Three top niggles with LO

I am doing my best to transition from Microsoft Office, so I thought it might be useful to put comments here. The top three difficulties I’ve found in using LO are:

  1. Macros. If I had a real macro option, I could put right a lot of the difficulties I’m finding. But the macro language Writer uses just isn’t capable of doing what I want, and it slows my work considerably. I don’t even mind retyping my Word macros, since I’d only have to do it once, but since it involves capitalization and changing font colours, they just don’t work.
  2. Capitalization. Using curly quotes makes capitalization inconsistent. If you start a sentence with a double quote, the word inside the quotes isn’t capitalized. If you start a sentence with a word that contains an apostrophe, the word doesn’t capitalize. Either do, or don’t do.
  3. The interface. I want my ribbon back. I still miss it, after 6 months transitioning. An add-on would be super, as then it gives the menu-fans the option to keep it if they want to.
    As it is, I’m still looking for a reasonably priced or free office substitute that does this. What drove me away? I won’t rent my software, the one-off price is exorbitant, especially since it only covers one installation, and if I try to reinstall Office after a reinstall, re-registering is such a PITA it’s hardly worth doing. I actually have a legal copy of MSO 2010, but I really can’t go through all that rigmarole because I’ve had a new motherboard installed.
    (And why are the captchas on this page so difficult to read?)

I know how hard it is trying to migrate from an industry standard piece of software to the next best thing. Software I’ve used over the years has either been bought out (and subsequently gone downhill), restarted from scratch (Apple Final Cut Pro) or become subscription only like Adobe products - try finding a decent Adobe After Effects alternative!!

Unfortunately a free MS Office clone doesn’t and never will exist. A lot of the features of MS Office will be exclusive to that software only and quite possibly copyrighted. You either have to put up with ‘all that rigmarole’ as you put it or just accept LibreOffice’s differences/limitations.

The macros are pretty much useless. I have a macro to highlight a number of words in the manuscript instead of doing them one by one, words like “which,” “very,” and “big” so I can look at them in the edits. I write a macro to search and replace each word, run it and it works. The next time I try to run it, it doesn’t work. It looks as if it’s working, but does nothing.
That is a really simple macro, so I gave up. If it can’t do that, then it won’t be able to cope with the more complex ones.

In what way is the LO macro language not “real”? Do you mean that your Word macros don’t work unaltered? I haven’t used macros extensively in Word or Writer, but they exist in both.