Your daily dose of “fuck Microsoft” is here!
The Document Foundation (TDF) recently announced the release of LibreOffice 26.8, and while it packs many new features, its highlight is the lack of any AI integration. This is quite the opposite of what Microsoft has been doing with its Office suite, but the tale of the disagreements between these two entities is as old as time itself, so nothing surprising. Now, TDF has explained why it cannot display some fancy charts that Microsoft Office can visualize without a problem.
Also explained at LO’s blog, with a less of a clickbait title: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09/17/libreoffice-26-8-and-interoperability/
Because it’s a new extension and it hasn’t been implemented yet. Saved you the click.
Dont know if thats a fair summary of the original post. Technically, it answers the clickbait question but not what it was about.
Microsoft claims its using ISO files, but writes proprietary extensions into them. That’s vendored so doesnt break the files but is outside standardization so limited interoperability and has some long term risk.
Important though, it makes libreoffice look like it doesn’t implement the standard which isn’t true.
They’re dealing with that by detecting these vendored chuncks and displaying a message block in the document and re-writing it on save to preseve it. it sounds like the wording is something similar to the blog post suggesting its a Microsoft Extension that may be supported in future releases or something but i havent seen it.
Tl;dr: use ODF if you want reliability even in MS Office.
All I want to do is write a simple document. Many people have already written plenty of software to do just that … I don’t need it to do anything else.
Any company that wants to engineer anything else beyond that is just trying to justify to everyone why they would want to install a 90hp outboard motor on a little goldfish.
I am genuinely so tempted to just write my resume in Markdown and make a PDF this time around.
Sadly, there’s still no rtf alternative.
My requirements:
- simple text styling (titles, bold, indent, that stuff)
- reflow text (not pdf)
- carry it’s media and other dependencies
- can be edited and viewed with the digital equivalent of carboard and a pencil
Office formats are over the top, require a fat office suite. epub is a website, even worse. Lightweight Markup formats like Markdown, Asciidoc, can’t carry their media. A html with base64 media comes the closest, sadly.
LaTeX is something I’ve been meaning to explore.
The problem is one person wants a complex feature here, another person needs another complex feature there. When you edit book-length texts you need styles, regular expressions in find/replace, plugins for referencing software etc. Interestingly, Word may do bells and whistles, but LO does the first two better than Word, and the third one as well as Word.
I use Markdown a lot for the plain text advantages but to me a huge limitation is that it doesn’t do colours and tabs. There are of course people writing books in Markdown, but I find it very limiting and ultimately counterproductive even for note-taking.
