Do you begin to hate LibreOffice? I do now!

Long long time ago I reported bugs of mess of Conditioning Format and Crash when drag cells to auto fill. But till now I have updated to the newest version 5.0.1.2 (X64), these two problems are not yet solved, even worse, and crash more frequently. I repect libreoffice and I loved you. But you really have hurt me and my job since I change from MS office to LibreOffice. Now I begin to hate you and I´m forced to go back to MS office even we have to pay some, although I donate to open source softwares too.

I doubt whether you actually expect an answer. You also will not get listened by the development team this way. I understand,however, the attitude, as I myself sometimes am unhappy with the long delays in the process of QA. It’s a good deal lack of human resources, surely. On the other hand the reasons to go for independent suppliers, open standards, interoperability, and (next to) full portability with respect to the OS are overwhelming. I’m hoping for a “United Free Office” saving resources…

What’s about the size of ranges you want to fill? From my experience: problems only occurred for large ranges containing more than 10000 rows. Is your practise in that range? If not you might have a local problem (aside of possible bugs). How many computers? If only one: Did you try to reset your user profile once?

(The most recently released version is 5.0.2. Next week we should have the first RC for 5.0.3.)

But: You obviously use(d) LibreOffice in production and even for critical purposes. This isn’t the scenario frequent upgrades and joining the “fresh” branch are thought for. As a rule, given your needs, a more conservative strategy concerning the “versioning” is recommendable (imo). A second level “0” in the version number should always indicate that there might be new features or an introductiojn of new concepts of implementation which come with a risk of new bugs (and some regressions). I would suggest to wait for the “w.3.y” minor version before relying on the w.x.y version for production.

I personally don’t do “critical production” any more and have installed 5.0.2 on Win 8.1. But I also keep some older versions at hand running as portable apps extracted from a .paf.exe archive. You may test the fresh versions this way as soon as one is published in .paf.exe variant. (For some time now the paf packaging keeps up tightly with the standard packaging.) Check this location for the purose. (And don’t worry about the “old” in the pathname. Humans and versions get older with times.)

I hope you give LibreOffice another try.

(Regarding 5.0.2 the handling of CF has improved, at least with regard to the “flickering bug” - which never was critical. A lot of problems with CF are hardly resolvable at all, and only got visible by the introduction of the CF manager.)

I wish, I wait and support because I love. But pls don’t make me cry.