[stroboskop]

You have to keep things in perspective.

LibreOffice does not look nice but it is functional. What is its main function? For many people, it has completely replaced Microsoft Office.

Of course MS Office has an even larger feature set, but few people max it out. Likewise, there are people who will prefer LaTeX but that's a small group. The advocates of web based office systems tend to ignore that desktop systems provide much more privacy. LibreOffice sits right in between those groups and is useful to many.

[unix-dude]

One thing that I particularly liked about Libre-Office is the fact that I can insert snippets of LaTeX when it is convenient.

Sure, not many people use this, but its nearly impossible to create some math in a word document that doesn’t look horrible.

Great project in my opinion. It has its quirks, but I've yet to find one that I could work-around with a few seconds of Googling.

[glazskunrukitis]

I think that there is a huge market for simplified office tools. Why don't we have standalone Google Docs for desktop? And I am not talking about a web app but a fully functional desktop one.

[anonymouz]

AbiWord seems to fit the niche of a lightweight word processor. That said, the advanced features of LibreOffice don't really get in the way if you don't use them and you can simply ignore them, so there seems little reason to develop a simplified office suite just for the sake of it.

[runn1ng]

I would much prefer 100% free (as-in-speech) Google Docs alternative.

I want to be able to install Google Docs-like application on my own server.

[drchaos]

There's a in-browser version of LibreOffice being worked on since quite some time (first announcement was in 2011[1]), but there's not much information online about the current status.

They have video[2] and a wiki page[3] which at least shows how to enable it (custom build required):

[1] http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/10/14/libreoffice-co...

[2] http://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2011-10-10-lool-demo.w...

[3] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Using_LibreOffice_in_a_W...

[jeffcutsinger]

There's always Feng Office. I can't speak to how fully featured or mature it is.

http://www.fengoffice.com/web/opensource/

[runn1ng]

This seems interesting, thanks for the pointer.

[pekk]

Why not just run an office suite locally if that is your requirement?

[Piskvorrr]

Not locally: I've seen many organizations admire the synchronization and collaboration features of GDocs, with a major caveat: the data is centralized in the cloud provider's hands, not the organization's. "Oh look, you don't own your data anymore" is a very theoretical scenario, but "oh look, you suddenly can't access your data anymore, we're not bringing them back, and you have no recourse" has happened with many cloud storage services, for various reasons.

Hosting your own network-based office web-app solution would be convenient for many...especially for the security.

[gcr]

If organizations rely on google docs so much, why don't they back up their google docs archive every {day,hour,minute} ? I'm sure there's an rsync for google docs or something.

Having to revert back to emailing saved word documents for a week or two is far better than losing everything for a week or two.

[runn1ng]

I don't want to run it locally.

I want to share docs with the internet, or with a small team, have integrated history, have instant editing, have the possibility of more people editing it. I want to have instant access to it from any computer with a browser.

Etherpad sort of does that, but not 100%.

[harshreality]

Except for continuous editing or live visibility of edits in progress, that's a lot like a wiki with wysiwyg editing. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WYSIWYG

You could probably extend wikis like mediawiki to have live visibility of edits, at the cost of performance. Separate db or redis storage for in-progress edits, and query that before retrieving the last static version of the page...

[Someone]

Reading http://www.zdnet.com/yes-you-can-use-the-new-chromebook-offl..., it seems the Chromebook tries to fit that market or at least one close to it.

[Someone]

On the other hand, for the typical westerner, "does not look nice but it is functional" does not cut it for other products, either. Even power drills aren't purely sold on functionality.

I certainly have some aversion against Libre Office because it does not look nice.

[cookiecaper]

I think it looks and works fine. "Looks nice" is a totally subjective argument that often leads to abominable design, a trend disguised as a function.

[Nux]

How does LO not look nice? What exactly is ugly about it? I used MS Office as well, I certainly don't find it beautiful. I think LO looks nice enough and is good enough and luckily I'm not alone believing this.

It has been many years since I stopped installing pirated MS Office suites on friends' computers and used OpenOffice and now LibreOffice instead. No complaints so far.

[Someone]

OK. Downloaded 4.0 to check it out. Some examples of what I find 'not nice' in half an hour or so of looking. None of them are showstoppers, but together, they give me the impression of "functional, but I have seen nicer":

Deviations from Mac OS style:

- application menu stays highlighted when preferences dialog is open.

- Does not use standard font and style dialogs => unnecessary learning curve; sharing styles with other applications does not seem possible.

- Does not use standard color dialogs => unnecessary learning curve; sharing palettes with other applications does not seem possible.

- Focus rectangles in dialogs even if that is disabled in system settings.

- OK button on the left, Cancel on the right.

- A setting for not aliasing screen fonts that are too small? Why not follow the system setting?

- Non-standard "Save changes before closing" dialogs: - weird shape (wide and very low) - incorrect order of buttons - non-standard button texts - non-standard 'Question' icon - extremely little room between button texts and button borders

- I expect 'Spell check' in the Edit menu, not in the Tools menu.

- "Page Setup" is missing. Instead, we have "Printer Settings"

General

- Focus rectangles look ugly (should not use dotted lines; dotted line is too close to the text)

- Spacing of lines in tree view in Preferences looks too small to me.

- Way too many settings (examples: a toggle for graphics antialiasing?)

- Why is this still combined as a single application?

- In the Tools-Customize dialog, menu separator lines are drawn using hyphens, not by drawing a line.

- Striped dialog backgrounds in a Mac App released in 2013?

- Help menu's "What's this?" item does not appear to do anything (its feedback is a pointer change, but that change does not happen if there is no window below the mouse. With large screens, it is easy to get there (say when having a HN reply window side by side with a LibreOffice window)

- Help menu has 5 menu items and 3 separator lines.

- Try spell-checking an empty document. Dialog opens, immediately an alert pops up "The spellcheck of this sheet has been completed." If you click OK, both the alert and the spell check dialog close.

- When you make row height lower, row numbers should, at some stage, start using a smaller font. They don't.

[Gormo]

I agree that LibreOffice may deviate significantly from OS-native UI conventions, but this is reasonable given its nature as a cross-platform project based on highly-portable OS-independent libraries. And there are plenty of applications that target particular platforms, but employ their own set of custom UI conventions; some are worse than the platform standards, some are better. It's the usability of the application's own set of conventions, and the consistency therein, that should be the basis of judgment; using the OS's stylistic defaults as the benchmark seems relatively arbitrary, especially, again, for a cross-platform application.

I don't know how it compares to iWork, but when I compare LibreOffice to Microsoft Office on the basis of internal consistency, parsimony (for lack of a better term), and even adherence to established platform conventions (on Windows), LibreOffice wins on all counts. With each new version of Office, Microsoft adds yet more UI novelties to its haphazard collection of product-specific menu styles, dialog boxes, and toolbars.

[gruuby]

But have you seen nicer without paying money for it? I think the little nags you presented don't outweigh the price you have to pay for MS Office. Not for me anyway.

[mynameisvlad]

That's a bad road to go down, though. We shouldn't be content with it looking okay just because it's free.

[xtracto]

Care to elaborate why?

I mean, this is a program, of which a lot of people put a lot of effort and which works pretty well. These people are making the program available for free no strings attached for anyone who wants to download it.

I understand that your personal tastes are too refined for the software, but for a lot of people, having this fully functional and free office suite is a great help.

Or as they say around here "A caballo dado, no se le ve colmillo".

[Someone]

I don't have MS Office, but I did buy Numbers, Pages, and Keynote, knowing well that OpenOffice (at the time, LibreOffice did not exist yet) is free and would likely handle many files better. I also do use LibreOffice, but only when I must.

[Gormo]

> LibreOffice does not look nice but it is functional.

That's an entirely subjective judgment. I happen to think that LibreOffice looks much better than MS Office 2010, especially when considering visual design as a functional rather than a merely decorative quality. Full-screen file menus are ugly and disorienting.

> Of course MS Office has an even larger feature set, but few people max it out.

OTOH, there are features in MS Office that really are useful and aren't well-represented by equivalent features in LibreOffice. Pivot tables in Excel, for example; not everyone may use them, but for those who do, Excel unfortunately has no credible competition.