LibreOffice?

[Dragon Angel]

I've used Microsoft Office for...well, almost my entire Office software-using computer experience. There was one long period where I did temporarily use LibreOffice's predecessor, OpenOffice, because I did not have access to any other copy of Microsoft's at that time. However, when my school started to install Office 2007 on students' laptops, I decided to jump back into Microsoft Office then.

I didn't mind OpenOffice, but it had some glaring issues that were just never fixed with successive releases (like styles being sometimes schizophrenic and not displaying correctly when they felt like it, some settings that I had chosen constantly returning to their defaults, pretty bad user interface lag...and some other rather minor things). So, those really helped to contribute toward my move back to Microsoft, as you can imagine. LibreOffice seems to have fixed A LOT of these from my recent experiments with it, and I'm actually impressed with it now...

So, now I'm thinking of moving back to it. Are there any things that I should be aware of at this point, though? A great part of my motivation for switching again is so that my documents can be edited almost anywhere -- on any platform -- without needing to spend more money on licenses. (like say if I was using a Mac and Boot Camp, I would ideally like to be able to edit my files on both its OS X and Windows sides*)

Oh, and document operability between MSO and LO isn't really an issue for me. I know that LO can't exactly handle MSO's file types well (actually, that's probably an understatement right there).

* Yes I am predicting that I'll be using both platforms in the near future, so that's another reason why I'm planning ahead.

[Darth Wong]

What kind of problems would you be worried about? The UI was never as slick as Microsoft's UI, but it's passable. The file interoperability will never be 100% because Microsoft likes it that way. Their file formats are not documented, and if they were documented, it's probably a safe bet that Office itself wouldn't actually conform to the official documentation anyway.

[Dragon Angel]

Ah the UI is fine for me now. Back when I tried to use it, it had a lot of horrible performance problems along with the other issues I listed, but performance is probably also to blame on my laptop at the time. Oh, and it randomly deleted the contents of a file I worked on when I saved it. (I'm confident that is fixed, of course.)

But mostly, I guess I'm mainly worried about other annoying bugs that could bite me in the future, like that Styles issue. I've used LO for two weeks now though, and it seems like most of my previous grievances with the old OO have long since disappeared.

[phongn]

So, now I'm thinking of moving back to it. Are there any things that I should be aware of at this point, though? A great part of my motivation for switching again is so that my documents can be edited almost anywhere -- on any platform -- without needing to spend more money on licenses. (like say if I was using a Mac and Boot Camp, I would ideally like to be able to edit my files on both its OS X and Windows sides*)

Like it or not, Microsoft Office is the de-facto standard for documents. Also, if you use Boot Camp you might just buy virtualization software and run the Office on Windows anyways.

What kind of problems would you be worried about? The UI was never as slick as Microsoft's UI, but it's passable. The file interoperability will never be 100% because Microsoft likes it that way. Their file formats are not documented, and if they were documented, it's probably a safe bet that Office itself wouldn't actually conform to the official documentation anyway.

Both the legacy and modern file formats are extensively documented but are extremely complicated. Not even Microsoft has been able to guarantee 100% conversion success.

[Dave]

I would suspect some of the glaring issues have been addressed, as Sun was apparently holding back much of the development with red-tape issues. Apparently it got so bad Novell started rolling their own fork with all the community development tacked onto the OpenOffice base.

Now that Sun has been bought out and Oracle told the community to take a hike (which they did), the LibreOffice fork has been able to integrate a lot of changes the community had been wanting, and by now have probably made a fair amount of progress on re-factoring some of the really ugly code.

My only concerns are long-term viability and document compatibility: the former is roughly assured at this point, but I'm not sure who is supporting the latter.

[Dragon Angel]

Like it or not, Microsoft Office is the de-facto standard for documents. Also, if you use Boot Camp you might just buy virtualization software and run the Office on Windows anyways.

I did read about virtualization, and it is extremely tempting... What I am worried about with regard to that is performance (again), specifically for 3D games as I want to enter game design with some of my friends. I'd heard about doing a trick like using a Boot Camp partition as your virtual machine (I know Parallels has this...not sure about VMware), but Windows 7 would always cough up an activation issue because of different hardware, so that plan is sunk.

How comparable is Parallels' / VMware's graphics adapter compared to Boot Camp's driver now? Obviously a virtual machine's performance would be inferior to something native, but if their performance difference is close enough, then I would seriously consider that option.

[phongn]

I did read about virtualization, and it is extremely tempting... What I am worried about with regard to that is performance (again), specifically for 3D games as I want to enter game design with some of my friends. I'd heard about doing a trick like using a Boot Camp partition as your virtual machine (I know Parallels has this...not sure about VMware), but Windows 7 would always cough up an activation issue because of different hardware, so that plan is sunk.

VMWare will run a Boot Camp partition and doesn't have the activation issue.

How comparable is Parallels' / VMware's graphics adapter compared to Boot Camp's driver now? Obviously a virtual machine's performance would be inferior to something native, but if their performance difference is close enough, then I would seriously consider that option.

It'll be slower, but usable. If you want to game, though, its best just to reboot into Windows.

[Zaune]

What kind of tasks do you normally use Office for? I wouldn't advise trying to run VBA apps on anything but genuine Office, but word-processing and basic spreadsheets should travel between versions pretty painlessly besides the odd formatting glitch.

[Ariphaos]

I had all of one minor issue with OpenOffice, which was multi-line cells in Calc. I haven't tested since then, so let's see...

...and it works, in 3.3.2. *runs to download new version*

I've never had any problems with LibreOffice with document incompatibility, myself, but I don't use it to load Microsoft documents much.