On Wednesday 25 March 2026 11:13:02 Thierry de Coulon via tde-users wrote:
I don't think that you are wrong.
a) If OpenOffice works for you, no reason to change
b) Obviously LibreOffice works for some but not for you. This must mean that there are special conditions on your machine that don't work well with LO. On my machines, LO behaves correctly, is fast, has normal fonts, normal colors. It does however often change the layout of a document when changing software version, which is annoying.
I don't upgrade LO so often - unless there is some new feature that I would use. Why people pretend that you *have* to update a working program because there *might* be some vulnerability they can't even name is a mystery to me.
Thierry
Thank you.
For what it's worth, I never said that everybody ought to give up LibreOffice and move over to OpenOffice. I only suggested -- for those rare individuals, such as myself -- that, if LibreOffice isn't working as desired, maybe give OpenOffice a try.
That was my original intention when responding to the thread. Also, I didn't catch that it was about scalc (due to my old eyes), which I don't use any more, but did see that it was about LibreOffice. Last time I used the spreadsheet, it was in the original OpenOffice, before it died and was resurrected by Apache. (We really ought to abbreviate it as AOO, rather than just OO.)
Nowadays I play for the other side (the creative people), and the spreadsheet-users (the money and numbers people) are the ones who owe me money (a lot of it), but manage to find excuses for not paying me. But anyway, that was years ago, and I hardly expect to recoup my losses after all this time.
I don't imagine that LibreOffice would work any better for me as a spreadsheet, though.
As for *why* LibreOffice doesn't work for me (my settings, or whatever), I have a feeling that it is something to do with security; for example, that I block most programs from connecting to the internet in the background. I want to know what programs are connecting, and why, so that I can approve it.
Sometimes I get emails -- mostly from big corporations -- that do similar things to my machine. Everything suddenly comes to a halt, or while I am listening to online radio, it begins to stutter, because I have just tried to download an email. There is a public radio station here that I once called, and they got my email address, and now send me emails sometimes. Every time I get one of their emails, the same thing happens: my machine freezes, and I usually have to do a hard shutdown, then reboot, and any unsaved work is lost. I have learned to avoid such mishaps by previewing my emails in kshowmail, deleting whatever isn't strictly necessary, then download using kmail.
My hunch is that LibreOffice misbehaves for me for similar reasons: that something is trying to connect to the internet in the background. Another possibility is that LibreOffice puts things into different folders than OpenOffice, so when I tried to copy over my settings, they were not an exact match.
Also there is that "little" problem, where LibreOffice changes my layout ever so slightly, due to some different page metrics. I never managed to track down the cause of this issue, but it messes up a lot of my pages. It may only be a fraction of an inch difference, but it is enough to change my layout, so that lines get broken up, or what fit onto a single page now suddenly spills over onto another page. (It seems that LibreOffice is makes everything slightly larger.) I don't know if this is intentional on the part of the developers, but it's a deal breaker for me.
Some of my pages were created decades ago, and I have no wish to go through all my materials and change the layout on over forty years of work.
Just to make clear why this is a problem for me: I collect a lot of materials of various kinds (texts, graphics, diagrams, charts, etc.) from many different sources. I can never use all these materials within a single book, or it would be unreadable; but I want to have them available, so that I can cut and paste what I want to use. My materials are already formatted, so that I don't have to keep redoing the same work, again and again. It may be, too, that I can publish my notes and these other research materials in separate volumes, for those who are interested. But to be practical, to get it published, to get people to read it, I must be selective.
As I said, if LibreOffice works for other people, that's good. I am glad that it works for somebody. Again, it may be that the size of my documents is part of the problem. Earlier in this thread, Jim said that his largest document was 57 pages (if I recall aright); I have many documents that run to hundreds of pages. These are not finished chapters, books, or anything like that; they are just for research: my collections of passages culled from various texts, together with commentaries and notes, by myself and others, but arranged under general headings. If it were just a matter of breaking up into chapters, that wouldn't be a problem; but to keep related materials grouped together, under a general heading, is the easiest way for me to keep things in order.
Not only do I have larger documents, but I also have more of them, usually fifty or so open at any one time. Not all of these are files like that, though, research materials, hundreds of pages each; I also have other, shorter miscellaneous documents that I am working on, which have nothing to do with those bigger files.
In any case, my system is pretty fast, and rarely misbehaves. Most of my problems come from outside; for example, network issues, which are beyond my control.
It's true, I would like to see some better word processor; something better than both LibreOffice and OpenOffice. But for now, OpenOffice does what I need, with the fewest complications or issues.
Bill