Comment by udev4096
3 days ago
LibreOffice is terrible. I cannot believe how anyone can do anything with it. I cannot stand Word but it's just impossible to find a true replacement for it. OnlyOffice should get more recognition. It is the closest you can get for Word replacement
> I cannot stand Word but it's just impossible to find a true replacement for it.
As someone who's never used Word: what do you use Word for that it's hard to find a replacement?
(For me, the "light" things I want to note down and version, I use one of the lightweight markup languages. The "heavy" things, I either use TeX or something to convert my lightweight markup into a pdf or whatever people want. What am I missing?)
>what do you use Word for that it's hard to find a replacement?
Opening files created by other organizations and expecting them to load correctly and accurately, and then editing them and expecting them to load correctly and accurately when I send them back.
How is it terrible? I keep hearing people say this, but I've never actually experienced any shortcomings personally. Granted, I don't really use word processors much. But when I did, I never had any.
Fit and finish aren't there, and have barely improved. It just looks bad. And it starts slowly (but so does Microsoft Office). Having to decide which fork to use is a problem.
Otherwise, I haven't had major issues. Sometime it doesn't work well with complex excel sheets, or complex word docs; create doc in X, edit in Y, view in X is likely to be disappointing if formatting is critical, but I've seen people use a publish to PDF, edit by change requests flow for that instead.
Other than multiplayer support, it's still much nicer than Google Docs, which can look better but likes to get into weird partially loaded states or runs simple spreadsheet tasks very slowly due to mandatory interaction with a server.
LibreOffice does everything I need it to...
Most people only use a small percentage of functionality in any app.
Individually, sure. But in an organization, the larger it is, the more probability that all of the features are being used approaches 1. Then you don't have a software issue anymore, you have a business workflow, retraining, or retooling issue.
Most admin staff don't do anything complex aside from writing letters. They don't create complex docs with table of contents and images and so on.
I have worked for companies prior who gave basic online office 365 to 99% of staff and then more expensive subscriptions on a as needed basis.
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Yeah I tried so hard to use LibreOffice. OnlyOffice is great