[Libreoffice-ux-advise] It is not with regret...

[Jose Alonso]

Dear LibreOffice developers,

It is not without regret that I have to advise you that, after many years
of using OpenOffice and lately LibreOffice, we have had to remove
LibreOffice from our computer and return to Microsoft Office.

What has precipitated the move is the fact that we now receive hundreds of
student assignments all written using MSOffice  .docX format, and the .docX
format simply DOES NOT WORK in LibreOffice, or in (I have just also
checked) OpenOffice. Pictures and graphics do not transfer,
misinterpretation of formats is rife! Saying that LibreOffice permits .docX
formats is churlish at best, false advertisement at worse.

Our work involves constantly writing comments in the margins of student
work (MA and PhD students) and we can not afford the time to fight
incompatibilities (and thus altering the original submitted materials),  to
finally having to go back to MSOffice for a faithfull reliable operation.

I admire your efforts, respect particularly your spreadsheet and
 PowerPoint  programs, and your multidimensional matrices handling (and
hidden from the users) of mathematical structures.

We are experienced users (me in particular a retired computer scientist in
scientific image processing) and would myself prefer to use LibreOffice,
but simply can not. I have read the blogs and all suggested solutions
simply suggest to put the head in the sand and go through (unreliable)
hoops to avoid the clear fact that docX does not work in LO. And
unfortunately it is the most common format in our limited (perhaps not so
limited) experience, particularly with Asian students.

I am sending this email in a spirit of cooperation. Please do not publish
it in the blog if you do not consider it helpful or politically appropriate
at this point in time. There appears to not exist a direct address to write
to LO other than through blogs, a griveous administrative  oversight.

Thanks for your excellent, imaginative, competent efforts developing a very
promising product.

Dr Jose Alonso
jra71 at columbia.edu
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