on MS Office clashing with my other apps I cringe. Reminds me of Myspace.<p>- Where is outline mode? I have quite a few colleagues who won't use it until it arrives.

I love LibreOffice.<p>That said, in my spare time, I've been looking through the code base, and my impressions are that it's too large. For instance, looking at the vcl module, which handles widgets, windows, etc. when I look at the number of classes my mind begins to boggle.<p>I possibly (read: probably) speak from ignorance, but I use the function SVMain() [1] as an example. Instead of defining a purely abstract class with architecture specific classes derived from this, they have defined an extern hook function, then they run it, test to see if it returns false, and if so run the standard ImplSVMain function. This seems inelegant for two reasons: the code is somewhat unclear, and there seems to be two functions with lightly different names, one is an SVMain function that does something, the other is an <i>implementation</i> of a function... Yet both implement a functional part of the code base. There is even a comment that reads "the real SVMain.".<p>Then there are the names... There is a "desktop" object that runs the main loop, the desktop being the application. [2] But there is an Application class [3], yet at the same time there's a DesktopEnvironmentContext class [4]. This seems to be some sort of misguided attempt at reimplementing a "desktop" metaphor, which is a legacy of early versions StarOffice. It was one of the first things ripped out when work started on OpenOffice.org, yet the class name still remains, making its purpose most unclear.<p>Furthermore, for some reason they force the Application class to be subclassed. Which they do only once, via Application_Impl. But I have noticed that the base class has lots of empty non-pure functions, and only forces Main() to be a pure virtual function. What is the point of this?<p>Another thing that I find makes the code harder to read is it uses a lot of Hungarian notation.<p>This is a legacy code base, and I wasn't being sarcastic when I said I love LibreOffice. I think people like Michael Meeks and Kohei are amazing. But I see the code base as having been slapped together somewhat pver many years. And there are code smells and, frankly, code rot, throughout the source.<p>It needs to be rearchitected (not rewritten). There is code in the code base that nobody dares touch (the legacy filters). The code is organised strangely, for example there are multiple places to find filters. At the same time, they have a system abstraction layer (sal), which has specific architectural and generic classes, but then I see that <a href="http://docs.libreoffice.org" rel="nofollow">http://docs.libreoffice.org</a> has modules like "android" and "iOS".<p>There are literally thousands of classes in there. Go-oo sometime ago refactored away dozens of classes, I would think they could refactor away a lot more.<p>I'm truly sorry if this seems harsh or ignorant by the way. It's not intended to be that way. It's just this code base is massive, so massive that its hard to understand how it all works. This in turn, IMO, may cause issues getting more volunteers. Not to mention too much refactoring might break things.<p>1. <a href="http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/svmain_8cxx_source.html#l00211" rel="nofollow">http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/svmain_8cxx_source.html...</a><p>2. <a href="http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Architecture/Process_Flow" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Architecture/Process_Flow</a><p>3. <a href="http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classApplication.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classApplication.html</a><p>4. <a href="http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classDesktopEnvironmentContext.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.libreoffice.org/vcl/html/classDesktopEnvironment...</a>

I downloaded the new version, and tried it on a docx file that a colleague had sent me. In MSword, the file has 24 pages. In LibreOffice, it seems to have a bit over 5 pages. No error message, no dialog box ... it just gets to a certain string ($O_2$, expressed in latex format) and stops. If not for the fact that I have MSword, I'd email back to my colleague and ask her what the heck kind of a draft manuscript she was sending.<p>Although I use the Excel copy quite a lot (for grading), I have yet to see the Word copy function properly in a professional document of any realistic complexity.<p>I know, I should report the bug, but the material I'm looking at is under submission to a scientific journal, and will therefore be private until it may be published.

I remember staroffice 5 (its ancient predecessor) in the late 90s. The interface was amazing to my eyes, for the time: <a href="http://linuxbook.orbdesigns.com/ch11/images/btlb1114.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://linuxbook.orbdesigns.com/ch11/images/btlb1114.jpg</a> and <a href="http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/sointr-1.gif" rel="nofollow">http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/sointr-1.gif</a><p>The star office applications all played well with each other in this shell of an application that looked like windows 95.<p>This is back when KDE was a new thing and many people were using FVWM ... it just looked so wonderfully sophisticated up against the desktop applications available for linux at the time.<p>PS: <a href="http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soui-1.gif" rel="nofollow">http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soui-1.gif</a> and <a href="http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soint-4.gif" rel="nofollow">http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soint-4.gif</a> and <a href="http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-6.gif" rel="nofollow">http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-6.gif</a> and <a href="http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-5.gif" rel="nofollow">http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-5.gif</a> ... I don't know how it's taken them 15 years to start to be awesome again.

I'll try it again, but OO/LO Impress PowerPoint replacement is particularly buggy. I often have to give scientific talks, and I'm always running into bugs. For example, various elements become fixed and uneditable, and figures often get mangled. The import filters occasionally mess up powerpoint documents, too. I wish I could avoid PowerPoint - I hate the ribbon and it can't cope with PDF figures.

I like LibreOffice Calc, though I have issues on occasion. It feels... bulky I guess, but it certainly seems to be more complete then good docs spreadsheets.<p>As an aside, just found out that you can use the perl module DBI:CSV: to treat a CSV as a DB and use SQL with it.

FWIW, another alternative to OpenOffice/LibreOffice<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsoft_Office" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsoft_Office</a><p>Android: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cn.wps.moffice_eng&#38;hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cn.wps.moffice...</a><p>Office 2012 Free Suite: <a href="http://www.kingsoftstore.com/software/kingsoft-office-freeware" rel="nofollow">http://www.kingsoftstore.com/software/kingsoft-office-freewa...</a><p>I've used it. Mostly opens Office documents without too much formatting problems.<p>It uses the Qt framework, so the UI looks neat. Hope it helps.

LO Impress has been a pain recently. Saving a presentation and re-opening it would yield garbage.<p>I've been testing LO 4 for a few weeks now, and it seems that the problem has gone. Apart from this, LO does the job, we use it for automatically generating API doc in HTML from specs we write with it, and this is great. Not that there is any other viable option on Linux (that I know of).<p>I wish I could have a Keynote-like on Linux. In the meantime, beamer does the job for quick &#38; safe slide decks.

Ted comes home early from work to discover his best friend in bed with his wife. "Frank," he cries. "I married her, so I have to! But why did you?"<p>That rather old and tired joke (one of Isaac Asimov's, I believe) says how I feel about Libre Office. I use Ubuntu, so it's the only game in town if I want to edit documents and spreadsheets. But it may be unique in the world as the only software that's actively <i>worse</i> than Microsoft Office.

Are the LibreOffice developers aware that most Mac users will not be able to start their application?<p>The reason is simply OS X' default configuration:<p>'LibreOffice.app can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer.<p>Your security preferences allow installation of only apps from the Mac Ap Store or identified developers.'<p>I know, using the Ctrl key lets me confirm that I really want to run LibreOffice.app, however, how many Mac users know that?

I've been using SkyDrive for a while now, and it generally feels more usable to me. Is there a reason people prefer LibreOffice over that? I haven't used it as much, but it feels like I can't be sure what the document will look like back in Microsoft Office once I'm done editing it.

Not sure why everyone sees LibreOffice as a Word replacement. Personally I use LibreOffice Calc all the time, I find it generally faster than excel. I also dislike the ribbon interface but I guess that's just personal preference.

How powerful/useful is the LibreOffice macro system, especially compared to VBA?

Biggest issue with LibreOffice is how slow it is compared to Office. Even in Linux, Office running under Wine is faster than LibreOffice.

I wish to god they would make Calc work with Mondrian OLAP server.

minor observation regarding the website's example images and their lightbox: really strange placement for the close "X" in the bottom right corner, right?

question: is still has some java dependencies, right?

I am waiting for MS Office on Linux.