The "White Label Office" release candidate [LWN.net]

The "White Label Office" release candidate

Posted Dec 22, 2011 18:40 UTC (Thu) by mjw (subscriber, #16740)
Parent article: The "White Label Office" release candidate

3.3... It really has been a year since there was any openoffice release. The Apache Office effort seems stuck on the 3.4 beta sources, and is mainly concerned with tossing out features and code that has "the wrong free software license".

Meanwhile The Document Foundation has pushed out a steady stream of LibreOffice releases every couple of months not just for 3.3.x, but 3.4.x and recently 3.5 betas: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan

Although it is fascinating to see these openoffice forks trying to define new meaning for the old codebase, maybe more relevant would be the announcement of the first LibreOffice 3.5 Beta test days:
http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/12/21/tdf-announc...

Both LibreOffice 3.4 and LibreOffice 3.5 (beta) seem to have introduced lots of cool new features:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/3.4
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/3.5

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The "White Label Office" release candidate

Posted Dec 22, 2011 20:03 UTC (Thu) by nteon (guest, #53899) [Link] (1 responses)

I hadn't used {Libre,Open}Office in probably close to 2 years until yesterday, when I had a big presentation to write. I must say, LibreOffice 3.4's Impress has gotten quite slick and was fantastic to use. I had no problem banging out a great looking 30+ page presentation & exporting it to PDF (which I remember being somewhat of a gamble in the past). The {Libre,Open}Office contributors should be very proud of themselves.

The "White Label Office" release candidate

Posted Dec 23, 2011 17:25 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Hmmmm, I'm less optimistic. In my experience LibreOffice is terribly unstable and it's always a surprise what will go wrong next. Sometimes, starting takes minutes. After another update, it's saving files which is broken. A couple of weeks later it's something else. Very, very annoying.

And some new features, while looking cool, are just annoying. The mouse over buttons on slides look nice but you disable slides half the time you try to select them... Those overlays probably are fine on a large screen and with a proper mouse but I work on a small laptop and it's a horror.