Sigh: An unfortunate experiment
Sigh: An unfortunate experiment
I won’t need to start working on Gold Open Access 2026 until November, but I was wondering whether it would be feasible to switch from MS Office 2019 (which is, after all, a tad out of date) to snazzy up-to-date free/open software LibreOffice 25.
Here’s my experience, and it’s not terribly meaningful because:
I’d be comparing a current LibreOffice to a six-year-old Office.
The GOA project relies heavily on being an annual update, including preparing the books.
I’m old–just reached 80–and perhaps less flexible or patient than I should be.
Anyway…
Installing LibreOffice
Easy-peasy.
Updating a copy of the primary spreadsheets (saved as LibreOffice Calc sheets)
LibreOffice loads the Excel sheets (most with multiple pages) neatly and saves them properly.
Downloading the DOAJ sheet and opening directly in LibreOffice went very well–actually better than Excel2019, because LibreOffice Calc could handle the Unicode directly on opening, not by going through a special step. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Excel had now fixed this inability to load UTF8 directly in later versions.)
Opening and saving is clearly slower–but not so much slower as to be a killer.
Sorting worked fine.
Vlookup involved a slightly different syntax for referring to a separate named sheet, but the help is excellent, and it worked fine (if differently) after I got the syntax right.
Pivot tables worked slightly differently and in some ways better, although forcing an extra row in one case.
At this point, including preparing new tables for the first three chapters of the book, I was ready to call the experiment a success.
But then…
Copying table contents from spreadsheet to document did NOT work well.
I opened the 2025 book (Gold Open Access 10) and saved a new version, again saved as a LibreOffice document.
To prepare the new book, I update dozens (hundreds?) of tables and modify the relatively small amount of text around them.
Copying all or part of an Excel table and pasting it into the comparable part of a Word table is a snap (once you make sure you’re doing it right).
Doing the same in LibreOffice…well, I don’t think I ever did get it to work properly. Either it would try to paste the entire new set of cells into the first cell of the Word table I’d highlighted, or various “paste special” options would result in various other unacceptable situations. Deleting the existing table and trying to paste in a new table from the set of cells marked in Calc worked……not much better. I believe I was able to get one table right after a certain amount of swearing. The second try was even worse: I gave up. (It also seems to be much slower–and if you try to paste in a way it doesn’t like, it tends to go nuts for a minute or so and then drop back to the start of the document. This behavior does not encourage further experimentation.)
Conclusion: Not yet, if I can avoid it.
If Office 2019 becomes unworkable over the next year, I’ll try buying the current (…