LibreOffice for enterprises
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Other than normal bugs, LibreOffice misses some features and tweaks that are important in an enterprise environment.
Calc
Calc should warn user when a cell text represents a valid number
Too often users have external data imported and some of the data are interpreted as text, but represents a valid number. Calc should warn users about that. This have severe consequences in calculations and is not easily detected.
In the "other" suite, a sign appears in the upper left corner of the cell with a tip.
In Calc, users can detect such anomalies by using menu "Display - Value highlight", but it is not intuitive.
Enterprises love standadized documents layouts and brand logos on the header or footer is a must for their spreadsheets. Today LibreOffice does not allow to insert a graphic in the header or footer of a spreadsheet. To overcome, you have to put it in the header/footer background image with little control on size and position. Please see: tdf#74146
Writer
Need for improved collaboration tools: better "track changes", better "compare documents" needed
The ability to track changes of a document in a professional environment or a work group is a very basic and important requirement for an Office suite. LibreOffice Writer supports track changes, but the implementation has several short comings:
- Tracked changes are not displayed in the margin, but 'destroy' the layout, because inserted and deleted text is both displayed within the text. A document with many contributors and commenters is barely readable in Writer.
- The tracked differences between versions of a document or between documents as identified by Writer are sub-optimal.
For further description and links to work in progress, please see Track changes.
For related bug(s) in the LibreOffice bug tracker, please see: tdf#34355.
Enhancement of Watermark Feature
Watermarks are currently supported but the options are limited and especially text watermark feature is preserved as a workaround: How to put a watermark text on your documents - Leif Lodahl
Also, there are compatibility issues on watermarks to be fixed in Microsoft Office formats.
Related bug report(s): tdf#54053.
Impress
Linked presentation should open full screen
While Impress allows to launch a linked presentation, the link will not open the external presentation in full screen mode. The user will have to do it manually.
Programming and extensibility
Improvements on the BASIC IDE for macro editing
The BASIC Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is somehow frozen into an ancient era of information technology. With a feature-rich, extended and object oriented API such as LibreOffice API, a modern IDE demands to show the properties and methods of an object, like Eclipse or Netbeans, for example.
That lacking feature hurts many migration projects. VBA macros are a small (enterprise-wise) volume of documents, but are those with higher cost to migrate.
Proxy authentication
On a enterprise where access to the internet is done by a proxy with authentication, you cannot copy a web page and paste into a LibreOffice document without loosing your linked graphics or objetcs. This is because the graphics are pasted as linked images and since LibreOffice does not have a proxy authentication dialog, the proxy will not let the graphic to be read.
The same issue raises if you plan to have your stock market prices inserted into a spreadsheet, behind an authenticated proxy. It will not work.