s|b wrote:
On Wed, 6 Apr 2016 20:28:17 -0000 (UTC), Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:

Yes, overkill for reading a simple document, but my reply was also
addressing the OP's statement of "and can not afford the cost of a MS
subscription of MS office." which you snipped.

So with LibreOffice, he gets his "office" at no cost.

What I said.


LibreOffice has failed every "quality" test I've given it.

You get "half an office at no cost".

And what's that worth ? About what you paid for it.

*******

As an example, I tried to do an Excel-type chart project.
Accept a list of maybe 80,000 ordered pairs and graph it.

The program runs for about four or five minutes, and
then declares "Allocation Error". No, that's not a main
memory error. I thought that at first, but I started
searching for that string. Well, where does that
error actually come from ? The program uses OpenGL to
draw a simple fricken chart. It seems to rely on an
ATI OpenGL plugin that indicates how much free memory
the video card has left. This plugin does not work properly.
It's known that Microsoft broke it (as the video card
memory management model changes from OS to OS, and ATI
hasn't been able to fix the OpenGL plugin to do the
right thing in each case). It's not even clear that
NVidia has such a capability at all in their Windows OpenGL
(because, of course, it would get broken).

So I cannot make my simple chart in Windows with LibreOffice.
It errors out. I don't think I can disable the OpenGL path.

However, if I use Linux and LibreOffice, I'm able
to complete my chart.

So much for "half an Office"...

I've had double-printed characters in Writer. There's
a whole litany of sins. But you'll find out when
you get there. Don't let me spoil the surprise.

At least with the viewers, you'll be able to
convert docx, xlsx, pptx you get off the Internet,
into some other archival format, so you can at least
read them. I usually convert to PDF for
quick access. As long as the documents don't
do anything too wacky, the translator package
(FileFormatConverters.exe) will work OK.

Paul