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Sort of an update on my usage of this program since I've been using it for about for 5 years now.

Those that see LibreOffice always ask me the same question: yeah that's nice but it doesn't look ready for prime time.

Things I use for LO for at my workplace

• Project and overview documents (todo list, big picture details, etc.)
• Very large text documents (hundreds of pages) since Word has a tendency to freak out on extremely large docs
• Initial draft documents (since moving to Word is seamless)
• Most conversions - whether from rich text or graphics programs
• HTML edits - including my home page and work with Markdown and Confluence docs
• Basic PDF edits - usually minor edits to a sentence or something needs to be deleted.
• Basic spreadsheets - I prefer their spreadsheet program sometimes as Excel can be overwhelming
• Print outs - printing out things or setting up PDF files where I want the layout to look a specific way (an alternative to Microsoft Publisher)
• Fixing bad or misbehaving MS Office files

What I don't use LibreOffice for:

• HOWTO files that involve pictures because drag-and-drop image stuff doesn't work efficiently. I generally use Word here.
• Track changes, collaboration - It might be great but as I'm the only one at my place of business using LibreOffice right now, I can't test this.
• Presentations and flowcharts - I do love PowerPoint and Impress just doesn't have the same level of usability. I dislike Visio for many reasons.
• Complex / Formatted Spreadsheets - Calc is improving but a lot of making data digestible is making it pretty and Excel remains my go-to program here.

Ever since this analysis back in 2013, I've been actively using LibreOffice for years now both at home and at work. Word still does many more things that LibreOffice doesn't but more recently some specific updates have really impressed me.

Image compression

This is WAY better than Microsoft Word, which defaults to either JPEG or no compression if you paste from clipboard.

https://translate.google.com/translate? ... t=&act=url


Formatting marks

LibreOffice does blue-text formatting marks which is SO MUCH EASIER to read than Microsoft's pure black format.

LibreOffice


Microsoft Office


I do a lot of Word formatting work and I wish like crazy there were a way to do this in Word 2016 but no luck so far.


Spellcheck issue

Sometimes Word's spellcheck system is problematic for a variety of reasons including language assignment confusion, Track Changes oddities, formatting issues, etc. It's an ongoing problem for international work. In this case, I like to switch over to the LibreOffice spellchecker.

Steps:

1. In Word, clear all changes, comments, etc. and save to a separate version

2. Open the file in LibreOffice, select all, and change language to whatever language or language variant you're using. For me, that means selecting Tools - Language - For all Text - English (USA)

It's a little slow but it does work.

Interesting. Word's formatting marks do show up in blue in the Mac Version of MS Office, but this feature hasn't made it to the Windows version (yet).

Erdeslawe wrote: ↑Sun May 06, 2018 1:06 am Interesting. Word's formatting marks do show up in blue in the Mac Version of MS Office, but this feature hasn't made it to the Windows version (yet).

Oh interesting, thanks

Just a note that I've updated the entry to highlight the available "still" and "legacy" program versions. https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2055

Sort of interesting: if you deal in PDFs a lot, it's worth noting how many available tools and features LibreOffice has for the format versus Microsoft Office: https://oscollege.com/2018/07/29/libreo ... ce-doesnt/

This is such a small thing but an enormous time saver: remember your last cursor position in LibreOffice. I've been using Splat to launch programs and files, had Firefox set to open previous tabs, and PDF XChange to open files where it left off. Now I've got LibreOffice open up where I left off. They're small things but, working on the same files day in and day out, it really adds up.

Be aware about kind 4.4: someone with commonality with OpenOffice or LibreOffice will have to seem at a section of the progressions which have befell in probably the most recent discharge. I've been truly motivated with a element of the updates together with trade the executives, skins, section line dispersing, and the sky is the restrict from there.

billon wrote: ↑Fri Feb 22, 2019 5:18 am

lol yeah ... I work with a lot of non-English speaking people who so I read a lot of text like this. I think he's saying that LibreOffice is now fully separate from its OpenOffice origins and that he's excited by the recent changes, to which I certainly agree.

Two LibreOffice notes that someone might find useful:

First, the ability to automatically open a given file to the last edit. I work in a lot of very long files (something LibreOffice handles much better than other programs) so this small trick has saved me a lot of time: https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question ... -left-off/

Second, something I recommend skipping: the discontinued "Alternative dialog Find & Replace for Writer" (AltSearch) ... In my search with finding tools that work with regular expressions and rich text (complex document formatting), I came across a LibreOffice add-on that looks fantastic.



Some older blogs and articles are still pointing to this but it no longer functions with LO. It does have some amazing built-in regular expressions tools that I hope I can find elsewhere.

I still seem to see quite a bit about OpenOffice so I thought I'd note how many releases on the LibreOffice track there have been since 2014 (the last time OO released):



SOURCE: https://twitter.com/libreoffice/status/ ... 07808?s=20

webfork wrote: ↑I still seem to see quite a bit about OpenOffice so I thought I'd note how many releases on the LibreOffice track there have been since 2014 (the last time OO released)

Although I'm not an user, I'm curious here: is that NeoOffice still being developed?

NeoOffice isn't free and it's for MacOS. The latest version is called 2017, but they quite regularly seem to fix bugs and offer patches.

I see. No wonder I'd never heard of it. Thanks for enlightening me.