LibreOffice is pretty damn good
from ColdWater@lemmy.ca to linux@lemmy.ml on 09 May 10:34
https://lemmy.ca/post/43715809
from ColdWater@lemmy.ca to linux@lemmy.ml on 09 May 10:34
https://lemmy.ca/post/43715809
Today I did my first advanced spreadsheet on LibreOffice after switching to Linux, and it handled itself pretty well. I had to search for some features on the web at first, but after I got it down, I felt comfortable using it. Also, LibreOffice’s default menu layout is not pretty, but I can find all of the functions with just a click, unlike MS Office’s ribbon menu where I had to click around to find what I was looking for. Sorry for bad English.
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However, in direct comparison with SoftMaker Office (which, admittedly, is not free software), LibreOffice is inconsistent, sluggish, unstable and less compatible with Microsoft formats.
Wrong info, the Microsoft format is less compatible with everything else.
Formats aren’t compatible. Parsers are.
?
There is Office software that can handle Microsoft formats better than other Office software. Still, Microsoft’s file formats are open.
That’s a sham. Only basic stuff is open standard, the rest is proprietary extensions. Such a format can’t usually be standardized; there’s an entire Wikipedia article about MS’ shenanigans to make it happen. But MS doesn’t even keep to that ambiguous 600-pages standard anymore. Here’s fsfe’ stance to it, calling it a pseudo-standard.
Which results in basic formatting having to be reverse-engineered. Better use Open Document Format.
To be fair, LibreOffice had (don’t know if it still has!) problems rendering OpenOffice .odt files in the past.
Except for MS format compatiblity, not my experience, Not sure where MS format compatibility stands now, but that has histically been the biggest issue.
Keep on mind that MS supplied LibreOffice translator is not great either so they have issues too. MS really does not plan on being compatible even between versions of their own software.
There are still a few issues left to fix in my experience.
For me MS Office aren’t compatible with LibreOffice is because MS fault not LibreOffice
How is it Microsoft’s fault that the LibreOffice team fails to properly support its formats? Others can do it.
It’s MS make their format to not compatible with other office software (because monopoly)
Then why can SoftMaker support it well and LibreOffice can’t?
I don’t use SM but probably because MS document format is their priority while LO’s priority is open document format
MS supplied LO translator in MS Office is not very good. That is their issue. MS is not even that compatible betwen versions of their own software.
The formats are “quasi-open”. There’s still a lot of proprietary stuff in them. Or undocumented or poorly documented things. MS didn’t really want it to be an open standard.
Being compatible with them requires a lot of work to reverse engineer the formats. Some companies make licensing deals with ms to get access to better docs but must keep their code closed. Something libreoffice can’t do.
I’m all for LibreOffice and Open Source, but I do not agree on this point. Microsoft created the format and application and LibreOffice is a third party that tries to be conform.
I usually work with MS formats on LO (only because they need smaller space for small files, in larger files, MS formats are objectively bulkier). My observation is that MS messes with formatting of files made on LO, no matter which format you pick… even with whitespace of otherwise plain unfomatted text at times.
It is definitely a MS issue, and it is not about formats they have made public.
Fuck Microsoft. We tried to get a open standard and so they created a competing name and standard to confuse and obfuscate (and wasn’t really a standard anyone could create).
So they can go get bent.
Huh, I’ve never heard of SoftMaker Office before, good to know it exists. I might check it out.
To add to some of the other comments, I have heard that the issue for LibreOffice is that Microsoft’s own parser isn’t compliant with the OOXML standard that they created. Yet the most important thing is compatibility with Microsoft Office, so you can’t simply build a parser according to the open standard and expect it to work with Microsoft Office. Instead, you need a parser to work the same way as Microsoft’s, which is proprietary. However, admittedly I have never read the OOXML standard or checked MS Office documents for compliance myself.
Therefore, if what I have heard is correct, I would assume that SoftMaker Office has either struck a deal with Microsoft before to improve compatibility, or has simply been better at reverse engineering. Alternatively, what I have heard could be wrong.
Honest question: who would use a non-collaborative standalone spreadsheet in 2025? I don’t get it.
Honest answer: People who would create spreadsheets for themselves.
I don't need to share everything, everytime. Do you ?
My single personal spreadsheet is (uh) a CSV that I edit with
vim. I don’t want to have to fire up a monstrous GUI app just to view a table. But sure, count me as eccentric in this way.Most of the spreadsheets I deal with are for work. For what I consider obvious reasons, they’ve been cloud-hosted for literally decades now.
There is a difference between “cloud-hosting” (= storing your documents on other people’s computers) and “collaborative editing” (= working on the same file at the same time).
Yes yes. The issue here being that in the real world nobody much is doing the latter. But we’re getting off topic, LibreOffice is neither.
LibreOffice can perfectly work with files stored on other people’s computers.
Yes, in theory, although tricky to set up. What it cannot do, at least not without fiddly modules, and even then nowhere near as well as the cloud competition, is any kind of collaborative document editing. Which is where the world is at today.
You said “in the real world nobody much is doing the latter”.
Indeed, confusing terminology. I consider that collaborative document editing is the activity, cloud hosting vs P2P is the technical implementation.
Like it or not, nobody much is doing the latter because it’s much harder to set up and the available cloud solutions provide a much (much) better user experience. I don’t say this a better situation but it’s the way things are.
Your initial response got peoples’ backs up because of its dismissive tone and (it seemed to me, as you hadn’t provided context) apparent advocacy for web-based tools like O365 or GSheets.
Many office application users wouldn’t consider vim as an “office application”, as they have their word processing app, their spreadsheet app, their email app, their chat app, their file explorer/manager, maybe something other than Notepad as a text editor, etc, and don’t really know much beyond some of what each of them can do.
The fact that vim (or Emacs or vim/nvim with plugins, or LazyVim or Doom Emacs) can do all of those things would blow many minds.
But the setup effort and learning curve is still there, and also requires that they have sufficient permissions/policy to be able to install things.
The pernicious side of social media in microcosm. To say “it’s not collaborative” is somehow understood as shilling for big tech. Always the worst possible interpretation of every remark.
Agreed as to vim.
Yeah, so you do use them, so you get it. Just most people use spreadsheets cause they know it and seem simple to them !
For me, I try to not use online spreadsheets for personal financial stuff. I only use online spreadsheets if the project has meaning in being shared. I quite like grist for this, really handful tool
Context is important:
“in August 2023, OnlyOffice announced a restructuring, placing Ascensio System SIA under the ownership of a British company, which is in turn owned by a Singapore-based holding company”
Its also open source and can be audited still.
I might uninstall because of this though as didnt even know.
You can absolutely collaborate with Collabora Office
Yes, true.
Not sure why you got downvoted, it is a fair question. Real time multiuser editing is a powerful feature. That said it is really only needed a small fraction of the time for specific types of collaboration. Also, it can cause problems as well. Libreoffice Calc meets most of my home spreadsheet needs: calculating mortgage rates and future value of investments and such.
Me, i hate “collaborative” internet connected spying stuff
While libreoffice seems to me like a gazillion features held together by duct tape, it does what I need it to do
.
Not you obviously
Privacy.
Me. The work I’m using them for doesn’t need collaboration or sharing. But it’s important to also have collaborative ones up my sleeve.
I’m using formula calculations and visual graphs, so a CLI-managed CSV just won’t work for me.
There’s only a small set of spreadsheets in my work life that need multiuser access, most of those are admin shit.
There are more in my home life, planning holidays, household tracking.
Buy most things at home and work have no need to be shared during update
Ribbon bar shit, personally I hate the MS ribbon bar. So for me the LO interface is way better. Just depends on what you like and what you learned and know well.
and libreoffice still has a ribbon interface if you like that.
I recommend giving OnlyOffice a try too. Way better UX/UI than Libre. Compatible with MS Office. No cost.
And coming fresh from a Russian Company with huge russian Government and Army Contracts
it’s not like OnlyOffice is controlled by Putin or something lol
Hm, TIL. I thought they were from the Baltics. For what it’s worth, as far as I can tell the desktop apps never tried to “phone home” from my machine.
Yeah, I thought the main devs were Latvian 🤔
“Headquartered” in Latvia. But really it’s Russian.
Look better doesn’t mean it’s functionally better.
Almost anytime i want to do something a bit more interesting in Excel i have to look for a solution on the web too. And i am considered one of the better Excel users in my working environment.
I do a lot of work with CSV files and LibreCalc is so much better for them. You can actually tell it how to delimit the file and to put quotations around each field.
Some programs actually advise against using excel if you’re going to work on a CSV to upload into the program, which is funny considering it’s meant to be the industry standard.
P. S. For anyone that would like to use LibreOffice at work, download portableapps and get it from there. It’s so portable it can get around IT administration requirements
On behalf of cyber and IT, just ask IT to install the thing, please. They can’t really say no to a free app and bypassing restrictions ends badly for everyone. I had a user do that with video editing software… seriously, what could go wrong? Ransomware. Literally ransomware. Lucky for antivirus it stopped it but yeah, please work with IT.
What? At my workplace there’s a bunch of stuff we aren’t allowed to install that’s free with the reasoning being security concerns.
That may be true for Discord but for FOSS products the security concern is the attack surface (more to patch).
Like I said to the other commenter, if they say no they should have to justify that (in written form, argued, with points), even if the reason you want it is familiarity with the tool, workflow speed ups, or it has a nicer UI. Make them work harder if they say no, and make it really clear you will go away quietly if they say yes.
I do think that companies asking users to use standard tools so they can build processes and training materials is reasonable. Using other tools means more attack surface, it means more updates, more documentation, less familiar people and it means more risk.
Also assuming your company is like most and forgets to document everything
alongside the crucial processes, if you know how to do something and tie it to a FOSS product instead of say excel, they won’t be able to hire a grad that can work for cheaper and do the thing half as well.My point is it does do something for them, but not as much as they think. They didn’t pay for the office suit for you to not use it. However, if you don’t need it, they can also stop paying for it. Justification is important. So is making ITs life difficult by making them justify decisions.
Bypassing them makes the incident response team’s life difficult, not ITs.
Have you worked somewhere before? Yeah, they should, but they won’t. It’s easier and cheaper to say no to everything unless there’s a serious tangible business reason that you need to use it, at which point they’ll look into it.
My company has rejected a bunch of stuff with the only reason being “Security Risk” with no further reasoning provided when asked. It’s super aggravating.
I’m sorry your team is like that, they should do better. I get along with my company IT team, obviously working close with them has benefits, but we have a lot of oversight and executive support so giving two word answers isn’t a thing where I work, they have to give a written justification etc.
In the same sense that not everyone works where I do, not everyone has assholes in IT who deny everything. Neither of our experiences are default and I was trying to write for someone in-between. Apologies if it didn’t come across that way.
There are businesses who don’t allow spotify on the corporate device, for sure. I saw a talk delivered by a guy who did. He worked for a mining company, they wouldn’t let people install things and were inundated with policy violations. He had to change the entire company culture around who IT were, and started by letting people make install requests for apps they wanted to use. They just tracked the requests so they knew who had what, and by helping, they could be selective about where the software came from.
When people don’t have IT as a support and see them as a regulator, they don’t work with them and bad shit happens. This dudes mining company was hit, also with ransomware (this one worked), because the CFO had local admin since he didn’t want to talk to IT.
My point is
a. they should be helping in this instance. Sorry they don’t, that’s frustrating to hear. Work culture is hard to change and I’m lucky with where I do work and the culture we have.
b. don’t bypass security controls regardless. Sorry. It’s still not the answer. If work makes you do things a slower or more annoying way, that’s their time lost. HR will throw you under the bus for the policy violation.
They can and most of the time they do complain about free apps
No enterprise support is actually scary for them. I did security, 'way back, but in Unix, and maybe that’s why we were more cool with OSS back then. Windows people love the black-box binaries and fear a lack of pricy support.
A co-worker was told (verbatim) by the head of IT that " we don’t use open source". So yeah…
Okay maybe I should have said they can’t say no and appear reasonable? Was there a justification or is this guy Joseph Goebbels or something? I bet you didn’t use AI 2 years ago but probably have that running rampant.
I’d love to live in a world where I trust everyone to install software on computers, but Mr Ransomware, albeit not common, is out there waiting to fuck up the business with a portable application he found. He wanted to do something for a colleague, but we all nearly suffered for it.
Install things the right way, and if you can’t, make a case for it and get managers involved. Justify the time saved or the comfort it provides: everyone hates AI, blame it on copilot being in excel.
Bypassing security instead of working with them doesn’t help anyone and it almost always ends badly.
What app was that? I’m guessing the software was not FOSS.
There was a trend of malware authors making websites to give away free video editors, I think this one appeared as capcut. They patch the binaries or use other techniques and include malicious DLLs.
Edit: you and I both are fine with people installing FOSS from github, but what happens when they get the name for the repo wrong? What happens when they go to the fake site a malware author spun up, that even has all the files they wanted?
Security is there for a reason, sorry, I know we can be annoying and add hurdles to important roles, but people get things wrong. We help with that, and bypassing us means you didn’t give us a chance to save you before you messed up (again I assume everyone on lemmy is a sysadmin Linux user so not ‘you’ but a generic user you).
Wow, I never heard about this malware trend. I guess this kind of crap will only increase with AI’s help…
I agree with LibreCalc and CSV, in some internationalclasses we always had issues with excel saving CSV in actually different formats depending on the machine locale. LibreCalc never had this problem.
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I am so close to loving libreoffice but trackpad gesture scrolling is broken and it’s kind of not optional on a laptop. With a mouse, I am a big fan.
I’ve found that a lot of apps with touch gestures need Touchégg to work correctly, could be worth a shot to give it an install. I use a converted macbook, and for any gestures to work with the apple trackpad at all I have to have touchegg, my partner has it on her converted pixelbook go to make the trackpad not feel awful there too.
github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg
i’m on mint cinnamon 22 and have touchegg installed. They have this in built Gestures applet but it doesn’t seem to govern the two finger scroll. Touche (separate app) seems similar - its all about 3 and 4 finger gestures. Seems like the two finger scroll is special somehow.
I’m probably misunderstanding as I rarely use word processing software, so I apologise if you talking about something more than the system’s own handling of touchpad scrolling! here’s the settings applet for XFCE, I think every DE will have similar options (it does even offer circular scrolling, but I know you aren’t looking for that):
<img alt="" src="https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/3bf23b8a-60f6-4502-8470-3edc2ed9dd20.webp">
Right you are - two finger is part of the touchpad device, and everything above is a “gesture”. This is enabled, and it works, but badly. Looks like a known issue: ask.libreoffice.org/t/…/18582
Gesture scrolling? You mean like making clockwise or anticlockwise circles to scroll up or down? I’d have thought that kind of functionality would be handled by the touchpad driver, not individual programs.
nah just two finger scroll. like going down from page 1 to page 2 with a touchpad
This works out of the box on KDE (should work on GNOME too), what desktop environment do you use?
Cinnamon, Mint 22. It works, but badly. Two finger scroll does nothing for a second, then jumps to the destination. You don’t see anything in between, which is not how that interaction is meant to go (I start the gesture, realise I overshot the top of page two, then adjust back up, read the top, then keep on scrolling - all without releasing the gesture).
This thread describes it well: www.reddit.com/r/…/touchpad_scroll_speed/
edit: i started digging into this again. I think it’s just sensitivity being way too high within LO. If I go one mm at a time it works as expected. But of course I want to browse docs as comfortably as I browse pages on firefox.
That’s my exact distro/de combo. Never had any issues with trackpad use that weren’t also there with the win10 that came on the thinkpad. Which was just that it’s prone to detecting even the lightest accidental taps and over reacting. Maybe it’s device specific?
Edit: by device specific, I mean that it isn’t every touchpad w/Libreoffice’s issue, rather something that’s wonky with some range of hardware and not others
Aha. This would make more sense - couldn’t imagine this was happening on every laptop. Then I should add my device details to a github issue. Thanks for letting me know.
Works on Ubuntu
.
A lot of what Linux lacks is UI design, and at least 50+% of that is just because of what we got used to using other products.
Absolutely true. We mimicked bad design out there for compatibility, but then it became comfy and now cannot be changed.
Having said that, the ribbon must die. Let’s not hold MSOffice (post-97) up as the ideal for anything at all, okay?
Depends on the Desktop/Theme your using really.
Define lack of design. You mean theming? because Linux has way more customizable theming options than the proprietary alternatives, to fit all kinds of subjective tastes.
You mean usability? it’s the one system that you can rice up to do absolutely whatever you want to do to fit your workflow, you can configure any key to automate literally anything a desktop can do.
The catch is that you actually do have to get your hands dirty if you want to mold the system to your liking… as opposed to being your own tastes the ones molding to adapt to whichever the designer of the OS decided should be the new tacky fashion or workflow.
I think he mispelled Windows.
Windows 11 is literally a part copy of KDE. Even the webpage got copied till they removed the evidence. It is KDE from Linux that got copied because the Windows User Interface was shit af.
But they still lack a lot for my taste. KDE seems to be the winner for me
offtopic but your english is great :)
Indeed, LibreOffice Calc is a near-daily fixture in my operational workflow. The insistence on proprietary, data-harvesting alternatives like Google Docs is… unnecessary. For Debian-based systems, the installation process is straightforward:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa&sudo apt install libreoffice, referencing the official documentation at wiki.documentfoundation.org/…/Linux(Is debian considered a “debian-based” distro?)
Debian users, ignore the above. Debian explicity warns against using ubuntu ppa
The correct way to get libreoffice in debian is just to apt install libreofffice… It’s already in the main debian repos
wiki.debian.org/LibreOffice
Yes. Its the obvious choice for desktop.
But if you want web, have you tried CryptoPad.
Collabora used to offer Libre Office online, now it’s their Libre Office fork
Rollapp lets you use LibreOffice online but I don’t think there is collaboration
Yes
You can visually theme it so it looks differently
Yeah; it’s pretty great. It lacks the excel functions, but if you know some python that is a total non-issue.
I do wish it had a self hosted docker though. I could see Proton mail and thunder mail adopting it that way, which would be neat.
Is a self hosted docker different from this?
github.com/linuxserver/docker-libreoffice
I bring this up often because its so amusing to me.
Last year I did a lot of interviews with developers of popular Steam Deck and Linux programs. All went really well, and were quite fun to do.
One ‘dev’ (I use that term so loosely because I found out GPT is heavily used for their work) freaked out though when they saw my document I sent initially was an .odt file.
Knowing I am a pen-tester, they freaked out and told the public at large I was trying to hack them with a weird file type.
.odt
It still makes me laugh. Anyway, I swear by LibreOffice, I use it daily and love it so much!
if a specific format isn’t requested or required, and the formatted text document is not expected to be edited by the recipient–only read, possibly by computer, or printed, i would default to using a pdf.
Most of these were not on-the-spot interviews. They were very informal questions and answers.
So Writer felt appropriate to me - the questions were there, they can copy to paste elsewhere, or enter their own answers in the document.
That’s funny! If someone was trying to infect my PC via e-mail, I would expect them to be sending pdf files.
Yeah, but it’d be better if calc gridlines didn’t have that unchangeable fade effect
It’s very good but M$ make every attempt to avoid making it interoperable with Word
M$ loves locking users into their totally bulls*it ecosystem with deliberately broken “standards.” LibreOffice, on the other hand, actually respects open formats like ODF and doesn’t treat interoperability as a threat. Word still can’t properly open documents it didn’t create, unless you pay the vendor tax and pray the formatting survives…
I think they deliberately mess with the formatting text in exported to “word doc” format files from LibreOffice too.
My first experience with it was that dark theme was bugged and the interface wasn’t intuitive
#775#298 060352 @ColdWater