Forget Chromebooks: Chrome OS is Coming to Windows

Google didn’t announce any shiny new Chromebooks at Google I/O. Instead, they highlighted their two big “platforms” — Chrome and Android. Whether you’re using Windows, Linux, or Mac, Google will be bringing the Chrome OS experience to you.
Chrome has always been Google’s vision of the browser-as-operating-system. They’re about to take it to the next level, using Chrome to provide apps that run outside the browser on desktops and laptops. Google wants to slowly turn your Windows laptop into a Chromebook.

Introducing Packaged Apps

If you have looked in the Chrome Web Store, you’ll know that most current Chrome “apps” are links to websites. For example, the Netflix app is just a link to Netflix, and the Evernote app is a link to Evernote’s website. Install an app, and you’ll get a large icon for it on your new tab page, but that’s about it.
However, Google is about to change the definition of an “app.” This change hasn’t rolled out to everyone yet, but it’s currently on Chrome’s developer channel. Everything currently in the Chrome Web Store will move to the new “Websites” category. The main “Apps” section will only contain new packaged apps.
A packaged app is a web app put into an offline package containing HTML, JS, and other web technologies — but no Flash content. Packaged apps will run entirely offline by default and will sync with the cloud. Packaged apps will even run in their own windows, outside of the browser.

Chrome as a Platform on Your OS

When you install a packaged app, Chrome will offer to display a Chrome OS-like “Chrome App Launcher” on your Windows taskbar. (This works similarly on Mac and Linux, but is currently in development.) This launcher will display your installed packaged apps and allow you to quickly launch them. When you launch one, it will appear in its own window on your desktop, complete with its own taskbar entry.

This acts as a sort of Chrome-only Start menu — Microsoft has removed their Start menu from your Windows taskbar and Chrome wants to take its place. The Chrome Web Store can evolve to function as a sort of app store for cross-platform, offline-enabled web apps that run on every PC operating system.
To clarify the difference between packaged apps and “old” website apps, a shortcut icon will be placed over all the old apps that are just shortcuts to websites.

Example Packaged Apps

You can actually install these packaged apps on the current stable version of Chrome today, assuming you have direct links to the apps — they won’t appear in searches yet. Current packaged apps include an offline text editor with syntax highlighting, a Cut the Rope Game, the Any.DO to-do app, Google Keep note-taking app, and more. These apps all function entirely offline and can sync when you go online. They run in their own and can support touch input, so they could work on a touch-enabled Chromebook or just in Chrome on a touch-enabled Windows laptop.
Use enough packaged apps and your Windows desktop will start to look an awful lot like a Chrome OS system. Packaged apps can use all of Chrome’s advanced browser features, from NaCL for running native code to WebGL for 3D graphics.

Chromebooks in 10 Years

Google is happy to keep selling Chromebooks for schools, businesses, and as second, third, or even fourth devices for people that want a simple web-browsing gadget to play with. But they’re not trying to position the Chromebook against Windows and Mac laptops for everyone — not yet. There’s a reason the Chromebook Pixel’s tagline is “For What’s Next.”
Google wants you to start using packaged apps in preference to desktop and Modern apps. Developers will have an incentive to create these packaged apps because they’ll work on every operating system and they can be created with web technologies — and unlike Microsoft’s Modern apps, they can integrate with the traditional Windows desktop workflow and taskbar.
This gives Chrome users a path for gradually switching to packaged apps that will work on Chrome OS. Google won’t need to care if you’re using a Chromebook — if you’re using a Windows computer and use mostly Chrome packaged apps, they’ll be happy.
As people switch to more and more packaged apps on Windows and Mac, a Chromebook will eventually start to make more sense — why not get a Chromebook once you start using Chrome packaged apps exclusively on your Windows or Mac laptop, anyway? A Chromebook is much more simple, so it’s a no-brainer if you only use packaged apps.

---

You’ll find packaged apps appearing as the only “Apps” in the Chrome Web Store as soon as this feature reaches Chrome’s stable channel. The websites section will remain, providing a way of discovering web apps.

Source: http://www.howtogeek.com/164257/forget-chromebooks-chrome-os-is-coming-to-windows/

SoftMaker FreeOffice Review-PCMag

MSRP
$0.00

• Pros
  Free, fast, efficient office suite with all basic features. Clear, traditional interface. Effective import and export of Microsoft formats, including password-protected files.
• Cons Lacks mail-merge (form-letter) features needed by small businesses. Spreadsheets lack modern graphic features. Limited presentations features.
• Bottom Line
  FreeOffice is faster than its free competitor LibreOffice but not as powerful overall; on the other hand, it has some Microsoft-Office-like features that LibreOffice can't match.

By Edward Mendelson Unless you live in Germany, where SoftMaker has a long-established and respected presence, you may never have heard of SoftMaker FreeOffice or its commercial big brother SoftMaker Office 2012. But SoftMaker's compact, powerful, and sleek application suite feels right at home in the English-speaking world, and the price of FreeOffice—free, as in FreeOffice—makes it especially attractive. Compared to its main freeware rival, LibreOffice, Softmaker FreeOffice can't compete on advanced features, but I prefer the FreeOffice interface, and FreeOffice is the only free office suite that displays documents as I want them displayed. More about that in a moment, but first I'll cover some basics about the suite as a whole.

•  

FreeOffice Basics
SoftMaker gives away FreeOffice partly as an advertisement for its commercial suite. FreeOffice consists of the three basic office apps: TextMaker, a word-processor; PlanMaker, a spreadsheet app; and SoftMaker Presentations. The $79.95 commercial suite adds a programming language similar to Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications; a $99.95 Professional version adds an Outlook 2013 work-alike. All three apps in the free version do an impressive job of importing Microsoft Office document.


Unlike LibreOffice, FreeOffice can open password-protected Microsoft Office documents if you know the password, and this feature alone is a good reason for installing FreeOffice on a USB stick so you can open your password-protected documents on someone else's computer. (The standard installation includes a Start Menu item that installs a "portable" version on a thumb drive.) Like LibreOffice, FreeOffice opens legacy WordPerfect documents—a major plus for law and government offices that typically have thousands of files in WordPerfect format.
I was pleasantly surprised by FreeOffice's speed. Complicated Microsoft Office documents that opened with painful slowness in LibreOffice opened instantly in FreeOffice –including multipage worksheets and a 400-page Word document. All basic formatting features imported perfectly, but you can't expect perfection with advanced features. For example, when I used PlanMaker to open an Excel worksheet that uses Excel's fancy conditional formatting to color-code data, PlanMaker warned me that some conditional formatting would be lost—and indeed it was. Any formatting lost on import into FreeOffice will be lost forever if you save the file after editing, so make sure you know what you're doing when saving an imported Office file. (LibreOffice does a better job with Excel's conditional formatting and other graphic features.)
LibreOffice comes in versions for Windows, Linux, and OS X, with tablet versions coming later this year. FreeOffice runs on Windows only, but the commercial SoftMaker Office runs on Windows, Linux, and Android, and an older 2010 version runs on Windows Mobile and even the ancient Windows CE mobile platform—the only full-featured office suites for mobile Windows platforms.


FreeOffice's interface looks a lot like Microsoft Office 2003, with the traditional top-line menu and toolbars, and with bright and clear icons that make it easy to find what you're looking for. One icon I was glad to see was a PDF icon that saves the current document in PDF format without long detours to the menu, as in other major suites. The only major annoyance is the lack of a "live" word count, forcing you to click a button on a "Statistics" toolbar to see how many words are in your document.


Making Text With TextMaker
TextMaker impressed me most with its document-viewing options. In addition to the usual page view, which shows headers, page numbers, footers, and top and bottom margins, TextMaker has a "continuous" view, which displays only the main content of the page, without headers and footers, and with page breaks indicated only by a faint line across the page. This is the view I prefer to work in, because it shows me how my text will look on the page, but doesn't break up the text at the top and bottom of every page—and TextMaker is one of very few word-processors that offer it. (The others are Microsoft Word for Windows—not the version for OS X—and Corel WordPerfect.) LibreOffice doesn't have a "continuous" view, only a web view, which doesn't show the actual margins and font that your document will have when it prints, and that's too little formatting for me to feel comfortable with.




TextMaker offers most of the advanced features you'll find in Word, but with some significant exceptions. You can insert footnotes or endnotes, but not both, as you can in Word. If you want to create cross-references, or use mail-merge to create form letters, you'll need to buy the commercial SoftMaker Office, not the free version. The free version has limited graphic capabilities compared to the commercial version—for example, you can't apply shadows, and graphic shapes are limited to printing with 300 dpi resolution. None of these restrictions will affect anyone who creates basic documents, but advanced students and scientists may want to look elsewhere.


Spreadsheets and Presentations
PlanMaker opened my sample Excel worksheets smoothly, but this is an app best suited for basic data manipulations. You won't find anything like Excel's zero-effort pivot tables that reorganize your views of your data with a few clicks, but you do get filtering options for tables, which accomplishes the same thing with a bit more effort. Conditional formatting has to be built by hand, without the gallery of elegant color-coding and other graphic features that Excel and LibreOffice. Charting is adequate but not dazzling.
SoftMaker Presentations gives you enough features to get basic presentations built, and does a good job of importing uncomplex PowerPoint files, but look elsewhere if you want to put together a presentation that's visually memorable instead of something that looks as if was left over from the last millennium.




Fast and Free
Don't be misled by my focus on the limits of FreeOffice. This suite is fast, effective, and, overall, extremely well-designed. For the vast majority of users, FreeOffice does everything you need in an office suite, and does it more quickly and intuitively than LibreOffice, though LibreOffice is, overall, more powerful and up-to-date. If you want the state-of-the-art, you'll choose Microsoft Office, but SoftMaker FreeOffice has plenty to offer for anyone who wants solidly functional apps and doesn't want to pay for them.

You can get Softmaker Free Office 2012 here:

http://www.freeoffice.com/


Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2419014,00.asp

Softmaker Office: A MS-Office Alternative

I recently tried Softmaker's Planmaker 2012 and Textmaker 2012 which are viable cheaper alternatives to the expensive MS-Office 2010. The Standard is $79.95 and the Professional is $99.95. They also offer a 30 day trial version to get the look and feel of it before you buy. Below are my screenshots and a link to the developer's website.

SoftMaker Office 2012. Your new office suite.

Choose SoftMaker Office 2012 as your office suite, and you will get the job done in less time and with better results. SoftMaker Office is reliable, powerful, fast, and easy to use.

Compatible with Microsoft Office 2010, 2007, 2003, and more.

To be useful in the real world, an office suite needs to be compatible with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.
SoftMaker Office 2012 fills this requirement competently: It not only works seamlessly with the old Microsoft Office formats DOC, XLS, and PPT, but also faithfully reads and writes files in the new DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats that have been introduced with Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010.
You will not find any other office suite that renders documents in all these Microsoft Office formats as faithfully as SoftMaker Office 2012.



Planmaker 2012

Every day there's some reckoning to do: whether in balancing a checkbook, drafting a budget, doing a sales forecast, creating a comprehensive financial model, or comparing mortgage offers.
PlanMaker 2012 handles such tasks reliably and with ease. More than 330 built-in functions are available to perform date and time, mathematical, statistical and financial calculations and to do data analysis.
The AutoFilter and Special filter help you manage huge data sets. Data grouping, like a word processor's outline view, hides the details and lets you see the big picture.
"What if" questions can be answered by using the scenario manager, which lets you test the effects that various values will have on the results of your calculations.
If a mistake is hiding somewhere in your calculations, syntax highlighting and the formula auditing wizard help you quickly find the place where things went wrong.
PlanMaker 2012 reads and writes Excel worksheets seamlessly, in both XLS and XLSX formats, ensuring trouble-free data exchange with all versions of Excel from 5.0 to 2010.

Textmaker 2012

Not only for your personal correspondence...
You write letters or short notes every day. You're always in a hurry; everything needs to be ready now. For that, you need a word processor that takes the labour out of routine tasks:

• When you write a letter with TextMaker, you don't have to type in the recipient's address by hand. TextMaker simply inserts it from its built-in address book.
• TextMaker checks your spelling while you are typing, marking typos with a red underline. This is not limited to English: TextMaker supports spell checking in 20 languages, even Russian and Arabic.
• Do you need an envelope for your letter? TextMaker comes with an envelope wizard that frees you from having to measure and position the address and sender fields.
• Would you rather send your letter by e-mail? Not a problem either. TextMaker creates a PDF file and offers to send it by e-mail.

Softmaker home page: http://www.softmaker.com/english/index_en.htm

Best free Microsoft Office alternatives: 5 suites to save you money

In Depth Don't want to pay for Office 2013? Then take a look at these

By Mike Williams  March 21st

• 
  

SoftMaker FreeOffice offers a free word processor, spreadsheet and presentation builder

Microsoft Office 2013 is out, and there's no doubt it has plenty of interesting features. But if you don't like the price, the more restrictive licence, or the new subscription option (which means you'll pay a fee every year), then you might prefer to check out some of the free Microsoft Office alternatives.
One option is to use a web-based package. This allows you to work on your documents anywhere, from many different devices, and is great for collaboration with others.
But there can also be annoying limits on file sizes; there are security issues with storing sensitive documents in the cloud; and of course if your internet connection goes down then you won't be able to access your files at all.
Still, the web approach works very well for many people, and if you're interested then Google Docs, Zoho, and - ironically - even Microsoft's Office Web Apps have plenty to offer.
But if you prefer a regular desktop solution, then don't worry, there are plenty around - and we've found five candidates to consider.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Apache OpenOffice

Apache OpenOffice is a powerful open source suite which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, vector graphics editor, database manager and mathematical equation editor.
The package is generally easy to use. An OpenOffice.org tool acts as a central launcher, and includes wizards to help you create a new letter, presentation and so on.

The applications themselves look and feel much like the pre-ribbon Microsoft Office (they will open most Office documents, too, although the original formatting isn't always preserved).
One problem is that disagreements over the direction of OpenOffice have resulted in many developers leaving the project, and starting the rival LibreOffice. It's not clear how OpenOffice will progress in future, then, but right now it's still a capable suite.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2. LibreOffice

A recent spinoff from OpenOffice, LibreOffice still looks much the same. There's a similar launch screen, and the same core features (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and so on), which look and feel like their OpenOffice equivalents.

There are lots of smaller tweaks, though: improved file format compatibility (including support for all Visio files from 1.0 through to 2013); support for Firefox themes to customise the interface; better template management; colour scales in spreadsheets, a status bar word count in Writer, and so on.
Nothing revolutionary, but LibreOffice is at least making progress, and at the moment it's outperforming OpenOffice.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3. SSuite Office

If power is your top priority, then SSuite Office probably isn't the program for you. It's more like Office 2003 than 2013, the core applications are relatively limited, and they can't handle OpenXML files (Microsoft's DOCX, XLSX and so on).

For a less demanding audience, though, it could be a different story. The program is easy to use, its word processor and spreadsheet are quite capable of doing useful work, and it also comes with an array of bonus extras: an email client, graphics editor, web browser, security software, media player, formula editor, image viewer, various network tools, even a few games (they're mostly very limited, but still fun to explore).
If you're just looking for something relatively simple then SSuite Office could prove interesting.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4. Kingsoft Office 2012

Kingsoft Office 2012 is a fraction of the size of other suites, yet still has the three core tools most people need: a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation creator.
Each of these has a browser-like tabbed interface, making it easy to open multiple documents.

There are lots of attractive templates, Paragraph handling is convenient, an encryption feature helps to keep sensitive documents safe from snoopers, and perhaps most importantly, the program is better at importing Office documents than most of the competition.
It's also only free for personal use, though, and there's no doubt that LibreOffice has more features (vector editing, database management and so on). But if you're a home user just looking for the basics then Kingsoft Office 2012 could be ideal.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

5. SoftMaker FreeOffice

SoftMaker FreeOffice is another essentials-only suite, offering a word processor ('TextMaker'), spreadsheet ('PlanMaker') and presentation builder ('Presentations'). These are well-designed and easy to use, though, with a comfortable and familiar interface.

Microsoft Office documents are generally imported very well, each application can export documents to PDF, and although you don't get a dedicated graphics tool, TextMaker has plenty of drawing and image tweaking features.
Overall, SoftMaker FreeOffice is a quality tool, and worth a look if you don't need all the LibreOffice extras.

Source: http://www.techradar.com/us/news/software/applications/best-free-microsoft-office-alternatives-5-suites-to-save-you-money-1139295

How To Edit PDF Files In Office Word 2013

Portable Document Format, popularly known as PDF, is supported on all major desktop operating systems as well as mobile operating systems. Plenty of free and paid apps available for computers as well as smartphones to view, create, and edit PDFs.

The main advantage of PDF is that you can convert almost any document type or picture format to PDF so that other users can also view the file on their computers or mobiles, without worrying about the file type. For instance, if you have a Word document and want to open the same Word document on a PC without Office suite, you can covert the Word document to PDF format and then open it with the help of any PDF viewer.

To help Windows users view PDFs without having to the install third-part tools, Microsoft has incorporated PDF support in Windows 8 as well. You can open PDF files with the help of native Reader app or install the official Adobe Reader app.

Microsoft Office, the most popular office software in the world, received PDF file support in Office 2007 (requires an add-on). As you may know, Office 2010 not only supports PDF out of the box (requires no add-on) but also supports saving documents in PDF format. Microsoft has improved the PDF support in Office 2013 and it now allows you edit PDF files as well.

Users who have installed Office 2013 can use it to open, create, and edit PDF without having to install third-party software.

Please note you can’t use Office 2013 to edit PDF files that have been write protected or files with read-only attribute. Also note that Office 2013 isn’t as powerful as some third-party PDF editing software and doesn’t offer all the features that you get in some third-party PDF editing tools.

Follow the below mentioned instructions to open and edit PDF files in Office 2013:

Step 1: Right-click on the PDF file that you would like to edit using Office Word 2013, click Open with option, and then select Word (desktop) to open it in Word 2013.

Step 2: You will see a dialog box with a message saying “Word will first convert your PDF to an editable Word document. The resulting Word document will be optimized to allow you edit the text, so it might not look exactly like the original PDF, especially if the original file contained lots of graphics.”

Click Ok button to continue opening the file in Word 2013.

Step 3: Upon opening the file, if the PDF file is downloaded from the web, a small message appears at the upper side of the screen with “Be careful—files from the Internet can contain viruses. Unless you need to edit, it’s safely to stay in Protected View.” Click the Enable Editing button next to the warning message to begin editing your PDF file.

Step 4: Once editing is completed, click File, click Save as button to save the file in PDF, Word, or RTF format. Please note that since Word first coverts the PDF to editable Word document before actually opening the file, you can’t actually save the changes to the existing PDF file. That is, when you press Ctrl + S hotkey or click Save button you’ll see the Save as dialog box.

So if you get “We can’t save this file because it’s ready-only. To keep your changes, you’ll need to save the document with a new name or in a different location.” message, please try saving the PDF with a different name or save the file in Word or XPS format.

 

Filed in: Microsoft Office
Tagged with: Office 2013

Source: http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-edit-pdf-file-in-office-word-2013/

Kingsoft Office Suite Review - Free MS-Office Compatible Office Suite

By Matthew Nawrocki

February 16, 2012, 1:24 PM PST

Takeaway: Kingsoft Office is designed to cater to the Microsoft Office crowd with its familiar-looking user interface and improved Office format support.

If you thought OpenOffice and LibreOffice were the epitome of free office suites, think again. Kingsoft Office is a truly underrated product that deserves a good look.

System requirements

• Operating systems: Windows XP, Vista, and 7
• Cost: $0 for Free Version, $49.95 for Standard, $69.95 for Professional
• Acquisition: Downloadable
• More Info: http://kingsoftstore.com

Comparison chart — courtesy of Kingsoft Office

Courtesy of Kingsoft Office

Over in the Microsoft Office Blog on TechRepublic, we are asking a simple poll question: How many are still using Office 2003? Take the poll and share your thoughts.

Who’s it for?

Kingsoft Office is for anyone who wants to write documents, generate spreadsheets, and create presentations without spending exorbitant amounts of money for expensive office suite applications.

What problem does it solve?

Unlike most free office programs, Kingsoft Office is designed to cater to the Microsoft Office crowd with its familiar-looking user interface and improved Microsoft Office format support.

Standout features

• The free version packs a punch: Despite the lack of support for some advanced features like VBA and macros, Kingsoft Office performs surprisingly well against the competition, yet it isn’t a memory or CPU hog.
• Excellent Microsoft Office format support: Kingsoft Office is able to create document files compatible with MS Office 2003. It can even pull off read-only support for reading MS Office 2007 and 2010 files without a hitch.
• Familiar user interface: Anyone who remembers MS Office 2003 will feel right at home and will instantly come to recognize the strikingly similar attributes to the window layout. (See the images on page 2)
• Smaller install size: At least with the free version, the installation clocked in at roughly 100MB, which is considerably compact, compared to its heftier counterparts.

What’s wrong?

• No real compelling reason to get a paid version: Since most folks aren’t going to use a macro system or any kind of scripting, paying for the Standard or Professional editions of Kingsoft Office might be a bit overkill.
• Cannot save documents in Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 format: For many casual users, not being able to save files in the 2007 or 2010 formats is a nonissue. But if you need to not only read but edit and save the latest formats as well, it would be best to consider buying the Microsoft product.

Competitive products

• OpenOffice
• LibreOffice
• Microsoft Office 2010

The bottom line

If you are looking for the ultimate free office suite for Windows, look no further. Experience document creation and manipulation as it was intended, without breaking the bank in the process.

Takeaway: Kingsoft Office is designed to cater to the Microsoft Office crowd with its familiar-looking user interface and improved Office format support.

You can get Kingsoft Office here:

http://www.kingsoftstore.com/office/download-office

Source: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/window-on-windows/review-kingsoft-office-suite/5722

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About Matthew Nawrocki

An avid technology writer and an IT guru, Matthew is here to help bring the best in software, hardware and the web to the collective consciousness of TechRepublic's readership. In addition to writing for TechRepublic, Matthew currently works as a Customer Success Professional for Ultimate Software in Santa Ana, California.

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LibreOffice v4 Review - Free MS-Office Compatible Office Suite

LibreOffice 4 review - Getting better but ...

Updated: February 22, 2013
Just a few days ago, LibreOffice 4 was released. As you know, this is an important milestone, both technically and historically. Since the split from OpenOffice, managed by Oracle, LibreOffice has quickly grown to become the dominant open-source office suite, and has completely pushed away OpenOffice from the spotlight. Moreover, this latest version brings a whole bunch of good things.
In my last review, I did opine some skepticism about what LibreOffice is all about, although it did what was expected from it. Let us see how things have changed in the last two years. Finally, we will give some extra focus to the Microsoft Office compatibility, because it is one of the most cardinal issues around. Follow me.

LibreOffice tour

At a first glance, LibreOffice does not look much different from its earlier versions. However, there's an obvious fresh air of improvement present. For me, the most visible change is the distinct improvement in responsiveness and loading times, even without the use of the Quickstarter. If previously, LibreOffice would take 3-4 seconds to launch, this time has been shortened to about half that. Cosmic.



Next, I visited the official page documenting some of the changes and tried a few of them, including various templates, PDF import and such. On paper, this functionality, or rather, this plethora of features is all nice and dandy, but there's something more important that we want to check.

Microsoft Office compatibility

This is the devil. So let's see what gives here. If you've read my comparison article, then you know there's a whole bunch of issues trying to work with LibreOffice and importing and exporting files to the rival, proprietary software. As an advanced user, you can get around these, but your weakest links are your clueless friends and colleagues with zero tolerance to any possible styling glitches that might arise from cross conversions.

Microsoft Office to LibreOffice

This was the first test I did. I created a DOCX file in Microsoft Office 2007, inserted a picture with a shadow, added comments and tracked changes. Indeed, tracking is one of the most important features for collaboration.



When I opened the file in LibreOffice 4, the conversion worked fairly well, including all the formatted stuff. The comments were there too, as well as of the tracked changes. The only thing that was out of place was the image shadow, which was imported somewhat ugly.

LibreOffice to Microsoft Office

Then, I did the reverse trick. I created a file in LibreOffice, used styles for titles, wrote some comments and changes, plus added an image with a caption. Then I saved the file as a DOCX. As always, you do get a warning when you're saving files in non-ODF format, but this is fine.






Then I opened the file in Microsoft Office 2007. Most importantly, Word did NOT complain the file was corrupt, like it would in the past. It opened the file smoothly and without any warnings or errors. As to the fidelity of the conversion? Well, you judge for yourself. Most of it worked fine, but not all. Line spacing was all wrong, although changes, comments and styles were preserved. However, line breaks in comments were not done well, probably due to the difference in UNIX and Windows carriage returns. It's so much better than in the past, but there's always a little detail that mars the process.




Later on, I also ran tests with Office 2010, and saved files as both DOC and DOCX in LibreOffice 4, then tried to opened them in the Microsoft suite. Worked like a charm, and again, without any warnings. This is critical, BUT the quality of documents is equally important, and still, we end up with some discrepancies.

Tracking changes

Worked really well - so much better than previous versions, and this used to be one of my major complaints. However, the Review Toolbar is missing, but you can install it through the Extension manager. Much like OpenOffice in this regard.




And working, sweating, earning and burning - quite all right:

A few words about Impress and Calc

Normally, most other components are neglected. Well, I gave both some scrutiny. For example, Calc handles pivot tables with more grace in the past, although it still does not have automatic graphs. Impress offers a nice template wizard on first launch, but in my experience, it was slow and sluggish. Not nice. Well, at least the names are in order, and not like the Crunchbang exercise of using themes with color names that do not match the actual colors.

Conclusion

As a pure office suite, LibreOffice 4 is quite decent. It brings a lot of improvements, including much better responsiveness, better but still inadequate support for Microsoft Office, better document tracking, and some other nifty tricks and details. There's also a version for Android, which I might check in the future. All in all, fairly decent, and it does merit the full version change. On the negative side, the interface demands a refresh, and there's a lot more than can be done to allow LibreOffice users a seamless experience with their Word-fixated audience. Lastly, some bugs and glitches need to be ironed out, like the slow Impress transitions, missing functionality in programs other than the Writer, and suchlike.

LibreOffice 4 is not perfect, but its most serious problem is the fact the interface is cluttered and not very productive. I have not lingered too much on this aspect of the office suite usage, but it's obvious, isn't it. Take a look at the programs and think carefully, how comfortable you feel using them. Now, I am not saying use the ribbon nonsense like Office, but a redesign is sorely needed. There is just too much of everything, not enough focus on styles, image management is clunky, and you can work faster elsewhere.

To wit, LibreOffice 4 deserves around 8/10. It's a sure keeper, and I am glad to have it added to my arsenal, both on Windows and Linux. I just wish it could become a killer app, but the path thither is still long and perilous. Well, let's hope version 5 will make that a reality.
Cheers.

Source: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/libreoffice-4-review.html