Your daily dose of “fuck Microsoft” is here!
The Document Foundation (TDF) recently announced the release of LibreOffice 26.8, and while it packs many new features, its highlight is the lack of any AI integration. This is quite the opposite of what Microsoft has been doing with its Office suite, but the tale of the disagreements between these two entities is as old as time itself, so nothing surprising. Now, TDF has explained why it cannot display some fancy charts that Microsoft Office can visualize without a problem.
Also explained at LO’s blog, with a less of a clickbait title: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09/17/libreoffice-26-8-and-interoperability/
i just want scrolling on windows version calc to be fixed.
Genuine curiosity: what’s broken about it? I’ve not noticed issues scolling in Calc on Windows…
Unfortunately, there is a limitation, and this is an exception. Charts with regional maps contain extensive geographical information that LibreOffice is unable to preserve.
I wonder why that is, and if it can be fixed
[Despite best efforts, c]harts with regional maps contain extensive geographical information that LibreOffice is unable to preserve.
Were I the devs, I’d be opening those files read-only by default and having an “unlock to edit” option somewhere obvious. When clicked, it would pop up a dialog box with the yellow triangle / exclamation mark warning icon saying that things would not be preserved beyond that point.
LibreOffice already does something like this when saving in formats that can lose information, but I’d move that to right up front.
I might even include a dig that the document was created by software that does not follow open document standards.
Tl;dr: use ODF if you want reliability even in MS Office.
This should be the universal takeaway.
All I want to do is write a simple document. Many people have already written plenty of software to do just that … I don’t need it to do anything else.
Any company that wants to engineer anything else beyond that is just trying to justify to everyone why they would want to install a 90hp outboard motor on a little goldfish.
The problem is one person wants a complex feature here, another person needs another complex feature there. When you edit book-length texts you need styles, regular expressions in find/replace, plugins for referencing software etc. Interestingly, Word may do bells and whistles, but LO does the first two better than Word, and the third one as well as Word.
I use Markdown a lot for the plain text advantages but to me a huge limitation is that it doesn’t do colours and tabs. There are of course people writing books in Markdown, but I find it very limiting and ultimately counterproductive even for note-taking.
Sadly, there’s still no rtf alternative.
My requirements:
- simple text styling (titles, bold, indent, that stuff)
- reflow text (not pdf)
- carry it’s media and other dependencies
- can be edited and viewed with the digital equivalent of carboard and a pencil
Office formats are over the top, require a fat office suite. epub is a website, even worse. Lightweight Markup formats like Markdown, Asciidoc, can’t carry their media. A html with base64 media comes the closest, sadly.
This isn’t a real answer because as far as I know there’s no tool that helps you with this, but you should be able to put base-64 encoded images into markdown documents too. At the very least by just putting raw HTML image tags.
What would be “nicer” would be if one could use the references feature that allows you to put links in the body but their destinations in the footer to stash the images at the bottom of the document, but I don’t think that’ll work, and I haven’t tried it.
That having been said, I personally think a folder of files, with images separated from the text, and referenced with relative paths, is better for 100 other reasons, with the only disadvantage being that you’d have to zip it up to send it to someone else. But if you’ve got embedding as a requirement, you could maybe try jamming them into the markdown.
Or make a new format! Mdgz, which is just a gziped tar of a file called index.md, and then a collection of any other files desired, and then get readers to resolve links only ever within that structure so it’s encapsulated. Should be pretty doable, easy to work with if you don’t have any special tools, but also possible to make tools for. I believe in you!
Or make a new format! Mdgz
Yeah, i did this with asciidoctor, named it adcx, with full word/odf-like directory structure and meta + mimetype file. But the shell script turned into a project-manager, got out of hand with bugs; i want to do a rewrite in python for forever now. But what holds me back is 1. if i do this seriously, i want to do it format-independent (modular i guess) and 2. python wrapper for a ruby toolchain? But i hate Ruby. And 3. more important projects first.
LaTeX is something I’ve been meaning to explore.
Also check out typst, it may be more approachable (though they have a closed source web app; the compiler is free and open source, so you can use it with any text editor with a plugin for it, or just write your text in markdown, get a template, compile).
This is the whole overarching problem with tech. Most of us have fairly simple problems with fairly simple solutions, and tech has just straight up solved those needs, sometimes well over a decade ago.
I’m not saying there’s nowhere left for tech to improve, especially in the medical and biotech space, but in the consumer market there’s only so much we realistically need. It has been addressed, end of sentence, but capitalism’s need to extract infinite profit does not jive with solved problems.
sometimes well over a decade ago.
Sometimes before I was born, that’d be 3 decades ago.
Networked collaborative office applications were a thing before 1995, BTW. Networks were not quite up to the task, but the rest was there.
Famous things like Word, Photoshop, AutoCAD and even raytracers were already feature-complete (by the computing ability of that time).
The Web (not the current one, but the hand-edited HTML pages by amateurs, Perl scripts as CGI, web rings and directories one) was the main new revolutionary thing in those, as you might have noticed, it’s also the very thing they are trying to destroy from all angles.
The overarching problem is that people who want you to buy things you don’t need and not buy things you need from someone else and not tell them to go to hell are able to push regulations and standards in their favor. They are joined by power-hungry people in governments in that.
All that is tangential to personal computers. A personal computer is a very powerful concept, especially with the Web (as it existed), and there are people trying to dilute and disperse and destroy that.
It’s all similar to printing press, mass media, widespread literacy, freedom of speech, all these things. A very important thing to protect.
Because it’s a new extension and it hasn’t been implemented yet. Saved you the click.
Ah, I would’ve thought because it’s partly saved in the cloud or something. Because we’ve had some charts torn apart due to shit similar to that.
They really fucked up basic functionality.
Dont know if thats a fair summary of the original post. Technically, it answers the clickbait question but not what it was about.
Microsoft claims its using ISO files, but writes proprietary extensions into them. That’s vendored so doesnt break the files but is outside standardization so limited interoperability and has some long term risk.
Important though, it makes libreoffice look like it doesn’t implement the standard which isn’t true.
They’re dealing with that by detecting these vendored chuncks and displaying a message block in the document and re-writing it on save to preseve it. it sounds like the wording is something similar to the blog post suggesting its a Microsoft Extension that may be supported in future releases or something but i havent seen it.
…and they managed to make a while “article” about that simple info. That’s why I stopped consuming all that shit.
Thanks for summing it up mate.
I don’t mind the articles, what I mind is annoying though.
This is paragraph two where I reiterate that I am just annoyed by the actual annoying thing.
This is the third paragraph, where I reiterate that I don’t mind articles, again, then remind you that I am annoyed by something else.
This is the seventh paragraph, down at the bottom of the page, where I finally mention my real annoyance is that they don’t make their point until the bottom because they want to get you to read all the repetitive nonsense before hand.
This is the last paragraph, because I know you will scroll to the bottom looking for the true answer, and I need to hide it, like a reverse of the lead up.
And finally, an unrelated paragraph, because the page seamlessly scrolls into a second, unrelated article.
You may have a future as a tech writer.
Features from 2016 are new?
“from 2016 onwards” some of those dates after 2016 are pretty recent.
Doing the Lord’s work.
Has it at least been defined
Its not part of the standard
You’d have to be a MS Office engineer to answer that.
Yes but only MS knows what it is.
