Office suites

MartinRF · 2013-02-16 21:24:10

This is supposed to be about proper office suites, not collection of programs that sort of cover most bases covered by office suites.

So far I have experience of:

OpenOffice (at home and at work which includes Star Office many years ago)
Microsoft Office (at work)

So far I have been perfectly happy with the features of OpenOffice and annoyed with the featuritis of both office suites. The fact that OO is OS-agnostic is its real killer feature. My mother uses OO on WinXP and I can support her based on my experience with OO on Solaris/Linux/Win2k/Vista/W7...

Last weekend I tried to make my way through Clark Ching's TTD tutorial using OO and Python and soon ran aground. I did a little research and came to the maybe premature conclusion that if it was at all possible it would be pretty hard.

So I started to consider LibreOffice and other alternatives:

Siag is way dated and even though I find i kind of cool I don't think it really fits my needs. No I have not tried it out.

I view LO as OO that has moved on and I only have very vague ideas about what it can do that my 'old' OO can't. Their web does, for instance, not tell me much about scripting for LO in Python.

Calligra seems to have some unique features, like brain dump, that I think could come in handy (I use Freemind quite a bit).

I found Freeoffice less than an hour ago...

Views on, experience of LibreOffice, Calligra or FreeOffice anyone?
Any other alternatives?

/Martin (when really deep into typography-nerd-land I use other tools including LaTeX and Scribus, and my favourite writing tool is LyX)

intoCB · 2013-02-16 21:32:49

Mommy, if I'm bad, will they make me use Calligra Suite again?

VastOne · 2013-02-17 03:40:58

^ Is this a response to a serious question an attempt at humor or just a seriously cynical view of it all? Either way I wonder how helpful it is

@MartinRF, LO is OO that did move on after the Oracle debacle with OO. LO is well supported and continues to improve. Many of my customers use it and are very content with it

txbahai · 2013-02-17 04:09:16

Libre is the best option I've seen so far...imho.

lcafiero · 2013-02-17 06:10:26

Another vote for LibreOffice.

pvsage · 2013-02-17 06:24:35

@VastOne: I thought intoCB's response was funny as hell. monkey

bigbenaugust · 2013-02-17 06:31:39

Hey, whatever happened to ApplixWare? tongue

bigbenaugust · 2013-02-17 06:33:18

But seriously, if it has to be a local office suite, it has to be LibreOffice. Otherwise, vim or Google Docs.

intoCB · 2013-02-17 08:15:23

My personal experience of Calligra - and I've tested the whole suite - was very negative. It's like they try to cover all the bases and none of them very well.

I don't think I'm alone in this point of view. How many KDE distributions use the Calligra suite, which is native, rather than LibreOffice?

Superficially it's a great set of programs but I wouldn't recommend them at all at this stage as a support to productivity.

Anyone out there regularly using Braindump? Or even irregularly?

To the developers: You're doing a great job but your work isn't finished yet.

fatmac · 2013-02-17 10:31:33

For an Integrated Office Suite it has to be Libre Office.
For Spreadsheet it would be Gnumeric, & for a Wordprocessor it would be Abiword.
For the command line it would likely depend on whether you are a vi or emacs fan, as a lot tend to use similar commands.

junkie · 2013-02-17 11:12:29

Calligra would take a brain dump every time I tried run a function through more than one page in Calligra Sheets. I wanted to cry blood in my school labs each time it crashed. I found Libre Office to be the most stable, quality office stuff.

As for alternatives to mind mapping programs like brain dump, I found freemind and dia (flowchart), but haven't really played with either.

dura · 2013-02-17 11:41:53

My experiences:

Abiword: buggy, and unreliable.

Calligra: not worth trying.

Libreoffice: full featured, still quite as stable as it should be. Heavyish (not really important). Biggest advantage is predictive text. Through crashes I've had documents corrupted.

MS Office: Unintuitive, but sometimes a necessary recourse.

Google Docs: Selling out to the new Devil, quite nice to work without saving. Saves in docx, reads all files, nice sharing facility to work on documents with others. Downer: doesn't have multiple page window zoom, so editing is not as easy as it should be. Multiple page on window is not something Google seem interested in, nor that other users are complaining about much; only ongoing complaints about normal zoom, which is actually implemented. O

My current choice: Google Docs. Use it everyday.

Last edited by dura (2013-02-17 11:42:25)

VastOne · 2013-02-17 14:09:00

^ Agree with that Dura, Google Docs is a nice choice especially when you have access to the web but not your machine.

I use it quite a bit

MartinRF · 2013-02-17 14:48:14

So Calligra is out due to lack of stability.

Anyone tried scripting LO calc the way Clark Ching does with VBA in Excell in his TDD tutorial?

/Martin

machinebacon · 2013-02-17 17:17:43

Freeoffice (Softmaker) is IMO the best one if you have to create documents (in Linux) that should open without formatting problems in Microsoft Office. So +1 from me, though it is not a FOSS.

Last edited by machinebacon (2013-02-17 17:18:59)

Kuno · 2013-02-18 00:39:01

machinebacon wrote:

Freeoffice (Softmaker) is IMO the best one if you have to create documents (in Linux) that should open without formatting problems in Microsoft Office.

Thats why i use it (the nonfree version) since 1996 on windows and linux (since 2008). FreeOffice install is about 100mb. Manually deleting unwanted localization, etc.. you get down to about 60mb.

diego898 · 2013-02-18 00:47:44

has anyone had any use/luck with LO 4? Came out relatively recently but I think #! is on 3.5 +/- .2

machinebacon · 2013-02-18 02:46:25

Kuno wrote:

machinebacon wrote:
Freeoffice (Softmaker) is IMO the best one if you have to create documents (in Linux) that should open without formatting problems in Microsoft Office.
Thats why i use it (the nonfree version) since 1996 on windows and linux (since 2008). FreeOffice install is about 100mb. Manually deleting unwanted localization, etc.. you get down to about 60mb.

Kuno, I remember that it was you who recommended it a few years (?) ago here on the forums and this was the reason I actually used it. Thanks for that again, credits where credits are due smile It has saved me a lot of pain when creating cross-platform documents. Didn't know they are around for over 10 years already!

Danke nochmal smile

Ref:
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5770
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=126698

Last edited by machinebacon (2013-02-18 02:48:42)

Kuno · 2013-02-18 09:38:16

machinebacon wrote:

Didn't know they are around for over 10 years already!

I think they started end of 80's with textmaker for dos. Mid 90's the first windows versions came out, the first linux version about 2006. When the first win-version (Textmaker 6.0) was out, i compared it with Word6, StarOffice, Works, and a few others on the market then. Sticked to softmaker, since is was the fastest, sleekest and, if working with graphics, the easiest to handle.
BTW: Back then you had to buy computer magazines to get software on CD's . Bought a lot of them... And only thus stumbled upon softmaker. smile

Last edited by Kuno (2013-02-18 10:19:24)

EnochRoot · 2013-02-18 20:48:15

LibreOffice 4 looks to be a big improvement on the previous version in terms of speed, having said that am downloading FreeOffice now to try it out monkey

txbahai · 2013-02-18 22:07:27

Anyone have an easy way to upgrade to libre4 on #!. Without moving my whole system to testing?

saneks · 2013-02-18 23:01:19

I had softmaker office (one of the free downloads mentioned above) for a while - much smaller than libre or open office and very compatible with MS office. toolbar layout looked a bit dated in my version, but if it works, it works.

don't use it much anymore, I usually use the editor for writing and use abiword and libre office only for formatting and saving to pdf and have a backup as .rtf usually if I need it later.

NatGeo · 2013-02-18 23:36:28

I have tested the Caligra suite, LO and Softmaker's Office. For me the #1 is Softmaker's suite; it has -probably- the best compatibility with M$-office (something I really need), and it's decently light and stable, LO it's good and more featured, but I had several problems when trying to convert ODF to excel's formats, and last...Caligra: I didn't like it at all.
I have to test Google Docs...is it possible to work offline?
Best regards.

Kuno · 2013-02-18 23:44:46

saneks wrote:

I had softmaker office (one of the free downloads mentioned above) for a while - much smaller than libre or open office and very compatible with MS office. toolbar layout looked a bit dated in my version, but if it works, it works.
don't use it much anymore, I usually use the editor for writing and use abiword and libre office only for formatting and saving to pdf and have a backup as .rtf usually if I need it later.

Makes me wonder... since freeoffice has an export to pdf - option integrated. And rtf's have not been compatible even between different MS-versions (let it be works or word) over the years.... Regarding the toolbar layout: yes! There are no ribbons. neutral

saneks · 2013-02-18 23:53:54

^ I just dont use Softmaker/freeOffice anymore because I dont have it installed anymore and grew to like typing in the editor because it doesnt distract me with tons of icons I dont need. I usually write to take notes and use abiword/libre only for formatting invoices and stuff, so no need for a fancy office suite.

For every bigger project and presentations I use InDesign. But I keep Libre Office installed on every linux box that has enough space just incase I might need it if I am with a linux-only machine

Last edited by saneks (2013-02-19 00:00:32)

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#1 2013-02-16 21:24:10

Office suites

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Re: Office suites

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#10 2013-02-17 10:31:33

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#15 2013-02-17 17:17:43

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#16 2013-02-18 00:39:01

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