Libre Office 4.0 Released

[Nothinman]

Originally Posted by slugg

I must admit, your argument is a good one and I don't have much to say against it. Heck, I'll even agree with your point.

But specifically with a productivity suit in mind, I still stand by my opinion that MS Office is the way to go. It's just a lot more practical. I may be wrong, but that's just my opinion.

For exchanging files with other businesses you likely need MS Office, but one could get away with just a single license if they wanted. But in the grander scheme we should be striving to move towards more open products and data formats, not the opposite. MS Office has been one of the few areas in which proprietary formats have become the standard across all lines of business and that's a pretty scary prospect to me. I've already had multiple instances where a customer pulls out something akin to a 2 decade old MS Works (for Mac possibly) file and asks how to open it now. What are you going to do in 10 years when MS Office drops support for importing/converting Word 95 files? Do you spend the time to up-convert your files to MS' new format every few years?

A more common example that most likely burns someone every day is having a PDF version of a file but not the original. The only real editor for PDFs is Acrobat so now you're stuck spending a day looking for some free (and probably spyware filled) tool to convert the PDF to doc(x) or pony up the cash for Acrobat. How stupid is that?

The fact that our government is allowed to release documents in proprietary formats like that is utterly insane. How are they supposed to claim any level of transparency when the download page for various documents say that you need to install a proprietary Windows app in order to fill out some form? If the government released anything else that required you to pay any company a hundred or so dollars to use it people would flip, but for some reason this gets a pass.

Advances in this area are being made simply because of the proliferation of non-Windows systems, but there's still a ton of things that need fixed and that never entails buying Windows and Office. =)

[lxskllr]

Yup. Everything I make is stored as .odt, and other formats are exported as necessary. If IibreOffice and siblings completely disappeared from the planet, my documents would still be readable because the method to read them is documented, and can be replicated. Businesses using proprietary software is ill advised, but they can do what they want. Governments should be forbidden from using proprietary software. Not only is it a fsck you to the people who paid for it(us), it's detrimental to security, and sovereignty.

[etherealfocus]

No argument there - MS and Adobe proprietary formats are pretty unforgivable. Still, if I have to upconvert documents every five years to stay MS-compatible to convert every day between open formats and proprietary formats, I'd rather do the conversion once a year. I'm the only IT guy at my company and I already spend too much time dealing with people screwing up their Outlook pst files... been pushing my boss to let me migrate us to webmail but he's pretty attached to Outlook. Yuck. Outlook without Exchange Server is like a PB&J without the peanut butter and jelly.

The last thing I need is showing 20 people how to use a completely different office application. It'd cost way more in lost productivity and my training time to teach everyone LO than it does to just pony up for every 2nd or 3rd MSO release. And since there are still major compatibility issues with Calc and Excel we'd routinely have trouble when vendors and customers send us Excel sheets.

I've had to deal with exactly zero OpenDoc files since I started at my company 7 months ago... we get heaps of Office files every day.

Sucks, and I agree in spirit. I'd never use MS or Adobe if there was a viable alternative... but even if LO and Thunderbird or webmail could fill all our office needs, training and compatibility would kill it for us. Which is exactly what MS and Adobe are banking on, of course. Too bad it works so well.