The new artcraft office suite is good. It is fast and small and mimics MS office well. The problem is it looks like it didn't run through QA. Ribbon should have been a bit bigger. It hurts my eyes to see the icons.

However the most interesting thing is I did not like it. After using Libreoffice for so many years and it's traditional menubar+toolbar it just works better. Really, I can't use ribbon though it was designed for ease of use. The design of libre office is humane. No other office suite has that feeling. Others look polished but artificial. So I am sticking to libre and thanks for making it. Nowadays there are a lot of office suites but when I really needed for day to day casual work there used to be only libre that didn't cost me. More importantly I could not afford MS then. keep the good work up.

Using LibreOffice in Linux Mint, and the default interface colours make it almost unusable. While I can change the banner colour at the top to make buttons more visible, this does not affect the rest of the interface - some buttons remain invisible, as they are still to bright. What is the problem?

Info:

Version: 24.2.7.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community

Build ID: 420(Build:2)

CPU threads: 12; OS: Linux 7.0; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3

Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US

Ubuntu package version: 4:24.2.7-0ubuntu0.24.04.7

Calc: threaded

I suppose this is a feature request. I like using LibreOffice for local documents, but this is a lost opportunity. I receive CSVs with payout information, so they're preformatted. In the datasets, they signify the payout as a negative dollar amount (i.e. -$100.00).

Calc is incapable of figuring out how to SUM these. At first I thought it was the negative sign, then I thought it must be formatted as a string instead of currency...but for me to fix any of that would take more time than for me to just tally them by hand.

I dropped the CSV into Google Drive and it happily gave me the negative total with no fuss. I think that kind of functionality would be very useful to Calc.

Sharing something I ran into this week in case it saves someone the same hour.

Bank and payout CSVs often write amounts as text like "-$100.00". Open that in Calc and SUM returns 0, because the column comes in as text, not numbers. The fix is in the Text Import dialog, not in the cells.

When the import window opens, click the amount column in the preview, keep its Column type as Standard, set the Language dropdown above the preview to English (USA), and tick "Detect special numbers" under Other options. With US English active, "-$100.00" imports as a real currency value, thousands separators and all, and SUM works on it.

I tested this on a CSV containing -$100.00, -$250.50 and -$1,200.00. With the default import the column lands as text and SUM returns 0. With English (USA) set, the same cells import as -100, -250.50 and -1,200, and SUM returns -1,550.50.

If a file is already imported with the column as text, you don't have to re-import: select the column, then Data > Text to Columns opens the same dialog with the same Language setting, and the column re-parses in place. A helper column also works if you'd rather keep the originals: =VALUE(SUBSTITUTE(A2;"$";"")).

Two things that don't work: Find & Replace to strip the $ sign (the $ disappears but the cells stay text), and changing the cell format to Currency (formatting never converts text to numbers). Both still leave SUM at 0.

I have spent WAY too much time, since the latest update, looking for something that was obvious for as long as I've used LO (OOo). Image> Position and Size. There WAS a checkbox in this window to maintain the ratio when resizing the graphic. Where did it go? Is it move? Removed? Renamed?

A five second task has taken two weeks. So glad upgrading makes things better.

Yeah, I'm irritated. Since I didn't initiate the upgrade to being with!

Version: 26.8.0.3 (X86_64)

Build ID: bce0998afefdbc355585ca324285661a2170ba77

CPU threads: 20; OS: Windows 11 X86_64 (build 26200); UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win

Locale: en-US (en_US); UI: en-US

Calc: CL threaded