SUSE's LibreOffice Core Team Moves To Collabora 72
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Meeks has announced that the core of SUSE's LibreOffice team is moving over to Collabora, which will now be providing commercial LibreOffice support. 'It seems to me that the ability to say "no" to profitable but peripheral business in order to strategically focus the company is a really important management task. In the final analysis I'm convinced that this is the right business decision for SUSE. It will allow Collabora's Productivity division to focus exclusively on driving LibreOffice into Windows, Mac and Consulting markets that are peripheral to SUSE. It will also retain the core of the existing skill base for the benefit of SUSE's customers, and the wider LibreOffice community, of which openSUSE is an important part.'"
Re:Nasty doc recovery bug fixed? (Score:5, Informative)
I figured a libre-office hater would be the first post. Just to counter it, here's my Open/Libre Office experience. In 2000, I started a software company in NC, and bought every employee (we were all big geek programmers) Linux laptops. I didn't pay for a single Windows Office license (though we paid for a bunch of Visual C++ pro seats). It's been 13 years, and even though I have been in a CTO role all that time, I've not once had to install Windows Office. I see co-workers, mostly in biz-dev, marketing, sales, or management roles who get squished by people who send them documents in a more recent Office format. Management hates paying for new software simply to load new file formats. LibreOffice has loaded and edited every file I ever had to deal with since 2000, for free, while my Office addicted co-workers have put out a lot of $$ just to keep up. You're upset about bugs in file recovery?!? Get a real job!
Now I have to give Microsoft some kudos. They've actually managed to continue to innovate in this space, and the PowerPoint presentations I see from co-workers who are PowerPoint fan-boys beat anything I've seen from the LibreOffice geeks. From a visual presentation point of view, they win. That's worth some $.
Wants to see LibreOffice do better? (Score:1)
It's understandable why you would want to remain anonymous
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better, hater, ideological, immature, inferior, interface, pirate, slow, stresses, tangible
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I understand the advantages of purchasing support and contributing to free software projects, but your right. I don't understand peoples obsession with purchasing *buggier slower more bloated and more expensive Microsoft solutions*. Point out a single minor bug in LibreOffice or OpenOffice is hardly comparable to more major issues related to data loss in many recent versions of Microsoft's suite. Outlook for instance has numerous bugs, degraded feature set from past versions, etc. While it does have new fea
Microsoft innovating in PowerPoint space? (Score:1)
Googling on 'graphics example filetype:odp` brings up some very interesting results, see these examples
Stereoscopic vision workshop [bertrandplanes.com]
Open Source Productivity Tools [pbworks.com]
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Those are schoolboy standard presentations and even Impress can do much better than that.
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I'm a bit skeptical of ms office's greatness too. My company and I do support and having been the one to get the company off the ground I did a lot of it until a few years ago. My recollection is people fear stuff that is different, but in reality MS Office requires significantly more maintenance. There are lots of bugs in it. For instance I had a employee (way overqualified and extremely knowledgeable all around) spend 3-4 days on one customs outlet because of a bug. The most recent MS Outlook was doing so
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My recollection is people fear stuff that is different, but in reality MS Office requires significantly more maintenance.
Fear is great in your cow-orkers! I've been told not to distribute Document.docm files because the Word2010 default is Document.docx and "people will be nervous about getting something different." The weird thing about that is most of these same people don't know how to tell WindowsOS to display document suffixes, so how would they even notice?
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I think that Powerpoint is good but the problem is that the gloss of Powerpoint can detract from what you are trying to say. I have seen a lot of presentations where people are really impressed by the speaker's Powerpoint presentation and are not listening to what is being said. You should learn to present and put the main points, your boardwork, on the presentation in a simple and plain form. Do not use too many different fonts or flashy graphics, they take the audience's attention away from you. They
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Powerpoint is actually the one bit of MS Office where Microsoft doesn't completely dominate the market, because a lot of people use Keynote.
Overwriting auto backups? (Score:2, Informative)
From what I've experienced OO prompts the user and asks if they want to recover any lost documents.
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I have no idea whatsoever about this bug, but if you know about it then it should not bite you again - you should always keep a backup, preferrably on another computer or at least on another HD or if even that can't be managed on some system a backup copy even on same HD is better than nothing. It sounds like a bug that should be flagged critical and fixed as quick as possible, but if this was needed to teach you to backup (and not trust the applications own auto-backups it manages and keeps in same disk) y
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It would damage their eternal belief that Microsoft is on the brink of destruction.
They did just purchase the failing smartphone business from Nokia for 7 billion dollars. I mean, they could literally light the 7 billion on fire, but it would be less spectacular.
MS Office is pretty slick, minus the GUI. Excel is both made by and undone by VBA and really has no peer, but Keynote outclasses Powerpoint and Word is nothing special. Visual Studio is great - when you are working with MS's languages and targeting Windows. I'm not in love with Explorer on any level... not even in Windows 7, which
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I know I was modded troll before, but I'll add a bit more.
Let me be very, very clear - I consider Windows 7, Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 to be the epitome of what Microsoft have created so far. The immediately following version of each of the above (Windows 8, Office 2013 and VS 2013) are all disasters in my opinion, not necessarily due to functionality or bugs, but due to the changes in UI. Windows 8 looks boring as fuck and Metro UI gets in the way in various areas even if you do your best to just
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You were modded troll because "To be honest I have enough trouble leaving Microsoft products at times, although often it's because they are the best at what they do" is incorrect. Nobody would replace the OS that came on their computer unless the replacement was superior, and Linux IS superior. My W7 notebook will be joining the tower in running kubuntu very soon -- Windows gets slower and slower all the time as its registry becomes hugely bloated. It seems uninstalling a program seldom deletes any registry
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You are making an assertion that Linux is superior as fact, rather than an opinion. Things such as this ARE subjective. Considering a different opinion as troll makes it impossible to have an intelligent discussion with you people.
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The fact that Linux has every feature Windows has while Windows lacks features that Linux has had for years is fact, not opinion. The fact that Linux is faster on the same machine is not opinion, but fact.
I use both OSes. Windows falls short everywhere except eye candy and gaming, which they excel at. Fact, not opinion.
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With Windows I can do everything I want, but with Linux I can only do maybe about 80%-90%. Close, but it's those edge cases which tend to burn you and make you question why you're trying to be different - and whether you're being different because you think it's better, or whether you've spent too much time on Linux forums with similar people who've convinced you that Linux is the better option.
I don't want to turn into an intolerant Linux zealot. I still want to retain at least some ability to communicate
Re:Not A Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
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They usually mention a non-existent Slashdot groupthink too.
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Bullshit. You can clearly see pattens when it comes to pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft/Windows posts being moderated highly, and anti-Linux and pro-Microsoft/Windows posts being moderated poorly, regardless of the merit of what's being discussed and even the validity of their arguments.
People HATE Microsoft here, often with good reason. But they're also often unable to accept that Linux might have its own set of flaws and that it could not be anything but perfect. I've seen it time and time again - and I've ar
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It's always the same few people though, not a general thread throughout the site. People like Alex Betis who will argue black is white when it comes to Linux are not everyone. I criticise everyone personally because they're all not good enough for different reasons.
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You know, I would love to see Microsoft burn crashing down but I don't think it's going away for some time yet (although nobody can predict the future, just make informed guesses/estimations). But it's really more on the emotional level - it's not as much from their crappy appliations (at command, taken from *NIX
Re:open source office suite will never succeed (Score:5, Informative)
Both the mail and the calendaring part has been figured out a long time ago. It's called CalDAV and IMAP. Get with the times, Exchange/Outlook is only king where the subjects want it to be. There are drop-in replacements for Exchange Server, it's just a question of figuring out how to do it and get your stuff out of the proprietary cycle. Microsoft has itself abandoned Office and Exchange in favor of it's cloud (pay-per-view) offering, there is nowhere to go but open.
"drop-in" != "figuring out how" (Score:3, Insightful)
"DROP IN" means there's a readily available "Downloads" page at some website, where you go to download some 250MB executable file with a free 2-user licence, and once you download that file, you double click on it, and it brings up a choice panel between "Basic" and "Advanced" installation, and 99% of all n00b users can choose the "Basic" installation, and within 5 minutes or so, you're up and playing a
I'll try ANYTHING. (Score:2)
But there is a very finite upper bound to my patience, and as soon as that foreboding "Not Ready For Primetime" feeling starts to sink in, I'm outta there.
Again, though, my larger point would be that there is MASSIVE value-add in simply "getting it all to work together seamlessly", and unless and until the FOSS/Linux/BSD community [-er-, non-Apple BSD community] starts stepping up to the plate and actually putting in the elbow grease and peforming their
Libre Writer is not quite there. (Score:2)
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Have you considered getting a real life?
It's got everything (Score:1)
Dontcha know? Emacs also comes with a life.
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Seriously? A trivial issue. I won't move to Microsoft Office because it is a buggy mess with freeken data loss issues, a horrible UI, proprietary BS which makes it so only Microsoft can fix, lack of proper support for free standards, and many more major issues. But what it comes right down to is I want essential features like export to PDF to work out of the box. I don't want to have to manually install a critical feature like an office suite on each new PC. No. It's much much much easier to install an LTS
Search and replace Manual Break (Score:2)
Install the AltSearch extension [libreoffice.org] and search for \p
Extension "Alt Find & Replace" does that (Score:2)
The OpenOffice Alt Find & Replace [openoffice.org] extension can do that -- I've been using it for years to supplement the built-in find/replace dialog, and it's really rare that I encounter something that it can't actually tackle. That said, while it works fine in the latest OpenOffice despite the extension's age, I have no idea how LibreWriter will handle it.**
**On my computers, OOWriter can handle much larger documents without slowing down or having 'issues' than LibreWriter can -- I'm fairly sure that this is becau
Re:Extension "Alt Find & Replace" does not do (Score:2)
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In all seriousness. The standard LO can Find and Replace my most common error that I find in papers with the search set to ^. and the replace to \t$0 That's for a change of paragrah to have an extra tab at start.
There is also the AltSearch plugin that works great and does exactly what you want it to do.
The AltSearch plugin can be had here: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/alternative-dialog-find-replace-for-writer [libreoffice.org] and the RegEx expressions with the builtin can be found here: https://hel [libreoffice.org]
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What's Collobora when it's at home? (Score:2, Funny)
Michael Meeks has announced that the core of SUSE's LibreOffice team is moving over to Collabora
Is that in French Polynesia?
Conditional formatting (Score:2)
Conditional formatting, fix it please, even when starting from scratch with a new Calc document, it's horribly broken - starts off ok, but after a bit of copying and pasting such as when making shift patterns, it all goes completely haywire and becomes unusable :-(. Every time (v 4.1.0.2.0 Sept 2013)
SUSE does an Oracle (Score:1, Troll)
It sounds like SUSE, the largest contributor to LibreOffice, is ending their investment in LibreOffice, and their engineers are looking for new employment. This echos the way they got out of the Mono business a few years ago. But taking the same people and putting them in a much smaller company, with far less enterprise sales experience, is not something that will cause Microsoft to lose any sleep.
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Hi, Rob! (Everyone, this is Rob Weir from IBM, posting in his role as marketer at IBM^W^W^W^W^W^W^Wentirely on his own behalf, yessirree.)
as far as i'm concerned (Score:1)
Why?
Wasted too many times with the bizarre quirks of libre/open office. Time is money. Stability is important and these application as about 1 yr ago, weren't all that stable. I had to work with training material which had text and graphics, etc., nothing to major, but can be large docs and I had a hard time dealing with all kinds of
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I had the displeasure of having to use libre office and open office and I can say that I would rather pay for Microsoft Office which I don't, then use free Libre/Open office.
Fixed that for you
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why bother to file a bug report for software that is still in pre alpha
What is the point ?
To take just one of many, many examples: a straightforward task should be pasting a bitmap into a document program like writer or word
This works in word, altho the large number of poorly documented options makes it difficult for the new user to understand; on the other hand, for almost every MS office question, there are one or two good websites, so 5 minutes on google usually produces an answer.
with writer, this just
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clueless management (Score:1)
Quote
'It seems to me that the ability to say "no" to profitable but peripheral business in order to strategically focus the company is a really important management task
unquote
no SH** Bosco; learning to focus on business with higher margin is something you should have engraved on your forehead on like, the first day of work.
Anyway, aside from the fanboys, everytime i try librre/open office, the don't work
I know, ymmv
About two months ago, I downloaded the latest open office clone and tried something
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So exactly what part are you having difficulty with? Are you trolling or is this a real difficulty for you?
As a side note, this method works with