Thursday, June 16, 2011

Why I downgraded from LibreOffice 3.4 to 3.3.2

I've been a happy user of LibreOffice since the first beta was released in 2010. I was keen to try out the new 3.4 version with a view to seeing further enhancements and efficiencies.

The first thing I noted was that it seemed to take longer to load some of my larger spreadsheets, and even some of my smaller spreadsheets.OK, the LibreOffice download page does stress that 3.4 is not ready for production use and the stable version should be released around the end of the month as 3.4.1 (if I understand the release schedule correctly). The additional load time didn't worry me too much, I usually load spreadsheets up at the beginning of the day and continue to use them throughout the day, so a few extra seconds was not too annoying.

Today I encountered the deal-breaker.

I have a few spreadsheets that I regularly use to track finances. With these I have a 'Net Value' column; a 'VAT %' column; a 'VAT €' column and a 'Gross Value' column. As I do not want a lot of zeros cluttering up the spreadsheet and not all of the entries will have VAT, then I do a check to ensure that the VAT value is calculated only if a % has been specified. Likewise, the Gross value is only calculated if there is a value in the Net Value. It looks something like this as a logic expression.


Net Value

VAT %

VAT €

Gross Value

NET€

VAT%

IF VAT% = blank

THEN blank

ELSE NET€*VAT%

IF NET€ = blank

THEN blank

ELSE GROSS€ = NET€+VAT€


This has worked fine in OpenOffice version 2.x right up to LibreOffice version 3.3.2. Now, with version 3.4, LibreOffice returns a “#VALUE” error for the Gross value when there is no VAT. What appears to be happening is that the creation of the blank in the VAT € column (“”) is interpreted in version 3.4 as a text value, and so canot perform the addition.

I cannot see that this would be a particularly unusual configuration, and yet it has slipped through the updates unseen by the developers. I don't want to have to re-write all my spreadsheets to get around this bug, so I have uninstalled 3.4 and reverted to 3.3.2.

Let's hope that this does not become a permanent 'feature' of LibreOffice!