[NTLUG:Discuss] How's LibreOffice doing?

[Leroy Tennison]

Is it just me or is LibreOffice getting stranger with time?  I 
downloaded 4.1.2.3 to look at it's Pivot Table capabilities.  Went to 
open a spreadsheet containing a list from which to create a Pivot 
Table.  I immediately ran into the first issue, the File->Open dialog 
had changed, it didn't present a list of directories or files - you just 
had to know the names (although, if you got the first couple of 
characters right it would supply possibilities)!  4.1.1.2 didn't have 
this behavior.  Fortunately I decided to look under Tools->Options to 
see if there was a setting to change and there was - under General for 
LibreOffice I had to check "Use LibreOffice dialogs" for the Open/Save 
Dialogs option.  I have no idea what dialog it was using (I'm running 
KDE 4 on OpenSuse 12.2 but I haven't seen a dialog like that one anywhere).

Then I opened the spreadsheet (which contained two columns of dollar 
amounts among other things) and created the Pivot Table placing those 
fields in the "Data fields" area.  When I looked at the Pivot Table the 
dollar amounts had been changed to dates!  Guessing that this might have 
something to do with the cell format of the source data I went and 
checked, it was Number (General).  I decided to try changing the format 
to one of the currency options and that solved the problem.  I don't 
know how 4.1.1.2 behaved because I had removed it by that point.

These issues might not seem so odd if Apache OpenOffice (4.0.0) behaved 
the same way but it doesn't, it's behavior is what I (and I think most 
people) would expect.  The File->Open dialog had the traditional listing 
and its Pivot Table (created from the same spreadsheet unmodified, I 
didn't save the cell format changes I tried I tried in LibreOffice) 
showed the dollar amounts as currency.

I moved away from LibreOffice because of its regressions (features which 
worked in pre-Apache OpenOffice didn't in LibreOffice although I have 
found a regression in OpenOffice as well) and my latest experience isn't 
encouraging me to change my decision.

Is Open/LibreOffice still the most capable office suite for Linux or 
have others (like KOffice) improved significantly?