"The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0, the free office suite the community has been dreaming of since 2001. LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010: a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2009-08-05
).
Member since:2005-07-12
Your #2 really drives home a point too - since just what the blue blazes is LibreOffice, OoO and even the latest iterations of Microsoft Office doing on startup that say... Office 97 or 2000 doesn't? Or is even needed?
It's really sad to be rocking a quad core 3ghz hyperthreaded system with 16 gigs of RAM, only to have a 'modern' office suite that does NOTHING I find useful or better end up taking longer to start and be harder to use than StarOffice, Lotus Smartsuite or Microsoft Office was on Windows 98 a decade and a half ago on a crappy K6/2-450 with only 64 megs of RAM... and at least those versions offered improvements over their predecessors -- today the new 'functionality' is usually stupid garbage like dicking with toolbar arrangement and skins.
Yeah... I'm digging out my Office 97 disk... just have to remember that it screws with UAC on Win7.
Member since:2011-01-28
deathshadow,
"and at least those versions offered improvements over their predecessors -- today the new 'functionality' is usually stupid garbage like dicking with toolbar arrangement and skins."
Yep, often times things change for the sake of change rather than for the sake of improvement.
"Yeah... I'm digging out my Office 97 disk... just have to remember that it screws with UAC on Win7."
I happily used office 97 for a long time, nothing newer offered a compelling reason to upgrade. This was probably true for virtually all MSOffice users, but of course it always came down to compatibility problems forcing everyone to upgrade together.
Edit: As I recall, it was the last version of office which could be backed up and reinstalled by copying it's program files and wasn't dependent on an installer or the registry. Windows software maintenance was better in those days.
Edited 2013-02-09 07:04 UTC
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Member since:
2009-08-05
1) it's gratis.
2) at least it's somewhat less than 10x slower than Office 2000.
3) it does keming better than I can do by hand.
4) it usually doesn't crash when importing office documents.
5) it only sometimes hangs on copy/paste operations.
6) at least it's document formats are kinda sorta somewhat standardized (pay no attention to the ramblings of Morten Welinder!)
7) it can finally do first-page-special header/footers!
...only three to go, but I couldn't come up with more