I want/need to install one of the"Offices". Does anyone have any thoughts on which?

I believe that Libre is a Beta, and I'm leaning towards that. But my big concern is good compatibility with Windows.

Thanks,
Dave

Dave,
I don't have any experience with LibreOffice. I do have a fair amount of experience with OpenOffice. OOwriter behaves very well and can open windows document relatively well. I've had problems with .docx files, particularly forms, in that OO will often not correctly see/interpret the macros, and the formatting, or the form functionality is messed up.

In terms of other components, the OpenOffice Excel seems to work fine, and does OOImpress (the powerpoint counterpart).

P.S. I found this link that you might be interested in, since it discusses LibreOffice/OpenOffice and the docx problems.


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just this morning I had a problem with my OO (3.3) not opening properly a docx file and messing up formatting and an embedded picture. Maybe LibreOffice does a better job at this.

I hope this helps.

Dave

I have used both. Changed to LO after the split. LO does everything OO does, and somethings better. In the long run OO is dead now it is owned by the big ¨O¨. Just my 2 cents worth.

Shaun

Shaun,

You may be right, and it's probably better to stick to LO. Unfortunately, LO is not in the stable repos. I would be willing to try it but I'm concerned about how many other things it might pull in from testing, since I'm running a purely stable system.

Pedro

As a follow up, I went ahead and installed LibreOffice in my stable system using the instructions for Debian as listed here,


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The good news is that the installation worked, LO seems to work and I did not mess up my stable system. The bad news, is that LO has the same problem with .docx files as OO: embedded picture does not show up, some formatting is messed up. So, I was disappointed. Maybe there will be a fix for this problem soon.

plvera wrote:As a follow up, I went ahead and installed LibreOffice in my stable system using the instructions for Debian as listed here,


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The good news is that the installation worked, LO seems to work and I did not mess up my stable system. The bad news, is that LO has the same problem with .docx files as OO: embedded picture does not show up, some formatting is messed up. So, I was disappointed. Maybe there will be a fix for this problem soon.

Pedro

I am not having any problems with .docx Can you give me a little more info, maybe I can help.

Best Regards
Shaun

Shaun,

It's a .docx file done by a coworker under Mac Os. It had an embedded picture (jpeg) and text wrapped around it. Either OO or LO opened it with a small blank rectangle box placed at the upper left hand side of the page and no picture was displayed. I had an accompanying pdf and I could tell there was a picture in the original file and the location of the picture.

I tried running the odf-converter (a suggestion I found in some webpage but it seems dated) and that gave worse results. .Doc files do not seem to be a problem, but it appears that MS has added something to the new Office with the .docx extension that presents a problem., I googled the problem and I don't seem to be the only one.l

thanks for the offer to help.

Pedro

Microsoft. __{{emoticon}}__

I just recently received a document in .docx form, apparently created with a fairly recent edition of Microsoft Office. I happened to be on Windows 7 at the time, and I did NOT pay to get a copy of Microsoft Office, but I had run Open Office there in the past when I had a copy of Windows Vista installed. On my newer OS, I had no office suite, so I grabbed Libre Office. It had no trouble at all reading the Word document in .docx format. I sent the same document to my Linux system and was able to read it fine with Libre Office there too.

As of three or four days ago, Debian Sid now has Libre Office 3.3.1-1 available, so hopefully it isn't too far away from being available in Debian Testing. IF you decide you want to get Libre Office, there are a couple of ways to do it. The Libre Office site has Debian .deb packages available, which they'll package in a compressed tar archive that you can download, uncompress and untar, then you can install all of the .deb packages. That's a bit cumbersome, but it works.

If you are somewhat versed in the use of Debian packaging, add the Sid repository, run apt-get update, then install the Libre Office packages, then, if you don't want other packages from Sid, comment out the Sid line, and maybe enable it once a month to check for Libre Office updates. Hopefully it won't be too long and it'll get included into Testing, then this exercise won't be needed. If you do use this approach, just be careful NOT to keep Sid enabled UNLESS you are sure that is what you want.

The install-meta app in antiX is now set to install LibreOffice rather than OpenOffice. Let's hope LibreOffice makes it into Testing soon.

anticapitalista wrote:The install-meta app in antiX is now set to install LibreOffice rather than OpenOffice. Let's hope LibreOffice makes it into Testing soon.

Great! Then the two hacks that I presented above are not necessary! I am going to grab another antiX ISO image and put it through its paces to double check that all is well, but I've had nothing but great success throughout our testing cycle; very little to report on my end - and that's a GOOD THING! __{{emoticon}}__

I haven't uploaded the latest iso with changes yet. Also, for LibreOffice to install via meta-installer, the sid repos need to be enabled. Not perfect, but that is why I hope LO comes to Testing asap.

anticapitalista wrote:I haven't uploaded the latest iso with changes yet. Also, for LibreOffice to install via meta-installer, the sid repos need to be enabled. Not perfect, but that is why I hope LO comes to Testing asap.

OK then. That still sounds like a useful tool to me, even if it is an interim stop gap solution. Like you, I'd like to see Libre Office make it to Testing soon. The packages seem to be fine. Maybe it will happen soon; I hope so!

Thanks for your suggestions and help everyone. I too look forward to LibreOffice getting to testing.
Dave