Anyone else have any feedback on Softmaker? I'm curious about it.
Printable View
That's exactly what I have done for my own personal files. ;)
I do that because on one computer, I use LO, and on another computer I have to use MSO.
For one thing, once you export to pdf, you can't edit it anymore.
But why would someone want to save in an MS format? Because most of the rest of the world uses MS Office. If I only cared about myself, odf would be fine. But anyone who ever wants to share with most other people actually needs MS formats.
Then save in MSO 2003, everyone with MSO should be able to open and edit them.Why go to an even more restricted format unnecessarily and then complain that LO doesn't have good compatibility? It is not really LO's responsibility to be compatible with MircoSoft's closed formats.
I've just completed a degree and am now doing honours and have used ONLY Open/Libreoffice throughout with the Zotero plugin for references (that's nearly six years now). Problem free. I can do everything I ever did in Word/Office. Suits my purposes but perhaps not for everyone's. ;)
wife wrote an e-book in old ms word 2003. we then moved it into libre since it has better support for certain things (for example PDF export made a much smaller file). at firts we considered moving it to word 2007 or 2010, but libre was a better choice.
anyway...
KOffice branched of into what is now Caligra suite. http://www.calligra-suite.org/
Caligra still has issues with some spreadsheets and its database, but development is going fast, bugs are being patched. interface is a bit different than libre and is ment to be more simplistic and show/use functions most users need.
there was a review in Distrowacth - but they fixed quite a few things since then and some new stuff added: http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20120430
edit: there is also web based office software: such as Office 365 and Google Docs/Drive/Office whatever :-)
I fear that's part of MS' DNA. It's rather humorous though that MSO file formats have problems between recent issues but WordPerfect files more recent than 6.0 (I think) can switch between versions with NO issues provided a feature is supported in a given version. It's a good thing the technically superior products always triumph:rolleyes:. Not that WordPerfect doesn't have its issues (Unicode support, for one). But I suspect if 5% of the R&D $ that have gone into MSWord had gone into WordPerfect and MS were honest, the word processor landscape might be different.
That's probably true. Do you remember when MS Office was given away for free when you bought Windows? Free, even if it's less than perfect is pretty compelling and a good way to build a user base. Plus, the O.S. and office suite were from the same company so there were less finger pointing opportunities when things made smoking holes.
I believe that they were unbundled because of competitor's in the Office marketplace brought suit for anti-competitive practices. The same as Netscape did when IE was bundled with Windows.
I had lots of compatibility issues between LibreImpress and Power Point. No later than last week, I saved my lecture in odt format at home, then opened it at work for the lecture with Power Point and 3/4th of the slides did not show up...Exporting as PDF works fine, but no editing is a huge problem when you are involved in a collaborative process.