OOo/LO is a straight forward clone of MS Office. It shares all its design weaknesses and adds some of its own. Except foor freedom, I don't see any reason for using it over MS Office.

I use it for a different reason: no ribbon.

Your loss. Ribbon is a huge advance....

At home? False premise: It has replaced Word (for me.)

That it has not for everyone or as a whole doesn't strike me as odd in the slightest. There are plenty of reasons to use Word. Aside from the fact that it's solid itself, it also has a metric ton of inertia. Those using it already have the license or pirated copy, already know it, have legacy documents using it, and are generally otherwise are left with very little reason to switch to something merely because it's a "solid alternative."

I know I tried to switch to LibreOffice for a few weeks and then ran back screaming. I know some others who have done the same.

I haven't yet met a single person who is happier with OOo/LO than with Word; if that's true for you you're the first such person I've heard of.

Not as a Word replacement (never used Word), but Excel and Powerpoint: I switched. It took a couple of months to feel as productive. The first 2 weeks were especially hair pulling.

Much was due to the ribbon interface, which I liked, which LO doesn't have. My mind reverted to menus via Office 2000 which I cut my teeth on as a new graduate years back.

There are some things I still find odd / bewildering:

Right clicking on a block of text I have the options of both 'Text' and 'Character' which have different options. Neither of the contained options contain vertical alignment choices. Tables just feel a pain, zooming in and out as different cells / borders are clicked. Blah blah blah other small things. For my sins, I like VBA (familiar with, rather than romance).

Familiar is the key. It took a small learning curve, and I'm as productive in it as a modern version of MS Office. Much of the learning curve is having been so familiar with MS Office, sometimes things are just done differently, mainly at the UX Level. Integration for a personal and work based workflow is where Linux leaves Windows in the standing-gates was the game changer for me, and why I put myself through the learning curve.

I do feel LO's UI simply doesn't look beautiful, indeed, I feel it looks ugly. Everything is gray, some icons have shadow, some not. I have the feeling a few hundreds of hours on grouping icons, highlighting contrast in dialogue boxes, would make it a lot less 'tired' looking. Mozilla did it, I am sure LO will, and that may be a small but important tipping point.

I switched to NeoOffice several years ago and currently use LibreOffice. Wrote my dissertation on it. And this despite having access to MS-Office for free through a university license.

Cool! What do you like more about it than MS Office?

I tried it because I wanted to try free (as in freedom) software and never felt the need to switch back as it did everything I required of a WYSIWYG word processor. I guess I have just gotten so used to it now that when I use Word/Excel etc (mostly briefly on someone else's computer) I get all confused about their new panel based menu system.

The point is not that they are better but that they are a suitable replacement for all but a very small niche of power users. But people tend to compare the limit cases even if all they'll ever use are the day-to-day functions.

>> haven't yet met a single person who is happier with OOo/LO than with Word...

> The point is not that they are better but that they are a suitable replacement...

Well then you're just confirming what I already said...

The Ribbon is almost seven years old now.

And that's how long I've been MS-free :-).

Export to LaTex, for one.

> I haven't yet met a single person who is happier with OOo/ > LO than with Word; if that's true for you you're the first > such person I've heard of.

Hi, I'm one such person. Reason: the ribbon. In the rest, yes, Word is better. But I like standard menubar interfaces and hate the programs that don't let me use them.

I switched several years ago and never looked backed. No problem whatsoever, I produce all my corporate documents with it.

Could you explain what it is that scared you so much? I am the one to scream whenever I'm forced into using anything from the post 2003 MS office suites, which is thankfully extremely rare.

Yeah, sure:

- LibreOffice can't even show the simplest documents correctly on the same computer: http://i.imgur.com/0glr43F.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/g3a1332.png

- Word takes < 200 ms to start up on my (blazing fast) laptop. LibreOffice takes > 2 seconds. It's outright irritating to say the least.

- Everything else has lags too. File->Save takes > 2 seconds to show me the dialog. In Word it's instantaneous.

- No smooth scroll?? My eyes!!! >___<

- No "Styles"??

- The UI just screams "LINUX", feels freaking hacky, and doesn't feel the way it should. For example:

1. Word highlights text word-by-word; LO does it letter-by-letter. Selections never work the way you intend them the first time.

2. Highlight a piece of text from left to right and then press Left. The cursor is now still on the left-hand side of the previously-highlighted text in Word, but still on the right-hand side in LibreOffice. What the hell???

3. A million other things about the UI doesn't feel normal, e.g. http://i.imgur.com/HM52E9A.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/zTK1zoi.png

I could go on and on, these are just what I found/remembered in a couple minutes of using it again.

You raised some great points about the selection UI. Did you file any bug reports for them? For your bad.doc, I think it's a missing font issue. Would you mind posting the file somewhere like Google Docs or Skydrive so we could take a look at it?

For the smooth scrolling, you need to enable it under:

Tools->Options->Writer->View

Unfortunately, it is disabled by default.

I love the idea of Free software, use LO at home, and pushed for it at work. After a pilot LO rollout, we ended up going with MSO 2010 because of LO's poor interoperability with our old Word docs.

As promised in my ohter comment, here's another example file, this time a .docx:

http://www40.zippyshare.com/v/24126556/file.html

Try opening it in MS Word and compare it with LibreOffice and you'll see why I ran away screaming:

http://i.imgur.com/4tSWXsn.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/3tBLuff.png

Exactly what is the etiquette for filing bug reports? I think of bugs as something not working as intended. Pressing left from a selection taking the cursor one space to the left of its rightmost extent, instead of to the leftmost extent, is stupid, but presumably working as intended. Should I file a bug saying OOo doesn't do HTML syntax highlighting? A bug complaining that in all the years I've had it installed (pre-2009, even), it has never mined one bitcoin for me?

It's called a feature request. If you think bitcoin mining falls under the scope an office suite, please do us all a favor and stay away from their bug tracker.

I'm missing something very funny I suspect. Please elaborate.

1. Nope I haven't submitted bug reports, I've just used Word instead.

2. Ah, I think you're right about the missing font, I didn't realize that. I'll get back to you if I find another example, there are a million things I've noticed over time that don't render correctly other than fonts. (EDIT: See my other comment.)

3. Actually, I do have smooth scrolling "enabled", but it doesn't have any effect whatsoever (as of version 4.0.0.3).

"- LibreOffice can't even show the simplest documents correctly on the same computer: http://i.imgur.com/0glr43F.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/g3a1332.png"

That's a .doc file, an un-/poorly-documented format. As noted in the article, it's not simple at all. It is a good argument in favor of Libre and OpenOffice, though: other word processors will be able to open your documents if you decide to switch from them. Just that alone is a big win for anyone thinking long term.

All of your other criticisms other than the speed stuff boil down to "I'm used to MS Word". Which is fine.

> 1. Word highlights text word-by-word;

I find Word's attempt to highlight word at a time to be extremely frustrating and distracting. Very often in my documents it simply will not properly recognize the boundaries of what I want to select, and small increments of the mouse produce jumps in the selection that were not intended. I think OO's behavior is a lot better in this respect.

> I find Word's attempt to highlight word at a time to be extremely frustrating and distracting.

Use the keyboard if you want to highlight character-by-character.

Word is simply optimizing for the most-common case: copying-and-pasting whole words, sentences, or paragraphs. It's a lot faster when you don't have to hit the exact character boundary of the word -- especially if you're using a touchpad instead of a mouse.

It's possible to disable this in Word by the way.

Except this is the common case, so it makes sense to have it on by default.

The great thing about LibreOffice is that if there is something you don't like about it, you can contribute to the codebase.

That's very disingenuous. The libreoffice code base is big and complex and hard enough to ramp up on that fixing your personal problems with it would quickly become a full time job, even if you already know all there is to know about programming enterprise software in c++

That depends on what you're trying to fix.

Add a nonlinear solver to calc? Sure.

Add a fill function into draw? _Maybe_ a two-month after-hours project.

Draw internals are an absolute mess. I've tried to fix bugs in Draw multiple times and just ended up discouraged.

It took me around 3 months, full-time, to write an import filter for LibreOffice that still only kinda-sorta works. And it depended very little on the rest of the codebase.

I think you underestimate how complicated a modern office suite is, and how much years-old technical debt there is floating around in LibreOffice.

Oh oh oh this would be funny if it weren't so sad. Thanks for illustrating so poignantly the idiocy of free software fanaticism (that is not to say that all OS software is bad or idiotic, I use a lot of it, it's about the cognitive dissonance in this thread).

So, I have this project in which I need to fill an area in a drawing in a proposal for a client. So my options are:

a) Spend $200 (about an hours worth of billable time, or 2 hours during dry spells) on MS Office.

b) Spend 2 x 4 x 10 = 80 hours (which is no where near enough, but let's go with your number) on this feature, then spend again that on finding and convincing the right people to include my patch, on a half-assed implementation which does just enough what I need, and tell my client 'yeah get back to me in 2 months when I have patched my word processor to deliver the functionality I need'.

Choices choices, which one should I choose?

Just that time alone on a single tiny feature would pay for a lifetime worth of MS Office software!

Or maybe I can spend my time doing something else and just use something that already works?

For "just" replacing word (ie: as a word processor with reasonable output considering it's not a DTP package or LaTeX), I think abiword is superior for most use cases (except: "being word" aka compatibility with complex word documents (for simple/ancient documents it reportedly is better than word...)).

If you need/want to insert various objects in various documents (eg: graphs from spreadsheets in documents that dynamically update when the data source update) -- not so much. I could argue that you'd be better off using literate R/LyX -- but unfortunately there's a bit of an UX gap).

I much prefer LibreOffice to MS Office -- but mostly because I don't feel quite as a afraid that my documents are going to go randomly get corrupted at the worst possible moment without any reasonable hope of recovery (documented formats ftw!).

I really think that has to do with Microsoft's lock-in strategy and the fact that people only "know" Office in the corporate space.

Or maybe, just maybe, it could be that word is actually a market leader in terms of features and interface.

Have you ever been involved in buying software for a company? In my experience, nobody compares the features of different word processing software. In fact, nobody even mentions competing software, as if Word was the only choice.

Now they don't. But they did in the 80s and 90s and guess what, Office won, because it was the best choice. And it's not like they didn't have commercial competitors who couldn't keep up with Microsoft bribes^Wlobbying :)