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Comment by varikin | Hacker News Reader

I always wanted to support OpenOffice and then LibreOffice, but it has never been as good as Word. Sadly, the corporate world uses MS Office and that forces me to use Office. The compatibility for complex files are lacking. Formatting would regularly be screwed up in one or the other. I tried LibreOffice again a couple months ago and it crashed 4 times while trying to create one document. I have given up and lost hope in LibreOffice.

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I agree that LibreOffice has a long way to go. It is the only software I use that crashes regularly.

I haven't had it crash ever (that I remember). I am running it on windows XP and 7. Maybe I am lucky or are other OSes less stable?

I tried v3 on OS X when it came out, and got several crashes in a few hours. I went back to MS Office 2007, for the lack of something better, and haven't tried it eversince. I'm giving it a new shot right now (OS X 10.6 32bit).

Yep. In particular, "track changes". As soon as you have to collaborate on a document with a lawyer or a counterparty, track changes becomes a must-have.

I'm not quite as pessimistic. These are solvable problems. It's just taking a really long time.

In 2004/5 I had to collaborate with a windows shop and used some change tracking and other collaborative features without any problem. I sometimes feel like these compatibility troubles aren't as bad as people want them to be.

I opened a doc today where libre office would crash predictably once i scrolled past some page.

The whole office software system hasnt evolved much since frameworks on my brothers XT 25 years ago. By that i mean it is still as painful, it sure has more features now.

My migration away from Microsoft started in 2000 when I ditched MS Office 2000 for StarOffice. Word for instance constantly opened popups such as "Word can't find the serbo-croatian dictionary. would you want to install it?" while I was typing.

Please be kind and file an issue and provide the test-case. thank you.

http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/

Yes, it's a must-have, that's why it's been part of LibreOffice for quite a while: go to menu Edit > Changes > Record, or to review all the changes to the document use the "Accept or Reject" function. It's all there, isn't it? What is it with LibreOffice's change tracker that you don't like?

I think the issue is that it doesn't play well with Word's change tracker. But I could be wrong; my change tracker is diff(1).

Yes, exactly what ams6110 said. The change tracking just isn't compatible enough.

If you have a completely plain vanilla document -- no formatting, no line breaks, no headers, no footers, no tables, nothing -- then OpenOffice/LibreOffice's tracking is good enough. But documents are rarely that simple. And, unfortunately, your lawyer or VC or potential acquirer really isn't interested in discussions about document formats. They have better things to do, and they expect you to be able to communicate with them.

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