Michael Meeks : LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org drift apart

[floris v]

I think (hope!) that the radical dumb down to MS "standards" is a LibreOffice phenomenon. Ironically, they try to make a the difference by imitating another product.

They aren't imitating it. They're empowering professional users of office software by enabling them to exchange their work with MSO users, who are still the vast majority. Don't forget that we're often advising people to buy MSO if they have to work professionally with people who require documents in MSO format, only because of compatibility issues. They will no longer have to do that when the import and export filters are much better than they're now.
Many people will of course only use OOo or LO as a cheap substitute for MSO, but that can't be helped.

[gerard24]

They aren't imitating it.

Not really sure of this.
If you want better compatibility, you improved filters.
When you change keyboard shortcuts or when formula, row, column separators becomes dependant of your locale, this stuff have nothing to do with compatibility.

We will know more when they will add 29/02/1900 date in Calc or when they replaces styles by direct formatting in Writer...

[floris v]

Older versions of Word (I stopped getting new versions after 2003) still had a set of settings for (former) WordPerfect users - blue screen, a lot of function key bindings from WP - to make moving to Word easy for them. Nobody at the time said that MS was imitating WP. If anything was said at all, it was probably that this step reflected good business sense. We're still talking about a so called productivity suite, and one important aspect of a productivity suite is that it allows you to be productive. If you're used to working with an office suite with certain keyboard bindings, moving to a suite with totally different key bindings is a pain. You'll get confused a lot, frustrated, etc. So I don't think that "imitating" the user interface is such a bad thing. It'll be different if they turn LO into an MSO clone with ODF as supported export format but MSO's format as default.

[Hagar Delest]

As long as the filters are not from the original company (with a poorly documented file format of course), you can't be sure about the result. So who would take the risk to lose data during an import/export operation for a long and complex document? Of course, many do because it's cheaper to use OOo. But I would not be comfortable with that (that's why I don't use MS Office formats in OOo).

And even if the users have nice import/export filters for MSO formats, why should they bother saving in ODF?
At least the OOo stand (not saving in OOXML) is a political decision that makes sense (doing so for former .doc, .xls, ... would have been suicide, agreed). It makes the user think twice about the format he's using.

[Villeroy]

They constantly add ridiculous mimicry to their product:
Just look at the marching ants around a copied a cell range in Calc. Unlike Excel, this indicator is totally unrelated to the system clipboard. They keep on marching even when you have something completely different on the clipboard.
Misusing the Enter key for pasting is a major annoyance. In LibreOffice you've got to take care not to navigate the wrong way as long as the ants are marching. Addionally the clipboard is cleared once you pasted by Enter key. In Excel we can turn this off (it is a legacy feature from Lotus 1-2-3 which they took over in the early 90ies).

I changed all my spreadsheet templates in the LibO profile so my default cell styles have thin grey borders in order to override the background colors which override the cell grid. Now my productive spreadsheets are readable again. No big deal for me, but for others... Guess from where they cloned this bad behaviour?

Some Excel fan boy introduced so called "named ranges" as pivot source specifiers without understanding that "named ranges" are "named expressions" actually and without even knowing that Calc (unlike Excel) knows the so called "database range" to specify a database-like area with column labels, fields and an unambiguous absolute address.
Most of my templates include named formula expressions and relative names, which are inappropriate as data pilot source but they all appear in the drop down for the pivot source.

Someone introduced Excel's named expressions on sheet level in such a sloppy manner that I instantly (instinctively?) removed the software from that Windows box. It was incredible how such alpha code made it into a downloadable binary.

[floris v]

@Villeroy: point taken.

[orcmid]

Let's wait for the SUMIFS function in LibreOffice. That would be a simple and most obviously missing feature.

I don't understand this comment. SUMIFS is provided in ODF 1.2 OpenFormula. I don't know why it wouldn't show up in OpenOffice.org Calc and LibreOffice Calc at some point, although not there as of LibreOffice 3.4.3. The COUNTIF and SUMIF short cases are already there of course.

[Although enough people have already expressed this sentiment, I too find it inconceivable that either Apache OO.o or LibreOffice would abandon ODF as their primary/native format so long as the ODF specification is under active maintenance and refinement.]

[italovignoli]

FUD about TDF and LibreOffice dropping ODF support should not even deserve a comment, but I have seen it repeated too many times on this forum. IBM has taught FUD to the world, and has perfectioned FUD to the point of making it a business strategy. Of course, companies are free to choose the best strategy for their objectives: IBM - and his friends - focus on FUD, we prefer to focus on code development and users.

[Villeroy]

I could not care less about what an ego clown like Mr. Meeks has to say. I stand by all the points I have written about the wrongly excelled Calc component of LibreOffice 3.4 and I'll add more points when needed.

[italovignoli]

Nice to know. You are free to criticize software development strategies, but this should happen on a technical ground. If you criticize just because a feature resembles something that you don't like, just because it has been developed by Microsoft... well, this speaks by itself.

[Villeroy]

Please read my points. Some LibreOffice devs implement Excel features wrongly, severely broken, without really knowing the Calc component.

[Bill]

If you criticize just because a feature resembles something that you don't like, just because it has been developed by Microsoft... well, this speaks by itself.

Wasn't this exactly what you did with the Renaissance Project?

[italovignoli]

Renaissance Project was at OOo, and I was one of the most active internal opponents.

[PGAGA]

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

IBM will be the main commercial contributor, so I think the OS/2 and eComStation will be supported for some time if the OS/2 community notifies enough interest.

Word from Serenity (which is the current maintainer of OS/2 - licensed from IBM) is that the OS/2 code has been left in AOOo. Serenity was contacted by Apache before the code removal was done and Serenity asked for it to be retained.

Phil

[henke54]

Michael Meeks : LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org drift apart

Hmmmm....