Will Linux Users Ever Be Able to Ditch Microsoft Office?
Jan. 25th, 2012 by Christopher Tozzi
We all have dirty secrets. Mine is this: Although I run Linux exclusively on all of my computers, I still use Microsoft Office. Why? Because LibreOffice — even if it’s through no fault of its own — doesn’t always get the job done for me. And sometimes I wonder if it ever will. Here’s why.
To be clear, I don’t use Microsoft Office exclusively. I process my words in LibreOffice whenever possible, since it runs natively and has a lot of features that I miss in MS Office. I especially like the autocomplete functionality and built-in support for exporting to PDF.
Thanks to the wonders of the Wine emulator (actually, Wine is not an emulator, but we’ll call it one for simplicity’s sake), however, I can run Microsoft Office — in my case, Office 2003, since that was the last copy I bought — just as easily as LibreOffice on my Ubuntu system. As a result, I’ve had it installed for years and keep it updated regularly.
LibreOffice and Microsoft Office Compatibility
And that’s a good thing, because there have been many days when having Microsoft Office so readily accessible has been vitally important for doing my job — usually because I’ve found myself in situations where LibreOffice has been unable to handle Microsoft Office files correctly.
In general, as most of its followers know, LibreOffice can open Word, Excel and Powerpoint files pretty well. It also can save data in those formats without problems most of the time. But occasionally — especially when the documents involved have complicated content such as comments or embedded files — LibreOffice just doesn’t cut it. In other words, it’s good, but it’s not perfect.
In most cases, that would be fine. I’ve been using computers long enough at this point to know there’s no such thing as perfection in the world of software. All the same, the problems with LibreOffice become untenable when they involve sharing files with other people for whom I do need things to be perfect. In my professional life, I can’t send Word files to others and just keep my fingers crossed that they’re not going to see a mash-up of jumbled nonsense when they try to open the file. So instead, I have to use my own copy of Microsoft Office to make sure things look alright before passing the data on.
The root of the problem, of course, is not the fault of the LibreOffice developers or the open source community. It stems from Microsoft’s clinging to proprietary file formats, or obfuscating its implementation of those which ostensibly are open. It all boils down to Redmond being nasty and evil.
But while that may be an excuse, it’s not a solution. Nor is it realistic — at least outside of the universe of the Church of Emacs — to refuse to deal in file formats that LibreOffice cannot read and write natively. An unfortunate fact of life is that the vast, vast majority of humanity opens and saves its documents in Microsoft Office formats, and will probably continue to do so for a long time to come.
Because of these things, I wonder whether LibreOffice will ever be a truly complete replacement for Microsoft Office — and, by extension, if Linux will meet the needs of general computer users as well as proprietary platforms. It’s not that I don’t want it to — I certainly do — but even if it’s unfair, I can’t foresee the total disappearance of compatibility issues in LibreOffice to the point that people who need to do real work in a Microsoft-dominated world will be able to ditch Microsoft Office entirely.
Of course, cloud-based office productivity holds promise for resolving this dilemma by making Microsoft Office and LibreOffice alike obsolete. But the cloud revolution seems to be coming more slowly than promised. Until it achieves its full effect, I’ll have to keep a launcher for Word in my Wine menu, sad as that makes me.
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I wonder how many extra pieces of software you would need to make up for LibreOffice’s shortcomings. As far as standalone tools for things like importing/exporting/converting PDFs ..
I have been switching clients to LibreOffice and have had suprisingly few complaints. Most of the offices and individuals I’ve worked with tend to create more than they receive from external sources.. so I suspect that has been the key to avoiding formatting trouble.
People wouldn’t feel the need to keep Microsoft Office, if their friends/collegues would just stop using it.
As indicated in the article (but a bit vague in my opinion), the reason is the (3) propietary exeptions in the contract between Novell and Microsoft. Might be more than 3 now, but that doesn’t really matter.
The exemptions ensure incompatibility, and even opening OOxml documents with LibreOffice could easily ruin the document. Not only the formatting, but the content. This is deliberate.
The small amounts (millions and millions) Microsoft spent to pay off Novell is one of the best investments made since Rockefeller buyed railway stretches (Standard Oil).
So, when many gives Novell credit for OpenOffice/LibreOffice, their work effectively killed it in a number of ways.
LibreOffice would have been better off if there was 100% incompatibility. Because then Microsoft would never have succeeded with the ISO farse.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20101219121621828&query=Novell+ooxml+Microsoft
LibreOffice (becoming obsolete just as MSO) works just fine. There’s basicly nothing wrong with it and it can be used by 90% of the MSO users.
Time is overdue for FOSS applications ++ to understand that appearance matters A LOT and do something about it.
It goes not only for the application itself, but the documents it produces. Fonts, DOCUMENT TEMPLATES, icons, obvious workflows and everything else. If it looks bad it will be perceived as bad.
But for the problems with OOxml documents: The cost/imperfections/trouble should be attributed to Microsoft (and Novell), not to LibreOffice.
Simple solution Christopher:
Use LibreOffice (LO) with Google Docs. I use LO as my offline Google Docs. Anyone who has a browser & is connected to the internet can use Google Docs. You can upload (or download) to Google docs from LO with just 2 clicks using this extension: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/openoffice.org2googledocs-export-import-to-google-docs-zoho-webdav
I feel bad LO doesn’t have the clout & advertising budget some proprietary alternatives have, so I give it my moral support (& spread the word in my own little way). With the tight integration with Google Docs I feel LO has a great future.
With the help of Google & good Google Docs compatibility LO won’t have to compete with or worry too much about compatibility with any monopoly.
Hey Jack! You seriously spent time writing this article? Are you just a total moron?
Quit pretending you write documents and stick to your Facebook, & tweets.
Also, you might need to find a new hobby, given you have nothing better to do then complain about “FREE” Software…(learn a fuckin work-a-round!)
I think you just need to jump back on the bandwagon, you MS fanboy. I’m sure you’ll just be happier there. The MS boat has your name on it! No need to complain, you paid for that shit!
If there are so many problems with LibreOffice. WHY NOT join the LibreOffice development community???? Help drive some code into the machine??? Help to make it better???? Oh no?? You don’t know how to do that sort of shit? Oh but you know how to complain about shit like a 5year old. Oh my the concept….
You are a total douche…. Quit being a lil whiny bitch! Quit complaining about “FREE” software released under GPL licenses assshank.
REAL LINUX USERS CONTRIBUTE, others are posers, such as yourself. Whining about shortfalls… Damn the wanna-be linux user. Maybe you need more time in the corner.
Good luck becoming a real reporter. Waaaaaa I had to use firefox to wrrite this waaaaaaaaaaaaa!
@Gymbag:
If you cannot read and got nothing to say – put a sock in it.
I have quit using Microsoft Office years ago and use LibreOffice (before OpenOffice) exclusively. I do not miss anything and I do not have any problems with documents and from my experience I am not alone. Although I often exchange documents with Windows users this is not a problem. In most cases they run LibreOffice too. When this is not a problem document conversion shows hardly any problems. In the beginning, years ago, I use the Microsofts free document viewers when I have problems with Microsoft’s formats. At the moment I do not have then installed. I am looking forward to Calligra Office which seems to have very good document conversion (misses features in order to be a full LibreOffice replacement.
I am a serious writer and need MS Office for my work….Google docs doesn’t do it – sorry. You see I use macros and third-party tools that only run in MS office and some of them only in a Windows environment. My solution is that I run MS Office 2007 (paid for) with Wine/Crossover and depending on the tools I need to use, I switch to Windows 7 running on virtual Box. LO is fine for everyday use, but for those of us who have to work with the bigger MS world then I’m afraid MS Office is the only option. I’m by no means a MS fan boy – I cut my writing teeth on Wordstar 3 and then Word Perfect 4.2. I hated the way MS used its marketing power back then to undercut these better products, but it worked. As much as I wish it were otherwise, I’m stuck with MS Office. I complete understand the writers comments.
I’ve heard some pathetic excuses for clinging to MS, but this piece of drivel has to take the first prize. For a start MS Office 2003 is obsolete and has been for nearly three years. The only way forward is to insist on using Open Document Format, which is the internationally recognised standard, and to keep on insisting until the message gets through. LibreOffice and ODF work well together, hardly suprising since both are ‘open’.
LO is not, and never will be, a serious replacement for M$ for anyone that does more than basic data manipulation. I would LOVE to kick M$ out the window in all manners possible, and have except in this one area. Doing large vlookups or index/match functions take excruciatingly too long in LO. One vlookup between two spreadsheets of over 100,000 rows each took over 12 HOURS wifh LO….M$ 2010 can do the same task in 30-45 minutes due to multi processor capability. Spare me the “use the LO database…yada..yada..yada” argument. Tried that and it failed miserably as well. Like it or not, M$ is at least 5 years ahead of open source office apps.
AG: you seem to think that the whole world works like you do, believe it or not, you are not the center of the universe.
Ive worked on three projects recently that changed Windows workstations for Linux ones with 56 to 97 worstations and we moved people to OO/LO and I can count on one hand the problems that needed a little fine tuning (and we predicted most of the ones we thought would have probelems because of the nature of their work).
So Id day that we are above 95% success rate where people could keep working like before.
These examples are different than my own personal experiences with family and friends becayse they are work related.
@Tim:
I agree. LibreOffice will do for the bulk. The only issue I got is not a LibreOffice problem.
@timlovejoy
Nice job on staying on topic….not sure how you read that I think I’m the center of the universe.
I’m speaking from personal experience. LO office was evaluated as a replacement for M$ in our office and didn’t make the cut. Our users don’t want to mess with settings and don’t tolerate incompatibilities…..they are the 99% crowd that uses M$ products for convenience. The app should just work and not get in the way…or cut productivity. As I said before, LO lags way behind M$ office…and I’ll go out on a limb here and say it always will.
Go Libreoffice!!
Get better and prove them wrong.
Oh for heavens sake how complicated do we need to make this? We have to get words on a page, numbers to add up, slide presentations. Libre Office does all of this and more.
I have been using Open Office in my law library for the last five years with no problems at all. In fact there have been lawyers who have sent me a MS Word document in the latest and greatest format that they could not open with an older version of MS Office. I could open it with Libre or OpenOffice save it in an older Word format and send it back to them.
Why is it that people will spend too much money to get the latest version of Microsoft Office just to keep up with the Jone’s but we seem to be afraid of sending something in ODF and asking people to download LibreOffice for free.
I do not get it.
Cheers.
John Kerr
At University, most people use MS Office, but I use LibreOffice/OpenOffice and promote it to students. They like it because it is free and does everything they need to do (which is usually quite basic stuff).
For people on a small budget, LibreOffice is great.
Also, all the University Computers that run Windows are incredibly slow. The University cannot afford to have high spec computers everywhere. If they would install Linux on those computers, they would work faster. It is LibreOffice that makes such a transition possible. Unfortunately, few institutions have made this step.
MS Office has had the office suite market tied up for fifteen years. Maybe longer. Breaking that monopoly will be just as difficult as breaking this Windows one is / was.
Documents are exchanged in MS’s format, and that format is so convoluted that reverse engineering it has been a decade’s work. I think that the formatting issues are 95% solved for LO / OO.o, but that still leaves the ecosystem which surrounds Word and Excel. As pointed out above, the enormous number of macros, plugins, and extensions mean that a lot of stuff that corporations depend on also depend on MS Office specifically.
As Google Docs, Office 365, and Zoho get better, and mobile devices have a greater role, I hope that Office lock-in drops. It may take many years, though.
The MS macro reason for staying with MS Office EXCLUSIVELY is nonsense.
Here are the steps to take:
1. Identify who needs the macros
2. Identify what these macros do and ask are the macros essential (today)??
3. Move whoever does not need the macros over to Libre Office.
4. Inform those who are moved over to Libre Office that this is a cost cutting effort and that some of the savings will be passed on to the worker. If the average cost of the next version of MS Office would cost $300.00 the worker will get $150.00 if the change over is successful.
Many people do not like change and learning something new, so there has to be a carrot here.
5. Install Libre Office on all computers and mandate that all new documents must be in the .ODF format.
I bet that step 4 is one that has never been tried. But we all know that the first step to moving to the Linux desktop is moving people to the open source software on their present systems. After that you can wait for a year then switch over to Linux and I bet they will not even notice.
If you are reading this you are probably a taxpayer. It is time to get the cost of software off of the backs of taxpayers.
It is time to get the cost of software off of the backs of tuition paying students.
Cheers
John
don’t know why anyone would choose to use either product for most things:
- word and writer are both horrible horrible products. Even with a great deal of work fighting with their horrid style systems you end up with amateurish results (which gets messed up every version upgrade, or after minor edits), and as soon as you get a document more than a dozen pages long with a few pictures in it they begin to crawl. Word processors of their ilk are arcane products that belong back in the 80s before 32 bit processors, and should have long died and been replaced with better tools. Given an unconstrained choice I would never use either of them, for anything. Every time i’m forced to use either of them i’m reminded how arcane and time wasting they are to use.
- a spreadsheet is just a spreadsheet, I use oocalc occasionally but it could just as easily be any other, and excel isn’t a particularly great example of one either with it’s very dated user interface. As soon as you’re talking performance issues with vlookup you’re already wasting your time: you’re using the wrong tool for the job (excel more than any other seems to be abused in this way, and for that it gets negative brownie points, not more)
- powerpoint has it’s place, but it’s not something you couldn’t replace in most cases with a bit of static html and simplest of interfaces. The fancy stuff is just a way to waste time and cost money.
For the most part they’re both very very ordinary products and are simply not a necessary, or even remotely the ideal way to produce the end products they pro-port to be designed to produce. I’m baffled why so much attention is given to either of them.
@notzed
You raise some good points, HTML for presentations is a good one, but sometimes we need the office Suite.
I use Libre Office in my library for:
Spine labels
book cards
Newsletter
Posters for events
Print Invitations
Yes I have seen Microsoft Word do some strange things in my day.
Cheers
John
Here’s a suggestion:
Lets have a European (or Worldwide) ballot on this. Governments can mandate that all computers must give an option to the consumer where he / she can decide on a free Office Productivity suite like LO/OO/Abiword etc or pay for a commercial suite.
Depending on the answer the browser is directed to the download page of the paid or free office productivity suite.
This may also educate the regular guy & he/she will know there are good options.
With today’s tough economy we need to start looking at solutions.
With all Governments getting tax revenues when commercial products are sold (maybe with the exception of few) would some Governments want to let their citizens benefit from the office productivity suite ballot?
Why stop at the “office productivity suite ballot”?
Why not have an OS ballot where Linux users will get a refund for choosing & using a free OS?
AG said
“One vlookup between two spreadsheets of over 100,000 rows each took over 12 HOURS wifh LO….M$ 2010 can do the same task in 30-45 minutes[...]Spare me the “use [a] database…” argument. Tried that and it failed miserably as well. ”
…
“The app should just work and not [..] cut productivity.
Priceless. iow:
I use a MS-spoon to dig a tranches and it is much better than the LO-spoon… and No, I do not use a mechanical shovel because I never learned how to drive one… but I care deeply about ‘productivity’ so I’m going to keep using the best wrong tool for the job I can find…
@Norbert:
))
Exactly
I’ve made and used huge spreadsheet-systems, but only to compensate for lack of proper tools. I’t completely unsafe. Having said that – It IS useful for such occations. Most users don’t have a clue about spreadsheets.
As regards wordprocessors it is amazing how many corporations that uses MSO or similar to write letters and so on. When it should have been a basic and simple part of the business system.
Office suites won’t go away, but the importance is more of a “mental thing” than real needs. Office suites as general tools is the mechanical typewriter/calculator of desktop computing.
Apple’s iWork and KDE’s Calligra is a far better approach if one absolutely need these things.
A major reason for the “importance” of office suits is it’s function as lock-in/lock-out mechanism. Remove that and it becomes more or less irrelevant. Won’t dissapear – but obsolete for most users.
@AG
WOW that must be some spreadsheet. I do acknowledge the need for MS Office as it is in some ways ahead of LO. This must be one of them. I agree that you have to pick the right tool.
I believe that after there is a critical mass of LO installations the investment (time resources money) to improve on the code will happen.
But yes I know, I am not the IT person whose job is on the line if things do not work out. How do we fight the MBTS? (Microsoft Brain Trained Syndrome).
You have taken the steps by trying out LO for a task. Thank you, it is really appreciated, I mean it. We need more people like you who will try it out.
Here in Canada, where I live and in countries around the world we have deficit budgets. I am 58 years old and I can remember when it all started here in Canada and the debt was just 15 cents per person. Well we have nickeled and dimed our way into this mess and it is going to take a lot of nickel and dimes to get ourselves out of it. We can start with the $$$$ per seat we spend on software.
Best regards,
John Kerr
Why would you EVER use word. Shouldn’t you switch to LaTeX?
Latex?
Yes I should, and sometimes do. I want to get somewhat proficient at it again. Lyx is good as well.
@John “mandate that all new documents must be in the .ODF format.”
Excellent suggestion. There must be a level playing field when the small guy has to compete with monopolist who keep shifting the target.
Well, unlike C. Tozzi and his half-assed attempt to actually use Linux (or his propensity to talk about things he does not know), I ditched MS Office when I was writing my thesis (back in 2008), and it was a fortunate move as I was struggling with MS Office (2003 sp3) and its non-intuitive(/not working) handling of complex formatting.
I needed a few things to do so, such as automatic table of contents, section breaks, headers for each section reminding the title of the chapter (with headers hidden on page 1 of each chapter), different page numberings (i.,ii.,iii.,… for contents; 1.,2.,3.,… for the substance; a.,b.,c.,… for appendices), …
Well, in Word, section breaks were a mess to manage, just impossible, the automatic table of contents was almost never matching the headings or specific numbering, page numbering started over at each section, headers were not showing as expected, and so on so forth. Everytime I checked my formatting it was broken in some way, or not responding intuitively to what I asked.
At some point, I was so angry with the time I was losing on such a stupid task (and the deadline coming closer), that I just switched to using just released OpenOffice.org 2.4 full time on Linux, and thus ditched Windows too as Office was the only reason to keep it up to this point. And I really do not regret it, every expected behaviour just worked from then on and was updated the way I wanted. And I won some extra time to focus on the content.
Impress was also ways easier to configure (background, font sizes and such things).
4 years later, at work with Office 2007 and those damn ribbons, I’m still struggling with Excel and its many non intuitive or not responding functions, and its a relief when I get back home and can actually be productive with LibreOffice.
So yeah, it’s just a small leap you have to make (ditch MS Office), and then you will feel the power of LibreOffice in your hands, doing exactly what it was asked to without any surprise, unexpected behaviours, bugs, security issues, …
I just can’t understand why an individual (though for professionals it may be justified) would want to pirate (let’s face it) or pay for MS Office when there’s something more powerful for free and open.