In your opinion, what makes Libre/Open Office less capable than M$ Office?

[MrSlack]

Well that's easily solved by thinking just after you press Ctrl+S...

[Zero999]

Well that's easily solved by thinking just after you press Ctrl+S...

Which is useless if it was someone else who saved the file.

[SeanB]

Well that's easily solved by thinking just after you press Ctrl+S...

Which is useless if it was someone else who saved the file.

And also does not work too well on networked drives as search explicitly excludes them from indexing, unless you want to whack the server with all the machines on restart trying to index every accessible file. You have to know the share to search and select it, then wait while the network goes up to full utilisation till it recurses every directory in the tree and reads every file to build up the index. Time for tea.......

File manager anybody? I am getting to like Cinnamon, a lot better at not hiding those things you might want to sort the view on. 

With Win7 open a directory with a few files that are media and it %$#@##%&*%$%$ insists on doing a preview in icons, despite the group policy and the local policy saying BLOODY DETAILED LIST ONLY AND WITH THE #$^^%*$^&% EXTENSION SHOWN. Then it adds a "helpful" 200 different types of display, and often then forgets the view on the next restart.

Then Win10 and the #$^^#@@#&%&%^ windows key stops working till you restart. Really cheesing my sister off on her laptop.

[Zero999]

Is there an estimate of how much taxpayers money they save by using open source software?

For enterprise it's usually cheaper to just use Microsoft.

Look at the experience Munich went through.  They spent 30 million Euros to convert from Windows to Linux and OpenOffice.  They had to pay $$$ to specialists for the original conversion and ongoing support, instead getting bids from the thousands of Microsoft partners available. 

Then they had so many issues with OpenOffice that they had to spend millions again to switch to LibreOffice.  Then they had massive issues with LibreOffice 4.1.x and KDE 4.  When they got new hardware, Linux didn't have the right kernel drivers...

They supposedly "saved" money but an independent study showed they would have actually spent less of taxpayer's money had they stuck with Windows.  The real cost of conversion might have been as high as 60 million Euros.  Cost had they remained with Windows: 20-30 million Euros.

A couple of years ago, the city employees were so dissatisfied that a study was proposed to see if Munich can switch back to Windows.    But there's no switching back... they're in too deep, they just have to live with the mess.

That article isn't completely relevant here, since not only is it talking about switching OpenOffice.org but desktop Linux too. Here in the UK, OOo is installed on many PCs in job centres (presumably to save licensing costs) and it works quite well. Compatibility with MS Office is not a problem because jobseekers are always advised to avoid complex formatting which can create problems with different versions of MS Office too.

[ade]

It's more usual for open source desktop conversions to switch wholesale... not just Office and Windows but other commercial products as well (from Adobe, etc.)

In most of these conversions the primary reason is political, not financial.  In the Munich example, even their original projections acknowledged that it would be cheaper to simply stick with Microsoft products. 

So usually the justification for a switch is to be free from vendor lock-in.  And that's a big reason why the OO/LO folks do not want OOXML to succeed, because then the vendor lock-in argument can't be used anymore to promote their services.

In smaller cases, the reason for conversion is for security concerns (e.g., Department of Defense, in part to reduce malware exposure).  Again it won't make sense to just switch Office to OO/LO in this case, so typically the whole desktop gets replaced.

Aside from some niche industries (e.g., CG/animation), virtually all of the large open source conversion projects we've seen are by governmental or educational institutions.  And among smaller companies which have switch away from Windows, most have switched to Macs instead of to Linux.

[Karel]

For enterprise it's usually cheaper to just use Microsoft.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/03/french-police-saves-millions-of-euros-by-adopting-ubuntu/

[ade]

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/03/french-police-saves-millions-of-euros-by-adopting-ubuntu/

That's a one-off that can't be repeated elsewhere, in part because the deal with the French gendarmerie is in effect subsidized by various parties including the company behind Ubuntu. 

E.g., Canonical only charges them something like $1/machine/year for support.  That's less than $100,000 to support 90,000 machines... less than the salary of just one Canonical engineer!

If the gendarmerie had to pay the same rates as everyone else, there would be no business case.  The typical SMB customer can't get Ubuntu desktop support from Canonical for less than $150/machine/year... 150x price difference!

[MrSlack]

Canonical support is boiled shit anyway. I mean really dire. Worse than Microsoft enterprise support which is bad. Not worth a thing. Plus the product is buggy as hell.

We dumped them and moved to RHEL and CentOS 7 which has been flawless so far. We're 50% windows and 50% Linux and it works for us.

All our Linux guys use office 2016 and windows 10 on the desktop out of choice so you've got to ask yourself a few questions there. I myself wouldn't put it near the desktop.

[Karel]

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/03/french-police-saves-millions-of-euros-by-adopting-ubuntu/

That's a one-off that can't be repeated elsewhere, in part because the deal with the French gendarmerie is in effect subsidized by various parties including the company behind Ubuntu. 

E.g., Canonical only charges them something like $1/machine/year for support.  That's less than $100,000 to support 90,000 machines... less than the salary of just one Canonical engineer!

If the gendarmerie had to pay the same rates as everyone else, there would be no business case.  The typical SMB customer can't get Ubuntu desktop support from Canonical for less than $150/machine/year... 150x price difference!

The same happens the other way around. When a big party ones to move away from microsoft, microsoft often offers them a deal they can't refuse.
Open-source alternatives are also instruments to get a good deal from microsoft. Problem is, it only works for big organizations who know how to settle deals.

In our case, microsoft has f*d us a couple of times too many and they have proofed us to be unreliable. Not to speak about their non-existing support.
So, we don't bother with them anymore.

[amspire]

To make decisions to go away from Windows does need a really strong CEO just due to the political influence of the big companies. I remember when we were looking for a piece of electronics test gear worth half a million dollars and it was a choice between Company A and Company B (Company B started with H and ended with P).

We chose the gear from Company A as it was more capable. The CEO of Company B invited our General Manager out to a game of golf somewhere very exclusive and during the game, he politely enquired if the engineering team was not particularly competent. In the nicest way we were told - it is not our fault if we were born stupid.

This kind of pressure means that choices such a move to Linux/LO have to be total commitment all the way to the top, or forget it.

[eugenenine]

Well that's easily solved by thinking just after you press Ctrl+S...

If your using Microsoft Office Excel and your spreadsheet is 277k rows long Ctrl+S brings up a dialog that says "not enough resources to complete" and then another that says "document not saved"

[Stonent]

If I paste a visio drawing into OO, it embeds it as a bitmap and cannot be re-sized in a non-lossless way.
If you open a word document that has an embedded visio file, it is blank.

[Karel]

The new LibreOffice also comes with improved document format support. Besides its support for Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2, LibreOffice 5.1 also boasts improved compatibility with Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format, Microsoft Office's default file format. Technically, Microsoft's OOXML format is an ISO standard. Technically.

In practice, no version of Microsoft Office, including Office 2016 has ever used the "strict" version of the standard. Instead, Office saves documents using a "transitional" version of OOXML by default. As the Document Foundation's Italo Vignoli points out, this is a transition that's been going on nine years. The Document Foundation says this standard tends to change with each new release of Microsoft Office, often in big ways, making it a challenge for LibreOffice to keep up.

For that matter it makes using the same document difficult between Office versions. So, if you think only Microsoft Office can fully support Microsoft Office document formats, think again.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-best-desktop-office-suite-libreoffice-gets-better/

[MrSlack]

Well that's easily solved by thinking just after you press Ctrl+S...

If your using Microsoft Office Excel and your spreadsheet is 277k rows long Ctrl+S brings up a dialog that says "not enough resources to complete" and then another that says "document not saved"

If you're doing that, you're using the wrong tool for the job. You need a database.

Also you can install 64-bit Excel and throw some more RAM in your box.

[charlespax]

Try opening a CSV file with 8,000 data points and graph it. LibreOffice will puke every time.

[poorchava]

I like how chapter and list numbering is more flexible in OO than MS, but on the other hand the image handling in OO sucks big time.

Sent from my HTC One M8s using Tapatalk.

[amspire]

Try opening a CSV file with 8,000 data points and graph it. LibreOffice will puke every time.

How long since you have tried Libre Calc?

I just loaded a CSV table of GPS data - 15 columns x 14400 rows. Loaded in 3 seconds.

Added a graph made from two of the columns (all 14400 rows) - 3 seconds.

Saved and reopened spreadsheet with graph - 4 seconds.

Libre Office has done a lot of work to speed up the Office packages in the last few years. They were slow.

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

Try opening a CSV file with 8,000 data points and graph it. LibreOffice will puke every time.

Did it straight away. 
Seriously you should check things before making statements like that.

[charlespax]

How long since you have tried Libre Calc?

I just loaded a CSV table of GPS data - 15 columns x 14400 rows. Loaded in 3 seconds.

Added a graph made from two of the columns (all 14400 rows) - 3 seconds.

Saved and reopened spreadsheet with graph - 4 seconds.

Libre Office has done a lot of work to speed up the Office packages in the last few years. They were slow.

I'm running LibreOffice 5.0.3.2 on OS X. I was able to generate a graph with time and four temperatures for 8,000 lines. I can open the same data extended to 20,000 lines. While trying to make a graph of the 20,000 lines LibreOffice hangs and I eventually have to force quite. Could be a memory allocation issue.

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

Yeah took a bit longer, about 5 seconds to make graph and then about 10 seconds to stretch it.

[amspire]

I'm running LibreOffice 5.0.3.2 on OS X. I was able to generate a graph with time and four temperatures for 8,000 lines. I can open the same data extended to 20,000 lines. While trying to make a graph of the 20,000 lines LibreOffice hangs and I eventually have to force quite. Could be a memory allocation issue.

I am using the latest 5.1.2.2 which apparently has more speed improvements. Tried your 20,000 lines of data and it didn't hang. Data loaded very quickly. A graph showing all columns was sluggish, but it worked.  I changed some data, and it showed up in the graph after a few seconds. It looks like the spreadsheet + graph is using 233MBytes of RAM to run.

[SeanB]

Works for me...

Version: 4.2.8.2
Build ID: 420m0(Build:2)

Able to do a line chart, but the Java can run slowwwwwwwwwwwww on the other types, running to 100% of 1 CPU, but not killing the rest of the machine. Going past 1.2G of virtual memory twiddling fingers and thumbs trying to make it 3D.

[amspire]

I have some spreadsheets from hell that I have never been able to open in Libre Office.

This is a catalogue done in Excel - about 180 interlinked sheets and hundreds - perhaps over 1000 embedded jpg's of different sizes. The version written by Office 2007 is 100MBytes and the later version written by Office 2013 is 60MBytes. Both still fail under Libre Calc. Looking how Microsoft Excel Viewer works with the 100Meg file, it is interesting. The viewer is only using 150MBytes, so Excel is not expanding the sheets from a compressed form at all unless it is the current sheet. Libre Office looks like it is trying to expand everything on load and is crashing - perhaps with memory issues as Windows LO is 32 bit.

I will try it on Linux next using 64 bit LO just after I finish my updates and install LO.

I ran the Microsoft OOXML validator on both spreadsheets in the Microsoft Open XML SDK 2.0 kit. Both the Excel 2007 and Excel 2013 saved versions fail Microsoft's OOXML validator. I have seen exactly the same validation errors in files saved by Libre Calc, so it looks like Libre Office has to duplicate the same Transitional mode OOXML non-compliances as MS Office for compatibility.

What a mess!  Microsoft are stuck in the Transitional mode disaster for over 7 years, and there is no sign of then going to strict mode. Almost all the current documents written by the latest Office are all in transitional OOXML format.

The purpose of a standard is that someone should be able to open a document using just the definitions in the standard. It would seem that is not true for OOXML. It is what we would call here a Claytons standard - the standard you have when you are not having a standard.

[ade]

Microsoft are stuck in the Transitional mode disaster for over 7 years, and there is no sign of then going to strict mode. Almost all the current documents written by the latest Office are all in transitional OOXML format.

Office 2013 is Strict compliant.  Just select "Strict Open XML Spreadsheet" during File, Save As.   Or change the default file format to Strict.

[nctnico]

I do not know how you guys survive as a business, running such obsolete software and dealing with complications, when you can fully license the entire MS Office suite for less the price of one cheap lunch each month. 

Perhaps but that would mean having to learn to use the stupid ribbon interface. I'm sticking with Office 2003 and simply ask people to send me doc or xls files if I need to edit them. OTOH the Libre Office which comes with Debian does a good job opening docx and xlsx files so problem solved.