LibreOffice 4.0 Released With Immense Changes

[brosis]

LO Impress is also... unimpressive,...

Just FYI, I'm a big supporter of LO but I can admit it isn't the best thing out there. One of the only reasons MS was so successful was because of Office.

No and no.

Impress can compress exported documents to PDF based on size, dpi and quality. MS is not even near this.
MS Office won not because its "successful", but because it used hidden functionality in Windows, forced own changing document types that others were unable to work with and was very often prepackaged in OEM. They drove every other single solution out of the market since Windows 95; even Wordperfect is nearly dead - I know no one who uses it now.

Right now its down to LibreOffice, Softmaker and MSO. With MSO going Linux, even half-arsed, Softmaker is very probably dead; and only LO and MSO will compete.

LO is more advanced than MSO, because it uses classic interface, works perfectly on multitude of platforms, is FLOSS, and has wide support for document formats.
Since 2009 I use LibreOffice exclusively for everything and it works wonders. Also, nearly all Windows PC's I encounter have OOO or LO installed, so its used everywhere which means its feature complete.

[a user]

Ok. I'll tell you what is missing from libreoffice. Convenience tools/scripts for niche applications. For example I was an economics major in college and they had a whole suite of built in tools (that you could enable) to automate generation of various statistics. Some of the tables I could easily recreate in LibreOffice, some it was way quicker to walk to a computer lab and use Microsoft office to do the work and then import it into LibreOffice latter.

LibreOffice has no good tutorials for using Base. None of them tell you how to customize querry's/inputs/etc. They only cover the automatic generation of user interface (There is allot of tutorials just telling you to click next->next->next) Which has made that part of Libreoffice useless to me.

Those are the only two areas where Microsoft Office wins. If you don't want to use base or don't need some niche tools for your profession, then LibreOffice is perfect.

BTW. Now that I'm out of school, I use LibreOffice exclusively.

well, being better at some points does not mean it is overall better

[a user]

One of the only reasons MS was so successful was because of Office.

100% NOT!

when microsoft had its winning run their office product actually was one of the worst on the market! especially the most used tool, WORD.

[uid313]

They added useless shit like Firefox personas skin support, instead of porting it o GTK3, improving the file format support, or shipping some post-1995 templates for Impress.

[cbamber85]

LO is more advanced than MSO, because it uses classic interface...

Err... What? It's more advanced because it uses a UI paradigm from the Windows 95 days? No. The Ribbon interface was the best to happen to MSO in a good few releases.

[Linuxhippy]

They added useless shit like Firefox personas skin support, instead of porting it o GTK3,

Actually they are not using GTK except for theming their own toolkit (Firefox is implemented the same way).
In case they would switch from VCL to GTK3 it would look like shit on Windows and OSX.

No. The Ribbon interface was the best to happen to MSO in a good few releases.

I have to use the Ribbon stuff as MSOffice-2010 is actually standard at the company I work for and to be honest actually dislike it a lot. Keeping in mind how few programs not created by Microsoft actually use Ribbons, I wonder wether it is really the big success microsoft wants us make to believe.
So it probably all comes down to personal preferences.

Regards

[curaga]

Maybe I need to try the new 4.0.

In previous versions my only complaints were far too slow startup and the dep on Java.

[Rallos Zek]

While LibreOffice isn't yet up to par with Microsoft Office

For a good many of us, LibreOffice has eclipsed MS Office a long time ago. Microsoft Office is one of the most overrated applications ever, if not the most overpriced .

[Hamish Wilson]

I have only used ribbon when I was writing my diploma exams, and while I admit it is not that bad it certainly is not easily discoverable. By the end of writing my Social30 written exam we were forced to help the examiner figure it out, even though we had never used it before, and he had.

[stikonas]

Neither Libre Office, nor MS Office are up to part with L_AT_EX anyway...