LibreOffice 7.6 Beta Available For This Excellent Open-Source Office Suite

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LibreOffice 7.6 Beta Available For This Excellent Open-Source Office Suite

Ahead of the stable release being planned for August, today marks the availability of LibreOffice 7.6 Beta 1 for those wanting to help in testing this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/LibreOffice-7.6-Beta-1

[MorrisS.]

I like the rounded corners.

[uid313]

The word "excellent" to describe LibreOffice sounds exaggerated. Last time I tried LibreOffice (I think it was version 7.5) it was awful!

[Linuxhippy]

i really hope they will soon enable / port the vulkan rendering backend to linux - scrolling is extremly choppy on my AMD system.
whereas windows users can revert to skia software rendering, on linux the only choice I get is that crappy cairo based renderer.

[M@GOid]

Recently at work I received some Excel files from some dumb people, that think it is appropriate to create vast text content in each cell of a spreadsheet document, instead of creating tables on a text editor, like you imagine a normal person would do... Anyway, those made me realize that LibreOffice's Calc don't scroll smoothly like a browser, but from cell to cell. Thanks to the aforementioned morons, I couldn't read the entire text in each cell, since the scrolling jumped to the next cell without revealing the content of the previous one.

This sent me in a search for smooth scrolling on Calc, but there is not a option for it. Even a old open bug report with dozens of people begging for the feature has been ignored for years. And to my dismay, not only LibreOffice suffers from this problem, but also Google Docs and OnlyOffice. To my surprise, the only one offering smooth scrolling on the spreadsheet app is KDE's Calligra, which is unfortunately without new releases since 2021.

[MorrisS.]

i really hope they will soon enable / port the vulkan rendering backend to linux - scrolling is extremly choppy on my AMD system.
whereas windows users can revert to skia software rendering, on linux the only choice I get is that crappy cairo based renderer.

there is matter about compositors based on opengl and implicit synchronization unlike vulkan which implements the explicit synchronization.

[mirmirmir]

I appreciate their effort to raise awareness of libreoffice on Twitter, but man, I don't like the way they respond to criticism, like someone complained about poor word dictionary, and they replied by blaming host os, someone else complained about poor UI, they replied to change it by doing somersault three times, which is not the answer btw, they just give options to different flavor of poor UI.

I know it's a free software, but they can't just fucking own it.

[andyprough]

Recently at work I received some Excel files from some dumb people, that think it is appropriate to create vast text content in each cell of a spreadsheet document, instead of creating tables on a text editor, like you imagine a normal person would do... Anyway, those made me realize that LibreOffice's Calc don't scroll smoothly like a browser, but from cell to cell. Thanks to the aforementioned morons, I couldn't read the entire text in each cell, since the scrolling jumped to the next cell without revealing the content of the previous one.

This sent me in a search for smooth scrolling on Calc, but there is not a option for it. Even a old open bug report with dozens of people begging for the feature has been ignored for years. And to my dismay, not only LibreOffice suffers from this problem, but also Google Docs and OnlyOffice. To my surprise, the only one offering smooth scrolling on the spreadsheet app is KDE's Calligra, which is unfortunately without new releases since 2021.

Not gonna lie - sometimes I string two or three wide monitors in a row to view stuff like that. It's especially horrifying when someone decides to print it as a PDF before sending it, and doesn't give you the original spreadsheet. At least in spreadsheet form you can zoom out 200-300% and change the cell sizes and enable word wrap and make it somewhat viewable sometimes. That's good to know about Calligra, I'll have to keep that in mind. MS Office doesn't handle it any better.

[oiaohm]

Recently at work I received some Excel files from some dumb people, that think it is appropriate to create vast text content in each cell of a spreadsheet document, instead of creating tables on a text editor, like you imagine a normal person would do... Anyway, those made me realize that LibreOffice's Calc don't scroll smoothly like a browser, but from cell to cell. Thanks to the aforementioned morons, I couldn't read the entire text in each cell, since the scrolling jumped to the next cell without revealing the content of the previous one.

Do make sure with the scrolling you have hardware acceleration on. But the cell to cell bit comes from the first spreadsheet program VisiCalc yes 1979.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/Calc/022

There is kind of a reason. Excel allows max of 32,767 characters in a cell(that limit goes back to VisiCalc). Yes LibreOffice calc does in fact allow 2 to the power of 31 chars in a cell.

Lot of these people cannot find shift-enter so are putting a line of text per cell instead of using the 32767 to put all the text in 1 cell. Yes there is a drop down arrow and the end of the input line that turns it into a input box in Calc and excel for a reason.

There is a reason one MS Office users use excel so much of the stuff you describe word tables are not able to do maths dependability. Yes word table can successfully do 1+1 in sum and give you 11 for no good reason at times.

M@GOid I would hope your define of vast is not 32767+ worth of text. Lets just say Libreoffice Calc with true 1G vast text per Cell is a little system taxing(for understatement of decade) so it kind of understand why LibreOffice wanted to display only one cells worth of data at a time.

Yes I know people ask all the time how to I put more than 32767 chars into excel calc cell. Yes the instruction they get back all the time is just split that up over cells as solution. Not hey do you think it time to create a document to go along with that and Microsoft is not increasing the limit.

This sent me in a search for smooth scrolling on Calc, but there is not a option for it. Even a old open bug report with dozens of people begging for the feature has been ignored for years. And to my dismay, not only LibreOffice suffers from this problem, but also Google Docs and OnlyOffice. To my surprise, the only one offering smooth scrolling on the spreadsheet app is KDE's Calligra, which is unfortunately without new releases since 2021.

Yes Calligra sheets is a very rare exception. Most spreadsheets programs(as in over 95% of them) follow the 1979 VisiCalc model with how to handle text in cells yes this is the the no scrolling from end of one cells contents to the start of the next cells contents.

Yes with 32767 chars to play with you should be able do a paragraph per cell. I have seen far too many that have a paragraph split over cells as well.

[Estranged1906]

As someone who lives and breathes Excel and uses it for pretty much anything ("if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail"), Calc just has hundreds of papercuts and missing features and incompatibilities and annoyances. An absolute non-starter. OnlyOffice Spreadsheets is not any better but at least it has a nicer user interface and seems to slowly improve over time while for Calc none of my bug reports of the last few years have made any progress (I guess there's just too many bugs and feature requests out there).

Calc might be fine for a "normal person" doing basic tasks like a household budget, calorie counting or childrens' height tracker. But for "professional work" it's just not good enough to compete with Excel.

Hence I'm using Excel 2016 running on PlayOnLinux...