Boy, LibreOffice still kinda sucks

[oshunluvr]

Until 13.04, I've used OpenOffice because it's just more polished and has been way better than LibreOffice. But: I'm trying to turn over a new leaf and stick to "pure" Kubuntu. You know - Kmail instead of Thunderbird, Telepathy instead of Skype or Pidgin, etc., so I can update without downloading a stack of .debs from the OO website. (BTW: Naming the meta package for LibreOffice "OpenOffice" in 12.04 was down right fraud and someone should be sued for that maneuver)

To be fair, I use MS Office at work and I guess you can tell where the $499 went. I don't like the new 2010 "ribbon" menu, but I'm getting used to it.

Tried out LibreOffice Calc today; doing some in-depth spreadsheet magic. I'm really having a hard time using it. There are no menu drop-shadows, stuff is hard to find (just about everything), toolbars are too numerous, under populated, and too difficult to adjust, etc.

The almost total inability to create decent headers and footers makes it unsuitable for any serious work. It's fine for figuring out your mortgage, but I can't even re-format the date field in the footer or put a graphic in the header. Supposedly, you can create a different header for page 1 but it doesn't work and the Page Organizer is simply grayed out all the time.

Too bad. I had read a lot of good reviews and had high hopes. Well, off to OpenOffice.org for some downloading...

[Achaean]

My only use of Libo is a spreadsheat at which I'm keeping my pwds and such things, inside a truecrypt container.
I have a very limited knowledge of databases, so a single spreadsheat is OK for me.
I never liked office suites so I'm not the right person to discuss details.
I only use Libo, because it's faster than OOO, but I never used advanced functions.

For doing math stuff (series of additions, multiplications and such things), I'm still using BASIC.
I prefer the old-school way and for every problem I'm facing I'm writing my own spaggeti code and I have my own console toolbox (with a simple ascii interface).
The only thing I changed after all that years, is that I added color to the interface (mostly blue and green colored results).
For the future I'm only planning to switch to a 64bit compiler.

I'm still refusing to learn office suites!

[oshunluvr]

Wow, BASIC! You ARE old school LOL!

I got used to using the suite thing for work and have migrated it to home too. It has some advantages, but can be a PITA too.

Honestly, an expectation that LO would be as polished as MSO is crazy, but I had hoped for at least the OO level of finish.

[Achaean]

Wow, BASIC! You ARE old school LOL!

Indeed!
But now my programs has colored output and are 32bit in freebasic and soon enough 64bit in Gambas.
Evolution of technology!!!

I also have some Pascal code, but freepascal has problems in late versions with non-Latin characters (only in console mode) and I'm waiting for the bug to be fixed.

I got used to using the suite thing for work and have migrated it to home too. It has some advantages, but can be a PITA too.

Honestly, an expectation that LO would be as polished as MSO is crazy, but I had hoped for at least the OO level of finish.

I really liked ooo and I had at past participated at it's documentation, when I wrote some guides for school wikis.
I really hope that the apache version will move ooo to the future.

BTW, which one is more responsive - faster at your system?
Libo or OOO?

[dequire]

Whilst out comparison shopping, you may want to test drive Calligra as well. Many people seem to really like it, and it is supposed to be better at opening MS files than LO or OOo.

[SteveRiley]

Oshun, curiously enough, you can get your drop shadows back if you replace libreoffice-kde with libreoffice-gtk. The GTK theme engine for Oxygen does a decent job of rendering LibreOffice's menus. You will, though, lose KDE file pickers, and instead get GNOME ones.

Last time I installed OpenOffice, it looked horrible. It was plagued by that Windows 95 "chiseled" look; every conceivable surface was hard-edged button. Has that changed?

[oshunluvr]

Oshun, curiously enough, you can get your drop shadows back if you replace libreoffice-kde with libreoffice-gtk. The GTK theme engine for Oxygen does a decent job of rendering LibreOffice's menus. You will, though, lose KDE file pickers, and instead get GNOME ones.

Last time I installed OpenOffice, it looked horrible. It was plagued by that Windows 95 "chiseled" look; every conceivable surface was hard-edged button. Has that changed?

Interestingly enough: OO 3.3 had really nice KDE integration. However, OO 3.4 has not. They left it on the "to-do" list. Which mean OO 3.4 has returned to the ugly look you remember. I guess I am stuck between a rock and a hard-place.

I tried Calligra for a minute and wasn't feelin' it. Maybe it's time to give it a second chance.

[dibl]

I recently had the task of preparing what looks to me like the world's most elaborate annual household budget for a retired wealthy guy, and after puking on Quicken's insistence on integrating his online banking and investment accounts, we settled on an LO spreadsheet set. He needed monthly budgets, including projected and actuals (and the difference) for all categories of income and expense (and he has lots of categories), plus quarterly, semi-annual, and annual summaries. He likes it -- he's using it now. But I agree it wouldn't make for pretty printing.

[Qqmike]

I love this forum, and really love reading these threads and posts. It makes me feel so damned good knowing I do not anymore and never will ever again fire up any spreadsheet or write any quick BASIC program for anything! :-) Yes, I do occasionally do a budget or cost analysis or projection or historical trending or analysis of the ponies, but now it's the very old-fashioned way: yellow legal pad and #2 pencil or uni-ball ink pen (ink, btw, is a liquid chemical that flows from a "pen" onto paper to form intelligible patterns of characters). Such a good feeling being on my own again after so many years of professional bindings. Thanks guys for the relief-reminders! :-) (I even have my dad's old green ledgers, dating 1940-1950's, and there's plenty of blank pages yet to use ...) This IS the Social/Casual Talk forum, ya know.

[K-Project]

Agree with the comments about the Calligra Suite. Really lovely and a fresh approach that feels unique. I've not tested its compatibility with MS documents, but as it stands I reckon there's a lot of potential. I do love Libre Office though personally.

[oshunluvr]

Well,I tried Calligra again. "Sheets" won't even open my spreadsheet, it just locks up at 59% until I kill it. I even tried saving it as .xls from OpenOffice and opening it that way. It opened, but most of the calculations are blanks and several of the cell references are "unknown."

It will open a couple of smaller spreadsheets OK, but it's basically worthless. I tried opening it from the command line to see if it kicks any errors and even installed the .dbg package, but it never crashes, just fails to work. It's a long way from usable IMO.

EDIT: BTW, What "genius" dev over at calligra thinks it's better to have the toolbar stuff to the right in a column that takes up the space normally used for data instead of in the unused space to the right of the toolbars? Really a dumb move.

[SteveRiley]

EDIT: BTW, What "genius" dev over at calligra thinks it's better to have the toolbar stuff to the right in a column that takes up the space normally used for data instead of in the unused space to the right of the toolbars? Really a dumb move.

That actually works pretty well with the word processor and the drawing program. Woodsmoke once wrote about the greater comfort of moving the mouse from left to right rather than top to bottom. But for spreadsheets -- yeah, the paradigm kinda falls apart.

[kubicle]

EDIT: BTW, What "genius" dev over at calligra thinks it's better to have the toolbar stuff to the right in a column that takes up the space normally used for data instead of in the unused space to the right of the toolbars? Really a dumb move.

I actually prefer the side panels (even in Sheets). In my common workflow (on widescreen monitors), I tend to have more redundant space horizontally rather than vertically...and with all these functions in the toolbars there would probably be like 4 of them.

Of course we all work differently, and if you don't like the side panels, you can remove them and put the functions you need on the toolbars (there are a couple of toolbars already configured that aren't enabled by default, so you can get some of the essentials in the toolbars with a few mouse clicks).

[oshunluvr]

For word processing, it's really a nice way to work, but I work sideways with spreadsheets so there it totally falls apart. At this point, it doesn't matter as it's doesn't work at all here - unless I want to manually reproduce a couple thousand lines of data, tables, calculations, conditional formats, etc.

[Achaean]

yellow legal pad and #2 pencil or uni-ball ink pen (ink, btw, is a liquid chemical that flows from a "pen" onto paper to form intelligible patterns of characters). Such a good feeling being on my own again after so many years of professional bindings. Thanks guys for the relief-reminders! :-) (I even have my dad's old green ledgers, dating 1940-1950's, and there's plenty of blank pages yet to use ...)

Pen and Paper
No!!! Avoid it at all costs!

"Pen and paper" solution is evil!
Pen is a chemical liquid which pollutes the environment.
And paper industry is destroying our trees.

Here's the ultimate solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus
Inkless, paperless and environmental friendly!

Just kidding of course!