LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 29, 2017 19:07 UTC (Sat) by cornelio (guest, #117499)
Parent article: LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

I will say I have never been very impressed by LibreOffice: it basically never evolved with respect to OpenOffice. Up till now, I haven't seen much advantage in moving a way from Apache OpenOffice: the main features have been invisible (code cleanups, C++ updates, German comments, support for obsolete formats) and development of ooxml and *real* new features hasn't really advanced.

This version does seem promising in two features: the new palette and Pivot Charts. It's still not enough to replace MS-Office in most settings out there but it is a step forward. Given the lack of options in linux it is very welcome.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 4:18 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (11 responses)

> I haven't seen much advantage in moving a way from Apache OpenOffice

Timely releases is a big bullet point for LibreOffice. Has been for a few years now too.

> never evolved with respect to OpenOffice

Out of curiosity, what was missing in LibreOffice that Apache had in their releases? Weren't they merging the AOO code in regularly?

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 6:09 UTC (Sun) by cornelio (guest, #117499) [Link] (9 responses)

> Out of curiosity, what was missing in LibreOffice that Apache had in their releases?

Stability. The Apache releases kept the changes small and basically only changed whatever had to be relicensed or brought features from IBM's Symphony. You just don't change an office suite that is working for the new and latest fork, especially in the Windows world (perhaps that's why a lot of people kept using XP for a while).

> Weren't they merging the AOO code in regularly?

TBH, I don't know. The biggest change in AOO is the sidebar, but since both LO and AOO have them that doesn't make it a reason to change. What has made a difference at the end is that all Linux/BSD distributions moved to LO and that involves some level of support and is also easier for most of us too lazy to rebuild the thing.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 6:15 UTC (Sun) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (3 responses)

>> Out of curiosity, what was missing in LibreOffice that Apache had in their releases?

> Stability.

It's true that dead projects tend to be very stable. No security fix will break functionality.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 12:24 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

How long did it take them to release that security fix a year or so ago? Didn't it take them three months or so of hard work before they could even get OOo to compile so they could test it?

Sorry for the snark, but when OOo and LO split, about the only visible work at OOo was (a) the work converting (or rather auditing) the change from LGPL3 to Apache - thanks very much for that by the way - and (b) the very audible and highly noticeable sniping at LO by someone who really should have known better.

What's the saying - "technical debt will *always* come back to bite you in the bum"? And when it takes six months to fix a "you're pwned" security problem, that really is a bite in the bum!!!

Cheers,
Wol

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 15:25 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

The theory that if you don't take any patches nothing will break is defied by modern "always on" network-connected software.

To make the network safe for anybody at all, it must be dynamic, things that were unheard of become commonplace, and then mandatory, and eventually obsolete, the universe's general rule that change is obligatory because of Time's Arrow can be stalled on a small scale at great cost, but is unavoidable on the larger scale. If you don't take any patches somewhere between "unheard of" and "mandatory" your stuff breaks, if you don't take them between "mandatory" and "obsolete" your stuff either breaks or gets trapped in some weird time hole where it behaves strangely and nobody you can talk to understands why.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 17:12 UTC (Sun) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

I was probably in excess of irony, so it didn't come to my mind that I could be misunderstood. Sorry for that.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 6:28 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

OK, well you've replied and made me look foolish literally in the seconds between writing my post and hitting "submit", fair enough :)

Apache's releases are small and infrequent due to (many of us said inevitable) failure of the Apache OpenOffice project. Recently that's about 12 months between patch releases, not out of caution but because it's all they're capable of. There haven't been any feature releases (not just major ones, even minor ones, anything above fixes) of AOO since 2014.

You suggest that "a lot of people kept using XP for a while", but what was notable was that people insisted, and insist today, on running XP despite the fact that it's unsupported and essentially abandoned. And that's where Apache OpenOffice arguably is already and certainly where it's headed.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 17:28 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

While I think people should have stopped running OOo long before AOO appeared (the only really usable OO was Go-OO long before that debacle), there are good reasons why people still run XP - for example we do!

Okay, it's in a VirtualBox, but firstly I can't get 7 (or later) to work the way I want - how on earth can I mirror my entire hard-disk inside a disk image stored on said hard-disk!!! (the MS-recommended way of getting round trying to have a network-based documents or pictures or whatever directory), and I really can't face trying to teach my wife how to get round this - there really are people out there who have problems learning new things :-)

Cheers,
Wol

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 19:05 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

>(perhaps that's why a lot of people kept using XP for a while).

That situation couldn't be more different from AOO. Microsoft recently patched Windows XP to stop spread of a very nasty worm. The OS has been EOL for years, they could have used it as a stick to beat millions into upgrading, but they kept their mouth shut and fixed it at their own expense.

Meanwhile Apache OpenOffice's owners have spent the last few years tirelessly flinging turds at the competition in every public venue they could find, waving around cherry-picked download statistics to paint a picutre with themselves at the centre of the universe, while they left their actual users (probably a tiny fraction of a percent of the "millions" they keep claiming) high and dry with unfixed 0-days for *an entire year*.

Because as it turns out, between the handful of remaining project members, all of them were middle management and not a single one could figure out how their own build system works to cut a release.

That's not stability, that's a cruise website selling tickets for the Titanic.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Aug 2, 2017 20:05 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (1 responses)

"What has made a difference at the end is that all Linux/BSD distributions moved to LO and that involves some level of support and is also easier for most of us too lazy to rebuild the thing."

AFAIK, none of the Linux distributions (don't know about BSDs) have ever shipped AOO. The major distributions, IIRC, were shipping the downstream OpenOffice project from Go-OO.org, which basically became LibreOffice when Oracle bought Sun and then turned it over to the ASF.

Timing

Posted Aug 2, 2017 20:08 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

It is worth being careful about the timing here: the LibreOffice fork happened well before Apache entered the picture.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 6:10 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

I think cornello's point wasn't "Man, LibreOffice lacks things from OpenOffice" but rather "Sure, LibreOffice is better than OpenOffice, but not by enough to matter to me".

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 30, 2017 17:15 UTC (Sun) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

What do you refer to with "development of ooxml"? OOXML isn't the native format of LibreOffice (nor is it that or AOO either, for that matter), ODF is. OOXML is an abomination that, through strategic bribing and committee stacking, managed to get accepted as an alternative document standard.

You cannot seriously expect OOXML development to take place in LibreOffice.

Or were you referring to increased support for handling OOXML documents? As an external observer I have gotten the impression that plenty of such changes are made in every release (obviously it might be that if you have encountered incompatibilities, yet not reported them, they might have gone unnoticed).

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Jul 31, 2017 9:39 UTC (Mon) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link] (6 responses)

LibreOffice isn't supposed to break new ground. What would it do? Change the way Word documents work worldwide? Add features that aren't supported in other Office suites?

No, it's supposed to "just work". Which is does.

I ran a school off it for many years (i.e. desktops, netbooks, etc. with Linux installs or just Windows without MS Office).
I ran my personal desktops off it for many years.
In fact, despite being a Windows network manager, I run LO exclusively at home and have run OO before that.
There's nothing in "ordinary" Office that means I need to worry about using it in particular.

The problem is those places that treat Office as more than a word-processor and a spreadsheet, but as business-critical services, loaded to the hilt with custom macros, integrating with ODBC and all kinds of things just to do simple jobs. There, there's scope for hundreds of subtle differences, bugs and problems with swapping for LibreOffice.

But as an "office suite"? LO works just fine, thanks. I know people who have written books in it.

LO is a maintainable version of OO, which AOO isn't. If you only use Office casually (99% of users!), then it works for opening Word docs, knocking up a quick leaflet, making a presentation, etc.

The only thing installed on my laptop (which has an image I can trace back almost 8 years) is LibreOffice. Given that I work in IT, with Windows systems and clients, you'd think I'd notice major problems if there were any. But - for most uses - it's just fine. It doesn't need to break new ground to be good and worthwhile.

(P.S. Just stop with the running-my-business-on-Office stuff, people... Euch!).

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Aug 3, 2017 8:09 UTC (Thu) by edomaur (subscriber, #14520) [Link] (5 responses)

LO is almost exactly what I need to write a book. Last writing work has been done in a mix of LO (heavy lifting, work session) WPS Write (plan mode, which is _STILL_ missing in LO and AOO and is really a needed feature for writers of my kind) and Google Doc (share and comment)

At the moment, I would subscribe to _any_ project promising to add plan mode (layout mode ? don't remember the English name) in LO Writer.

Well...

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Aug 3, 2017 8:23 UTC (Thu) by edomaur (subscriber, #14520) [Link]

Outline mode ! sorry, just remembered now. I want an outline mode in LO Writer.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Aug 10, 2017 10:01 UTC (Thu) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link] (3 responses)

I just wrote an entire book in LibreOffice. (Compiled from git master, too.) It's awesome. I had to save as docx to send the file to Calibre for the ebook, but that's fine too. I even used its ability to directly edit PDFs to fix a last-second problem for the print version. I've mentally mapped out a whole series of "how I dun it" blog posts I need to get started on ...

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Aug 11, 2017 22:05 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Have they sped up saving, then? LibreOffice 4.4 took fifteen minutes or so to save a 450-page book, all serial one-core banging: it was utterly ridiculous and totally aggravating. (Plus, of course, autosaving LibreOffice-style means saving *over the top of the original*, so suddenly whenever it autosaved it would steal focus from us and force us to stop working for a quarter of an hour. Thanks heaps, LibreOffice. Mind you it was crashy enough that saving now and then was essential...)

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Aug 15, 2017 15:58 UTC (Tue) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link] (1 responses)

o_0 Um, it never took that long for me to save. A coupla seconds at most. (Lenovo X240 running Xubuntu 16.04, 8GB memory; running LO 6.0alpha, head of git master - though I never saw any such behaviour, like, ever with LO.). I can confidently state there was something seriously wrong with your system in some manner.

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Sep 5, 2017 11:46 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Oh, it was Windows, plus it's 4.4, which is quite old. I'm willing to call that "something wrong".

(I haven't tested on Linux with 5.x yet, though I plan to.)

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Posted Aug 3, 2017 20:03 UTC (Thu) by jgfenix (guest, #113371) [Link]

Are you seriously saying that? It's that it didn't have revolutionary changes but it evolved a lot. For example, there was a noticeable increase in speed and the memory used decreased (thanks to that code cleanups). There were also a lot of user visible changes (For example in OO you couldn't rotate a image in writer which is stupid).