LibreOffice Portable

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webfork
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Re: LibreOffice

#16 Post by webfork »

LibreOffice personalization (via Firefox personas) didn't look quite right yet: the darker backgrounds don't yet change the font text color for the menu items so File / Edit / View / Insert etc. were all black on a dark background (invisible). I suspect this will get fixed in the near future, but in the mean time a lighter-colored persona works well. Of those I tested, the solid, light-colored, mild gradients seemed to work best. The one I really like: silver2 (used below)

Image

Another that worked fairly well: http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/119301 (edit) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... breoffice/

Overall, I'm happy to see this change: feels like it really cleans up LibreOffice for a look that hasn't changed much since the StarOffice days.

Edit: The updated official site is excellent. Very well designed. I was also pleased to see they're supporting Microsoft Publisher (.PUB) files.

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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#17 Post by webfork »

From a post in the entry:
"Includes excellent compatibility for 100s of file formats including OpenXML" - that must be a joke??? LibreOffice still messes up 90% of my Word-, Excel-, and PowerPoint files. Especially docx, xlsx, and pptx formats. If you value maximum compatibility, LibreOffice is pretty poor. SoftMaker FreeOffice in this relation remains unbeaten.
"Excellent" is used because:

1. It's referring more generally to the fact that it supports an unequaled number of formats from all across the spectrum
2. The OpenXML import is better than many other available tools
3. There are many Microsoft formats that other tools (including SoftMaker and yes even newer Microsoft tools) cannot open

If you can come up with a way to explain that without substantially increasing the size of the entry and we'll use that instead.

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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#18 Post by webfork »

Been using LibreOffice Calc a lot more lately. Obviously Excel has more features, but anytime I've got to get something that looks like a table from almost any document, I am more often than not opening/pasting it into Calc first. It shows up looking more like the original, maintains formatting/links, and seems more compatible with it's destination. Even sometimes pulling tables between Office applications Word/Excel/PowerPoint.

Along this line, some good news for LibreOffice: AMD is helping update Calc to use graphics processors. I haven't seen speed tests comparing Calc to Excel, but could lead to the acknowledgement that, if you're serious about spreadsheets, Calc is the way to go. Obviously, this is also good for AMD and their whole "APU" push, intending to remove the idea of separate system and graphics processors.
Last edited by webfork on Tue Jul 09, 2013 5:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: (added a bit more, updating)

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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#19 Post by webfork »

False positive note: McAffee went after LibreOffice 4.1.0 (installed, not portable) file soffice.bin as an Artemis!B9c7b9443f1E file. Ugh. I don't have control over the AV program so quarantining was not an option. This REALLY screwed up my day. Anyway, after a lot of tweaking I finally got the computer to back up to an earlier version, despite deleting everything I could related to version 4.1.0. The portable version helped me get around it temporarily.

On a side note, This might sound like a reason not to use LibreOffice, but it's the fact that I've grown so dependent upon that program's feature set and reliability that made this such a headache.

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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#20 Post by lautrepay »

webfork wrote:This might sound like a reason not to use LibreOffice
This is a good reason not to use McAffee (or any other antivirus). :wink:

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Erkhyan
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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#21 Post by Erkhyan »

I didn't have problems with the portable version either, but after three different tries on two different computers, I cannot seem to be able to install the non-portable version. Something about a corrupted file (liboffice1.cab, I think). I was wondering whether the problem came from the original file, or the antivirus (Avast) corrupted it during the download…

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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#22 Post by JohnTHaller »

Erkhyan wrote:I didn't have problems with the portable version either, but after three different tries on two different computers, I cannot seem to be able to install the non-portable version. Something about a corrupted file (liboffice1.cab, I think). I was wondering whether the problem came from the original file, or the antivirus (Avast) corrupted it during the download…
This will happen when you get an incomplete download of the LibreOffice MSI installer. For some reason, it can't detect when it is an incomplete download and you'll get this error. If you check the file size and MD5, it likely won't match the published versions. Clear your browser cache and download again and then check the file size and MD5. If you get a broken one again, there could be an incomplete one on your local download mirror. If that's the case, let me know and I'll report it to the Document Foundation team.
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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#23 Post by webfork »

JohnTHaller wrote:Clear your browser cache and download again and then check the file size and MD5. If you get a broken one again, there could be an incomplete one on your local download mirror. If that's the case, let me know and I'll report it to the Document Foundation team.
Thanks for that. Getting the broken LO version off my computer was very time intensive, so I'll have to retest this when the next version comes out.

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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#24 Post by Erkhyan »

I redownloaded a fourth time and got a valid file this time. The file’s size didn’t change between downloads, but this time I used an integrity check. It works now.

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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#25 Post by webfork »

webfork wrote:solid, light-colored, mild gradients seemed to work best
Found a darker persona that I really like. Found among a group of themes have popped on Mozilla's site specifically for LibreOffice.

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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#26 Post by webfork »

Two new reviews for LibreOffice from Softpedia. Both are very positive and I mostly agree with their analysis.

LibreOffice Writer Review

LibreOffice Calc Review

I recently tried to do a project tracking document inside Calc but could *NOT* figure out the bizarre way it handles HTML links. So for the moment I'm sticking with Excel for that.

Also, this article seems to suggest the fact that Word can't open .ODT files correctly is a LibreOffice problem, even though the Open Document Format is separate from the LibreOffice organization. If LibreOffice isn't saving ODF files incorrectly, that's a separate issue from Microsoft's format adoption.

Edit: evidently there was a whole series of them. Adding the other reviews:

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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#27 Post by SYSTEM »

webfork wrote:Also, this article seems to suggest the fact that Word can't open .ODT files correctly is a LibreOffice problem, even though the Open Document Format is separate from the LibreOffice organization. If LibreOffice isn't saving ODF files incorrectly, that's a separate issue from Microsoft's format adoption.
One potential cause for problems is that LibreOffice saves into a newer version of ODF than Microsoft Office supports. Changing the preference Tools -> Options... -> Opening and Saving -> General -> ODF version (or something like that, I use Finnish localization) may help.

BTW, a tip: LibreOffice User Guides. In my experience they are much better than F1 online help.
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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#28 Post by webfork »

SYSTEM wrote:BTW, a tip: LibreOffice User Guides. In my experience they are much better than F1 online help.
Nice. Thanks for that.

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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#29 Post by webfork »

[Note that I'm a little late writing this up as LibreOffice is at 4.2.1 but I waited too long to post this.]

Pleased with some of the changes in the 4.2 release. I've been using the 4.1 series extensively and there are some nice changes, including a variety of import updates/adds for Apple Keynote, Abiword, Microsoft Word (docx), and more. It's far from a brand new program, but it's a clear step forward.

Interestingly, OpenOffice's fixes are also impressive. This should not be taken as OpenOffice is somehow on par with LibreOffice, however: while some of the changes look great, it seems that LibreOffice is adding more features to more parts of the program over a more frequent release cycle. You can see this phenonminon quite clearly in the Softpedia changelog:

OpenOffice: http://mac.softpedia.com/progChangelog/ ... 10319.html
LibreOffice: http://www.softpedia.com/progChangelog/ ... 71618.html

As other reviews have stated, has fewer features but is more polished and maybe more solid. I haven't tested them side by side to see this, but I have had occasional crashes on LibreOffice on par with my copy of Microsoft Office 2010. I'm primarily going with LibreOffice right now due to the license, advocacy by organizations I like, and simple familiarity.

Also interesting related article: http://andybrandt531.com/2013/09/libreo ... ce-taught/

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Re: LibreOffice Portable

#30 Post by webfork »

Just tested the PDF editor included in the program. I don't know if it's improved since the last time I tested it or if I never actually tested it in LibreOffice, but the editor works fairly well (basically using the existing graphics editor on top of the PDF viewer). Many of the PDFs show up with the text separated into separate lines (so you can't edit paragraphs as a whole) but you can move graphs, fix small text errors, add arrows and emphasis, etc. This is better (in some areas) than Adobe's Pro editor.

Anyway ... added PDF Editor to the feature category.

Edit: I recently did a PDF edit to fill out a graphical form using LibreOffice that worked much better than Adobe Acrobat Pro v9. Great stuff.

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