Besides, when you can easy apply a style to the document directly as an experiment, then change it just as easily, previews become redundant. But previews are only useful for characters for paragraphs, they would need to show at least three lines to be useful. True, Word does have style previews, which Styles and Formatting lacks. Much of its functionality is also available in Word, but several layers down - an arrangement that discourages users from adding the elegance of styles to their workflows. Opened by pressing F11, it places all of LibreOffice’s five categories of styles - paragraphs, characters, frames, pages, and lists - within easy reach, providing different views of each category, and allowing easy creation and modification of styles. 2) The Styles and Formatting WindowĪnother floating window, Styles and Formatting is even more powerful than the Navigator. The longer the document, the more powerful you’ll find the Navigator. It’s a little like KRunner or GNOME+Do - a flexible, minimalist tool for advanced users. Moreover, since the Navigator is a floating window, you can place it anywhere on the screen, so that it doesn’t reduce the size of the editing window.Īnd that’s not all: the Navigator can be used as a basic outliner and as a table of contents for a master document made up smaller documents. Get into the habit of naming objects instead of accepting defaults like Table1, and the Navigator becomes even more powerful. However, with Writer’s Navigator, you can jump back and forth in a document not just by heading styles, but by any type of object you care to name: tables, frames, graphics, comments, links, or anything else you care to name. Word has a pane on the left side of the editing window that uses headings as a tool for moving through a document. Together, these advantages not only suggest a very different design philosophy from Word, but also demonstrate that, from the perspective of an expert user, Writer is the superior tool. Far from being the underdog in every circumstance, Writer has at least twelve major advantages over Word. More important, in the last few years the two have been in a mostly unnoticed arms race, with one rarely adding another feature without the other one copying it as soon as possible.įar from one having an obvious advantage, in recent years the feature lists of Writer and Word have become closer than ever.Īll the same, some basic differences remain. To a degree, Writer has always imitated Word in the hopes of being competitive. Once you get to know Writer and Word, the differences become less clear-cut. Since Word sports a ribbon interface while LibreOffice remains with a traditional menu, finding equivalent features is even harder than a decade ago, because Word often buries advanced features several levels down, often in drop-down lists. For example, the equivalent of Word’s AutoSummary in Writer remains AutoAbstract.įor another, features are not always in the same positions in Writer and Word. Although LibreOffice and have a history of conforming to MS Office’s name-choices - for example, in the spreadsheets, data pilots were recently renamed pivot tables to match Excel’s usage - holdouts remain. That’s especially true when looking at the word processors, LibreOffice’s Writer and MS Office’s Word.įor one thing, features frequently have different names in Writer and Word. However, when you examine LibreOffice and MS Office without assumptions, the comparison changes dramatically. At the very most, they may grudgingly find it acceptable for undemanding users. When reviewers look at LibreOffice and its ancestor, they inevitably assume that it’s inferior to Microsoft Office. This means you will always find the latest stable version in the master branch.ALSO SEE THE COUNTERPOINT ARTICLE: How Microsoft Office Tops LibreOffice: 11 Features Once in a while we merge develop into master, which results in a new release. To contribute, fork the main repo, branch off a feature branch from develop, make your changes and commit them, push to your fork and submit a pull request for ether/develop. If you'd like to help, get in touch! Also, the wiki is always a valuable resource. You can also translate the user interface to your mother tongue or learn how to write plugins. One of the first things you should do is actually use Etherpad, and get to know it - read about it, evangelise it, and engage with the wider community. So, if you like Etherpad and would like to give back some love, we'd like to see your contributions! It doesn't matter how familiar you are with real-time applications, or whether you know how to write programs for Node.js. Lots of passionate, helpful individuals have joined and voluntarily contributed every single bit throughout this project: From this website through the documentation to the very core of the application.
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