LibreOffice Woes, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud

I love LibreOffice, the open source productivity suite that comes with most Linux systems. That’s why it makes me so sad to say it’s sometimes not up to the task of serious work. Luckily, however, cloud-based office suites now work just as well, making word processing woes on Linux a thing of the past.

When I say I love LibreOffice, I mean it. In fact, I just finished writing a whole book in it—though the office suite was still known as OpenOffice when I started writing, back before worries about Oracle’s intentions led many developers to jump ship and launch LibreOffice under the auspices of the Document Foundation.

Here’s the sad part: LibreOffice has proven too convoluted in my final stages of writing the book to get the job done. As a result, I’ve had to fire up Microsoft Office (inside a VirtualBox virtual machine, since I do all of my work on Ubuntu Linux) to complete tasks that should be simple inside a world-class word processor, but just aren’t.

For example: If you want to start the page numbering in a LibreOffice document at, say, page 60—as you likely would if the document is the second chapter of a book—you can try to use the “Offset” feature to modify the page number fields. You’d then discover that that only works up to the point where the page number exceeds the total number of pages in the document. After that, you just get a blank field where the page number is supposed to be, with no indication of what’s wrong.

It turns out you’re supposed to use a different feature—not the one called “Offset”—for offsetting page numbers if you want to “change the actual page number and not the displayed number” (whatever the difference there is supposed to be). So the LibreOffice wiki’s answer to why page offsets only half work is that it’s not a bug, it’s a feature, and it’s supposed to be this way—which is never a good thing to tell your users.

Another problem: Doing a search-and-replace with regular expressions can be a great way to correct typos automatically. For example, I can write a regex to match strings where I entered a date in the format “[month] [day], [year],” but missed a comma after the year, which is not consistent with the Chicago Manual of Style‘s guidelines. Unfortunately, LibreOffice crashes whenever I try to do a regex search-and-replace like this on a book-length document. Maybe that’s just my particular version of LibreOffice, or my Ubuntu 14.04 environment. Still, this type of instability is a major frustration when one tries to get work done. It’s also a problem that doesn’t exist in Microsoft Word, which searches and replaces regexes with aplomb.

Fortunately, I’ve recently discovered a new solution to my word processing woes, which is to do most of my work online in Google Docs. Google’s word processing platform isn’t quite as feature-rich as LibreOffice, but it behaves less strangely. That my work is automatically backed up to the cloud—not to mention that Google Docs can read and write in Microsoft’s native file formats better than LibreOffice—is a bonus.

I believe in open source, and I wish it could fulfill every one of my computing needs. Maybe it would be able to if I wrote shorter documents. But I’m disappoined to admit that LibreOffice and its open source cousins no longer cut it for me in the word-processing department, and I’ve moved on to the cloud, closed and proprietary though it may be.