UK Cabinet Office Signals Move Towards Open Source Office Suites

> It was ten years ago that the CIO of Massachusetts rattled the desktop world by endorsing ODF

My goodness... Was it ten years already? Seems like yesterday :)

Indeed it was. I wonder where Peter Quinn is now?

Quinn? Where is he now? Under house arrest with the rumor being MS is footing the security bill.

As always,

YBT (for those not in the know, a.k.a. YBT === "Your Buddy Txt.")

Here you go Bob.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/peter-quinn/6/996/121

Warning: Politics ;-)

Quoting: Here you go Bob.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/peter-quinn/6/996/121

Warning: Politics ;-)

"Very strong regulatory experience" indeed. That's so ironic, it hurts.

> Warning: Politics ;-)

I, for one, welcome our new Redmond overlords.

Last night, I wanted to print a .xlsx spreadsheet sent to me. I opened it in LibreOffice, it opened just fine. I selected the tab I wanted to print, and wanted to see the "print preview".

It showed 4 pages, numbered 0,1,2,3. When I printed it, only the first three were printed.

I cannot say that this was a xlsx vs ODF conflict. What I can say is that this is the kind of piddling little stuff that makes LibreOffice look bad.

I hope you filed a bug report.

We end users can contribute to the improvement of Free Software by reporting issues as soon as we notice them. In my experience, completely described bug reports are quickly fixed and we are all winners.

Penguinist, it would be a waste of time. I'm using Debian Stable, it's not the latest version.

I agree, not only are bugs fixed quickly, and publicly, but there is no "expense" to upgrading to the latest version at any time, unlike the proprietary office suites.

My biggest problem with LibreOffice these days is that the data charts it produces in general just look awful compared to what Microsoft Excel and even Google Docs produces by default.

Anyone know of a way to get decent looking ones produced by LibreOffice?

@Bob_R: You can load in the latest LibreOffice just fine on Debian Stable. The worst that can happen is having to tear out the "desktop integration" (menu entries etc) of the currently-loaded version to make room, and that's only if you're doing an in-major_point-upgrade. I have versions 3.6 and 4.2 both loaded on my Sparky machine, and intend to keep it that way (because v4.x has all the new shiny but it drops support for Word6 which recruiters still dote on last I checked). The procedure is simple: download and unpack the tarballs, run sudo dpkg -i *.deb on all the just-exposed packages, and you're done. Last I checked, this even works on my comfy old Mepis8.0 machine from back when Stable meant Debian 5.

@cr:

Where does that install the new packages?

In opt? Or scattered through the regular file system? Do you need to fiddle with update-alternatives?

@BS:

Both "imported" branches of LO reside in /opt. No idea on update-alternatives as I haven't had occasion to dig that deep into Debian package mechanics. I have assumed that, when a new update comes out, I'll repeat the process (and maybe tear out some desktop-integration in so doing).

@cr: Thanks.