LibreOffice

Apologies for negativity, but LibreOffice has been something of a disaster here.

Ubuntu switched from OpenOffice with their latest release. They really shouldn't have - LibreOffice's quality control is apparently quite poor and serious bugs that affect my workflow have crept in, over the OpenOffice 3.3 counterpart.

Firstly, caching of linked documents:
I have dozens of spreadsheets which link together in a web of horrifying complexity. LibreOffice attempts to improve performance by caching the external data. Unfortunately, that means when I change data in one sheet it doesn't change in another. Even opening and closing the document doesn't help. Even clicking 'update' in Edit->Links doesn't work. I have to close and reopen the application.

Second, corrupting of linked documents URIs:
Sometimes saving a document in LibreOffice causes the URIs of linked documents to become fixed (as seen in Edit->Links). This is bad as I move between several computers over the day, each of which may access the documents differently (/home/techuser/docs/ on the server, /Volumes/techuser/docs/ on a Mac Samba connection, //server/techusers/docs/ on Windows).
After using LibreOffice on a Linux machine, the paths get stuck as "/home/techuser/...". Attempting to open elsewhere results in sheets with little more that "!REF" messages. At first I restored backups and resigned myself to losing the recent changes, later I found that manually settings the links in Edit->Links fixed it.

What's the solution? "apt-get remove libreoffice" then download the genuine openoffice.org .deb files.

I am serious about my data. I have trusted OpenOffice and StarOffice for around a decade now. Ubuntu have unfortunately jumped into the LibreOffice camp far too soon and its image has suffered as a result.