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.
- 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???
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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++
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!
![http://i.imgur.com/g3a1332.png"](http://i.imgur.com/g3a1332.png"){kind=link}
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.