A few months ago I complained about slow installation of LibreOffice 3.3. A few days ago I downloaded LibreOffice 3.4.3 and installed it on a windows machine.The experience this time was better. The download was around 50MB smaller and it installed in almost half the earlier time, i.e. 1.5 hrs. This is still a lot more than what I would expect (1.5 minutes) but good to see things improving.
The new LibreOffice is fairly good and I could create simple documents in it without much issues. However the biggest pain remains interoperability with MS Office. When I saved my .odt document as .doc there was visible ugliness in the formatting of the document. Bullets, for example, were changed to some other symbol than normal solid circles. Similar things happened when I opened .doc or .docx files using LibreOffice.
Mind you both the applications are very good for standalone use but interoperability of the formats remains pain in the neck. Microsoft obviously do not have any incentive to work on this aspect and in fact would do all in its capacity to hamper the same. And Open Source alternatives will always be on the losing side paying the catchup game.
So What are our options for this interoperability?
One way is to export the document to PDF format, which preserves the exact formatting on all the platforms.While this options works like a charm where we dont expect further updates to the document from the recipients (CVs etc), we have to look for alternatives for "collaborative editing".
From top of my mind I can think of using wiki or Google docs to edit online. I am also told that the Open Source software AbiWord, which is available on multiple platforms, seems to have a "collaborotion plugin" which allows us to edit documents simultaneously by multiple authors in real time.
Need to evaluate AbiWord. Added to the ToDo list. :)
The new LibreOffice is fairly good and I could create simple documents in it without much issues. However the biggest pain remains interoperability with MS Office. When I saved my .odt document as .doc there was visible ugliness in the formatting of the document. Bullets, for example, were changed to some other symbol than normal solid circles. Similar things happened when I opened .doc or .docx files using LibreOffice.
Mind you both the applications are very good for standalone use but interoperability of the formats remains pain in the neck. Microsoft obviously do not have any incentive to work on this aspect and in fact would do all in its capacity to hamper the same. And Open Source alternatives will always be on the losing side paying the catchup game.
So What are our options for this interoperability?
One way is to export the document to PDF format, which preserves the exact formatting on all the platforms.While this options works like a charm where we dont expect further updates to the document from the recipients (CVs etc), we have to look for alternatives for "collaborative editing".
From top of my mind I can think of using wiki or Google docs to edit online. I am also told that the Open Source software AbiWord, which is available on multiple platforms, seems to have a "collaborotion plugin" which allows us to edit documents simultaneously by multiple authors in real time.
Need to evaluate AbiWord. Added to the ToDo list. :)
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