Compared and Contrasted: OpenOffice V. LibreOffice

GMGruman writes "Oracle's imposition of fees for some OpenOffice capabilities caused some of the venerable open source office suite's creators to head out on their own and create LibreOffice as a truly free OSS tool. InfoWorld's Neil McAllister reviews the two OSS productivity tools side by side to figure out where they differ, and whether you can jettison Oracle's OpenOffice safely for the fully free LibreOffice."

Comments

Printable version

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the print version (all one one page instead of four). There's still ads, but it's better.
Also, frist psto?

Re:Printable version

[Sparks23]

Safari comes with a Reader mode built-in, and there's the Readability add-on for Firefox and a similar one for Chrome. For general browser-agnostic solutions, often with mobile variants, there is the web version of Readability, or the Instapaper service.

To the best of my knowledge, all of those will slurp in multiple pages of an article when producing the clean/readable version of the article.

Re:Printable version

[Requiem18th]

Firefox's Autopager does the same thing, I guess. Haven't tried Safari since leaving Windows.

All about features, not stability

[Animats]

(Read the print version of the article on one page. It's one of those "short article spread across many ad-heavy pages" crap sites.)

The article just compares the feature lists. It's not clear if either is better from a bug standpoint. A big problem with OpenOffice is that it tends to crash too much. (Especially, for some reason, when exiting.) Also, OpenOffice had some features written in Java, but they were optional. Did LibreOffice get rid of the Oracle Java parts, replace them with something, or what?

It's encouraging that LibreOffice is around. I've been using OpenOffice since 1.0, and haven't used a version of Microsoft Word later than Word 97. OpenOffice in its later incarnations isn't bad, although it still, after ten years, has an amateurish feel to it.

Re:All about features, not stability

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The article just compares the feature lists.

This isn't true at all. While their testing was very limited they notes several bugs where the specs claimed a feature would work, but did not actually function or was inaccessible.

Also, OpenOffice had some features written in Java, but they were optional. Did LibreOffice get rid of the Oracle Java parts, replace them with something, or what?

If you had RTFA you'd note the discussion of needing to download the JRE if you used LibreOffice in order to get some features to work. So, no, there is still a dependency. You'd also note the JRE comes bundled with OpenOffice, but is an out of date version.

OpenOffice in its later incarnations isn't bad, although it still, after ten years, has an amateurish feel to it.

Agreed. It really needs some good paid developers from Canonical or Redhat or someone to do proper usability assessment and testing, and then rework the UI and other relevant parts of the code.

Re:All about features, not stability

[jfengel]

The main thing I've seen is that it seems to open a lot faster. That's just anecdotal; I haven't used a stopwatch and I only have a limited set of machines. But I'm used to downloaded Excel spreadsheets taking tens-of-seconds to open, especially the first time. (I don't like fast-starters because they make the already interminable Windows startup even slower.)

Re:All about features, not stability

[icebike]

Downloading a JRE doesn't seem that big of a deal. Most people have that installed already.

The review specifically stated:

I found no difference between the two offerings either in performance or stability. Neither crashed on me, even when handling documents designed to put productivity apps through the wringer.

That is my assessment as well. I've never seen any crashes on either version.

I agree that the UI puts things in odd places, and some things are done in un-obvious ways.

But basically I disagree with the author's "amateurish" assessment. That is pure Microsoft speak there, which translates into "Not all the things learned from years of swearing at Word translate to either of these packages".

Re:All about features, not stability

[tverbeek]

"I agree that the UI puts things in odd places, and some things are done in un-obvious ways." Sounds like a description of Microsoft Office to me.

Re:All about features, not stability

[magus_melchior]

Did LibreOffice get rid of the Oracle Java parts, replace them with something, or what?

The article says that LO does support Java, but you need to download it separately (licensing issues?). Certain features (database for one) require Java, but for basic Word/Excel clone stuff, you probably don't need it.

Re:All about features, not stability

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I agree that the UI puts things in odd places, and some things are done in un-obvious ways. But basically I disagree with the author's "amateurish" assessment. That is pure Microsoft speak there, which translates into "Not all the things learned from years of swearing at Word translate to either of these packages".

Comical, but fair. User interface design is so often done poorly in the computing world that calling terrible usability amateurish is not really fair. Individual mileage may vary. I'm, perhaps, overly harsh because I use OS X as my default desktop, only resorting to Ubuntu or Windows when I need specific software for that platform or that only runs well on that platform, or when testing on multiple platforms. As such, most of the software I use inherits a lot of good usability defaults from the dev tools and native UI widgets. OpenOffice has always ignored OS X native UI, however, concentrating instead on consistency across platforms and ignoring both the UI issues this causes and the functionality offered by OS X to native programs, which OO and LibreOffice cannot use (system services for example). This makes it seem like a usability disaster on OS X, when in truth it is just another poor to average usability program, badly ported to an OS it was clearly not designed for.

As for OO versus MS Office, I had a fun interaction at work where a co-worker was demanding MS Office because they did not like the supplied OO. When they obtained it, it was the new version with a completely different interface than they were used to and they ended up switching back in short order. Personally, I've used both about the same amount and curse at both equally. Word probably takes the cake for hellish UI design choices, but Calc is pretty close.

Re:All about features, not stability

[Belial6]

Don't kid yourself about OSX. You may like it, but it has it's own share of UI disasters. Some like having the Trash and Eject be the same UI target were a dumb idea from day one. Some, like having all of the menus at the top of the screen made sense when we were on low resolution single screen systems, but are detriments in multi-monitor high resolutions systems, and some of them are brand new bonehead decisions like choose to use a green plus for a button that will shrink the screen.

Re:All about features, not stability

[TheRaven64]

LibreOffice incorporates all of Novell's patches. A lot of these were related to improving startup time, mostly by turning static initialisers into lazy initialisation, but also by tweaking the linkage so the dynamic loader doesn't have to spend so much time resolving symbols. Most of the others are related to improving MS compatibility, and depending on who you listen to are either vital to adoption or are a MS-spawned patent trap.

Re:All about features, not stability

[gad_zuki!]

>Downloading a JRE doesn't seem that big of a deal. Most people have that installed already.

Its a huge deal. Most people don't have it installed. There's very little reason for more end users to have java.

On top if it, if you read about the main vectors for malware, you'll see java vulnerabilities top the list. Having to install java and increasing your attack surface by a ridiculous degree isn't worth it for any office product. Imagine if MS forced people to install silverlight, slashdot would be having conniptions, but java is okay? No thanks. I don't let friends and family have java or use IE or Adobe Reader. Their malware levels are almost non-existent now. Funny how that works.

Re:All about features, not stability

[Belial6]

Fit's law is a joke. In a best case scenario, the amount of time it would save is small enough to be statistical noise. For someone who has never touched a mouse before, you might see some benefit, but it only takes days for someone to become proficient enough with a mouse that it loses it's benefits. In multi screen modes you not only have the longer distance, but you also have to move to a second screen that is not necessarily the same size and shape. It also requires that you reorient your vision form one screen to another to find your place. After all, not every click is going to be in the corner. It also has the problem of the user having to figure out what window the menu applies to. That more than consumes the tiny amounts of time and effort that would be saved with Fit's Law. It could be argued that the saved real estate was worth the drawbacks of the single menu for all applications, but real estate is less valuable now than the benefit of clearly associating a menu with a window.

I don't know what you are talking about Linux requiring the movement of the mouse in specific patterns.

As for symbols, Windows has a picture of what it will do. One big window for full screen where you can see only one window. Two smaller windows for the mode that lets you see more than one windows. Clearly, there was at least an attempt to have icons that had some kind of association with what would happen. I personally think they did a perfectly fine job with them. OSX on the other hand used a symbol, that means exactly the opposite of what the button does half the time. Plus means add or more. There is never a case where a plus symbol should be used to shrink a screen. It is worse than arbitrary. It is wrong. A squiggly line, a # symbol, an picture of an apple, would all be fine if meaningless. A plus symbol is not meaningless, it is wrong. Then the color choice gets added to that. Apple is using Green, Yellow, and Red. When these colors are put together in a row, it is a reference to a stop light. The fact that red, the universal symbol for stop is used to close the window (some times the app, but that is a whole other UI screwup). Using Green along side of it in a Green Yellow Red combination assigns 'Go' to the color. That means the green plus has the symbol 'Go More' or 'Go Bigger'. That is simply not what the button does. The OSX symbol isn't "not easily interpretable". A green plus assigned to a window is very clearly marked. It is just that the button doesn't do what it is marked to do. Sure, you can learn that it is labeled badly, just as we can learn that hamburgers are not made with ham. It doesn't make it correct.

Re:All about features, not stability

[mug funky]

conveniently ignored the part about command-o being two relatively small keypresses versus one really big one?

you could flip that and say that the single (granted small, out of the way key) keypress F2 for renaming in windows is probably quite a good solution.

i find renaming to be an annoying task in OSX. the double-click speed mixed with my own impatience means it's pot luck as to whether i rename the next file or open it.

removal of all eject and restart buttons is a big problem. as is the steadfast, bloody-minded and consistent refusal to get out of the '80s and put at least a second button on their mouse. instead they have 1 big button that covers the entire surface of the thing, and after a week of use the thing's so fucked it can't tell if you pressed the left or right side unless you place your fingers in ergonomically painful positions.

the nipple-mouse does not cut it - the trackball thing is so flimsy that on the mac i use most frequently i can't even scroll up (but i can scroll down and side-by-side). don't even fucking get me started on the clicking and dragging by clutching the sides with my thumb-and-weakest-finger causing shooting pain up the sides of my arm. macs are used for design! who would have guessed people would click-and-drag quite often?

a lack of "process priority" in their equivalent of windows' task manager is a big pain - having to use terminal and sudo renice to perform a task i do several times an hour on a PC.

how about having no menu button on the goddamned "pro cinema HD" displays. try doing colour critical work where 2 identical monitors have the same brightness setting (the only setting you have control on the actual screen), running the exact same colour profile, can look completely different, with no remedy in software to correct for it without massive and egregious loss of precision. nothing worse than having a client look between 2 different monitors, and 1 different broadcast monitor and ask you which one they're meant to be looking at.

okay, i'm ranting now. but Mac sucks at UI no matter how much the fanboys squeal that they're actually not stupid, they're advaaanced.

Re:All about features, not stability

[lennier]

I suppose one could just as easily ask, who launches icons from the windowing GUI using the keyboard, but not using Spotlight? Who does it so often that a key combination rather than a keypress slows them down?

Interesting you should say that.

It's only my anecdotal observation, but whenever I compare the Windows to Mac users I know, I always get the impression that the Mac users are very keyboard-shy compared to the Windows ones, and less efficient.

The Windows users will use a very fluid mix of mouse and keyboard gestures, but the Mac users tend to use mouse-only gestures, and generally take a much longer time to get anything done. In fact it's painful for me to sit behind a Mac user and watch them deliberately left-click, drag, move, for about ten seconds when it would take about two accelerator keys. I see their hands all bunched up in claws from the intensity of extended delicate mousing and the muscle concentration it requires and think 'that can't be healthy'.

Maybe I just have a poor selection of non-proficient Mac users to observe? But they seem to be the 'power user' type to me.

Re:so who won?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Depends

Re:so who won?

[jbolden]

Well 6 words: Not different enough yet to matter.

Tl, dr

[Noughmad]

To summarize the summary of the summary: They're the same.

Outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither has an equivalent to Outlook. I would think that the corporate lock-in to Outlook would be a strong message to OS writers that this is a big opportunity. I keep hearing from MS Office users that they'd ditch Office in a nanosecond if there was a competitor to Outlook, but since there isn't they don't bother moving to the OpenOffice/LibreOffice half-offering.

Re:Outlook

[Desler]

He said "competitor" not half-assed attempts at cloning Outlook but with reduced functionality that somehow end up being buggier than Outlook is.

Re:Outlook

[kabloom]

Nobody's integrated an Outlook substitute into OpenOffice because Outlook is very different from the other office applications (which are all centered around creating documents of various types). Outlook is focused on connectivity, mainly email, address books, and calendars and the open source world has had a full stack for these capabilities for a long time. The recommended way to replace Outlook is with open protocols (IMAP, LDAP, CalDAV), but if you need Microsoft Exchange support, that's available too. One can use Evolution as a substitute for Outlook.

Re:Outlook

[0racle]

Outlook is more then just a e-mail reader. Corporate support for Outlook and nothing else is from running Exchange as their collaboration suite. Nothing works better with Exchange than Outlook and replacing all the functionality of Exchange/Outlook is not easy.

Re:Outlook

[Voyager529]

*facepalm*

Zimbra, as has been mentioned before, is among the closest I've seen, but the list you wrote are NOT outlook substitutes.

I know a LOT of Outlook users, and NONE of them have ever listed Usenet as a necessary feature. If you're going to list Thunderbird as a viable alternative, you'll then by definition have to also list Windows Live Mail, since techncially it does do e-mail. ignoring user familiarity and data lock-in, here's what you're missing:

-Exchange support - yes, Exchange does POP3 and imap, but device sync, user policy and dozens of other backend features make it a staple in many server rooms. Again, there are FOSS alternatives, but "just because" isn't a good enough reason to ditch a perfectly working exchange server for a product many sysadmins don't know how to use (and "well they should" is a load of crap if their organization isn't using a non-exchange product already, and most of us have better things to do in our day like work on the actual Exchange server). There's also Blackberry server, OWA, and a swath of other things in the exchange ecosystem that the alternatives simply can't compete with yet.

-Calendar features - Sunbird is great, and has decent Thunderbird collaboration, but it's nowhere near as fluid. Meeting requests, room scheduling, and 'presence' features are just a few things off the top of my head that my office would crucify me for if I switched them to something else.

-Instant search of large mailboxes - can any of the applications you list do near-instant, as-you-type searches of inboxes that are 20GBytes or larger? heck, how do they handle mail of that volume? It's not as ridiculous as you might think, I've got several users with PST files that large.

Outlook has its issues (the fact that PST repair utilities exist is telling of one of them), but at the end of the day, I've yet to see an e-mail program of the FOSS variety that can compare to Outlook. Zimbra is pretty close, but it still comes up short - ask anyone in my office.

Re:Outlook

[icebike]

replacing all the functionality of Exchange/Outlook is not easy.

Nor even remotely necessary.

Re:Outlook

[BitZtream]

It is if you want to replace Outlook.

My company makes sells a service which can be used from within Outlook via an COM addon. A couple things I can tell you about Outlook users.

They aren't using it for email only. Those people quickly go switch to something that doesn't suck at reading email.

Sales people LIVE in Outlook. Contacts, notes, scheduling, reminders, workflow, document management, CRM and sales process are just the first and obvious things that come to mind. Every one of our customers that uses Outlook in a corporate environment has multiple plugins installed before we even get to them. These plugins make Outlook a client for some other system in their company and typically roll it all into one client reasonable well for the more well established plugins.

To put it bluntly, as much as Outlook sucks for Email, it is in a class all by itself when it comes to being a PIM for someone in a large company.

Nor even remotely necessary.

What you utterly fail to understand is while you think Outlook is an email client, you have absolutely no clue how people actually use it in the real world. You're just spouting off random crap because you think you understand what Outlook is used for, when in reality you don't. Its not a email client, its a PIM with a large feature set that you actually DO need to mimic if you expect people to use something else.

There isn't a Outlook/Exchange replacement, I've been looking for years. If it wasn't needed or people didn't want the features of Outlook, people would use something else in large companies ... but look around, it doesn't happen unless.

I haven't even touched on server side features.

With all that said, I freaking hate Outlook and Exchange, they are big over complicated piles of crap that need to be replaced by an open alternative, but thats not going to happen until the OSS world stops trying to change the way people use software like Outlook into their model and instead tries to make software that fits what those users want. That won't happen until someone can make money off it as its a very big project to take on.

Re:Outlook

[Byzantine]

One can use Evolution as a substitute for Outlook.

Maybe I'm alone here, but I won't use Evolution until it supports recurring tasks. And since that particular bug has gone unclosed for over eleven years, I'm not holding my breath. Well, not anymore.

Re:Outlook

[Machtyn]

There are a few things that Microsoft does very well that the OSS world hasn't had the ability to duplicate. Excel is one. It flat out beats Calc for advanced functionality. I still use Calc. Outlook/Exchange for all the reasons the parent just detailed. I still use Thunderbird. I haven't really made an in-depth research for an OSS/FLOSS alternative for shared address books, notes, and calendars that integrate seemlessly with Thunderbird. I've seen a few that have made the attempt and haven't quite succeeded (yet), have I missed something?

Re:Outlook

[Voyager529]

I'm a bit of a pragmatist. Richard Stallman-like loyalty to FOSS be damned if my users can't do what they need to do for the company to be productive. Your NFS analogy falls flat because users can still store files and have share-level and file-level permissions added via NTFS. It doesn't support ZFS either, but if I wanted to, I could easily build a FreeNAS and have Windows talk to it with the users being none the wiser.

*YOUR* bubble involves the notion that users are going to notice what file system is on the computers they run. Given that half the staff has an iPhone or Android phone and the other half wants one of the above, neither of which come with file system management utilities out of the box, it's a safe bet that they won't care in the slightest. They *will*, however, care if I took away their ability to deal with large mailboxes and exchange meeting requests, or radically altered the process. While our internet service here is firewalled with a Linux appliance and our fax system soon will be, replacing our entire server infrastructure with Linux machines will do nothing but cost us money. How? our financial management software, for one, is Windows only. "Free as in speech" doesn't mean squat to a finance department that can NO LONGER DO THEIR JOBS because their financial management software no longer functions. Even if you were able to find me collaborative bookkeeping software that was able to handle tens of thousands of financial entries per fiscal quarter with the kind of support I get from that vendor (when I call, it's one of four people who all know me by my first name, know the internal politics, know the systems, and know my limits of abilities, etc.), there's still the hours of migrating the data from one system to the other. A full blown linux stack is useless for us because there's a dozen other windows-only applications that run our business that don't have Linux counterparts designed to scale to the magnitude that we need it to.

Even if you said, "okay, just switch your mail server then", I again ask the question - why? for a warm fuzzy feeling that I'm not giving my money to Microsoft - the Microsoft that's already got my money for the present Exchange server? So that the mail store can run on ZFS and be somewhat more fault tolerant? Would whatever the product I'd switch to be able to seamlessly import the hundreds of gigabytes of mail that already exists and would cost me my job if it wasn't able to be migrated? So I get better support than having every question I've ever had exactly one Google search away?

Exchange isn't the only option, but - stay with me now - I've yet to see a compelling reason to switch AWAY from it. Sure, it makes sense if you're starting from scratch. Heck, I'm working with another client to replace their present Squirrelmail abomination with a Zimbra stack, so I'm not opposed to it in a broad sense. But I'm still waiting to hear the list of specific (and neither "more secure" nor "free [in any sense of the word]" fit that criteria) functionality that would make a switch away from Exchange worth the migration.

As for 'instant search', as I said to another reply, it does require the freely downloadable Windows Desktop Search plugin. The semantics of what exactly is being searched is irrelevant to exactly all of my end users as long as the e-mail they're thinking of is found at the end of the day.

Re:Outlook

[Darinbob]

This tends to require that the entire company make a conscious effort to allow alternatives to Outlook. Ie, you need IT buy in, and no one is more pro-Microsoft and anti-user-choice than IT. It requires buy in from everyone so that they don't go and create some automation script that requires others to use an Outlook form. It means that when you hire new IT people you need to make sure that they're ok working in a company that is not 100% Microsoft.

Sure, everything can start off wholesome. But over time the Microsoft virus can start creeping in. Then you'll find that you're on the losing end, and everyone is glaring at you for being the person blocking "progress" because they're wasting money supporting servers for open protocols when they already have Microsoft sanctified servers for most people.

Re:Outlook

[MikeBabcock]

Agreed. As an open source software advocate and user, I'm always wondering when someone with the skills required will write a proper replacement for Outlook's non-Email capabilities. That is to say, I don't value Outlook as an E-mail platform at all. Its the bundled crap they threw in after the failure of Schedule+ that's become nearly necessary in business circles.

PS Evolution is terrible in comparison.

Re:Outlook

[hairyfeet]

Hear hear! Your posting is a perfect example of what I've been trying to get across for years here, in that the problem is never Windows and Office and that magically switching Windows for Linux and MS Office for OO.o will just get you fired because it is the 40 billion other programs that without which you have employees being paid to flick paper airplanes at each other and update their FB profile that bites you in the ass HARD.

For me with my customers the PITA that makes Linux a non option is QuickBooks. Here QuickBooks is God and anyone who has sat down with a small business owner and taken an overview of the situation will see why: With QB you can have the whole smash, from payroll and inventory to taxes and parts, all handled by a single "QuickBooks Girl" (and for some reason it is ALWAYS a "QuickBooks Girl". If I didn't know better I'd say they had a union rule or something) and everything "just works" and the QB Girl takes care of the paperwork and everything just runs smooth.

And I'm sorry Linux guys but I tried to learn and like GnuCash, i really did. but GnuCash is to QB what Gimp is to photoshop, there simply is NO comparison. And trying to get QB to run stable on Linux will make you pull your hair out and if QB is down you might as well send everyone home for all the work that'll get done.

So while there is nothing wrong with OO.o, in fact I hand it out to every single home user with new builds, it is never OO.o that is the problem. like others pointed out it is Outlook which has fifty plugins that make it a kick ass PIM, it is Exchange that ties everything together all nice and neat, it is those fifty bazillion mission critical apps that a company has come to depend on that simply have NO equivalent in Linux.

If Linux is gonna make inroads on the desktop it'll have to be in the home NOT in business where too much money and data is already tied up in solutions that get the job done. Sadly the only Linux I see being pushed to the home is Ubuntu, which is so bleeding edge the wallpaper should be a straight razor and which breaks more than it fixes with each release. But expecting you can convert businesses by simply replacing Windows and Office is not only naive and unrealistic, in most businesses it would be suicide. Without the apps and collaborative software to tie everything together work simply doesn't get done, and most of those apps are Windows only and a royal PITA to switch from. It would be nice if we could all just switch to any OS and still be able to work, but that just isn't reality for most ATM.

Summary so you don't need to RTFA

[commodore6502]

They are the same.
- except LibreOffice doesn't come with Java for the database
- and LO has some new stuff like SVG and MSworks/WordPerfect file support

I wonder how GO-oo and LibreOffice compare?

Re:Summary so you don't need to RTFA

[shutdown -p now]

I wonder how GO-oo and LibreOffice compare?

Go-OO does not exist as a standalone project anymore. The only reason why it was there in the first place is the difficulty to get the patches accepted into mainstream by Sun/Oracle. This problem doesn't exist with LibreOffice, and, indeed, one of the first things they did after forking was to merge Go-OO in.

Re:so who won?

[TaoPhoenix]

Libre.

(Because Oracle is showing their evil ways, so go Libre and try to deal with the downsides, which appear to be minimal.)

OpenOffice is also fully free

[kabloom]

OpenOffice and LibreOffice are both fully free. The difference between OpenOffice and LibreOffice is who's in charge, and whose contributions are getting accepted.

Not looking back

[icebike]

At work we (and some of our customers) switched to OOO about 3 years ago, and for the types of documents (including some rather large manuals) it works just fine, and imported all of our old documents, from multiple different versions of MSOffice and Word.

When the devs jumped ship, we jumped with them to LibreOffice, retaining just a few seats of OOO in our customers shop, because they already paid for support contracts. But reports are that they have not been happy with what little help they got. The phone techs knew less than our people.

There are some missing functions that MS-Office users wish were available, and maddeningly well hidden features as well as stuff that just does not work. But these were not mainstream functionality that we needed in our shop.

LibreOffice is currently every bit as good as OOO, and in some ways better. Going forward, all the wet-ware is in their corner, and Oracle will probably take a year bringing replacements up to speed before any serious bugs can be addressed, let alone new features. (Although nothing will stop them from feeding off of the efforts of LibreOffice).

  LibreOffice probably needs to think about a revenue stream for the future. I'm fine with that. Let those who absolutely have to have support contracts in place (for what ever reason) foot the bill.

Re:Not looking back

[NortySpock]

LibreOffice probably needs to think about a revenue stream for the future.

They have a funding drive going on right now.

They have a lot of people on their side, but the real issue will be paying down the technical debt in the codebase. It really needs an overhaul.

Ho Hum article.

[BrokenHalo]

I haven't yet used LibreOffice, but I have been using OOo and NeoOffice (the Mac-native version of OOo) for years, and on the whole, I'm pretty happy with both. I'm a bit curious as to why TFA's author doesn't bother to mention NeoOffice. One glaring error I did spot is on the 3rd page of TFA where it is mentioned that Libre now supports SVG. All versions of the code have in fact done so for some time.

No doubt we shall shortly see posts from the Microsoft shills bagging OOo and variants, but the simple truth is that for 99.9% of purposes, the FOSS offerings are perfectly adequate.

Re:Ho Hum article.

[udoschuermann]

Track changes, as in who made what alterations to the document (additions, removals, etc.) shown visually? Writer has had that feature for a few years at least.

As to footnotes, I've never had an issue with those in OOo, but MS Word destroyed entire documents (as in start from scratch because it no longer loads) when editing foot notes, and repeatedly replaced inserted images with big red X's, and other "fun" things to drive me to the brink. OOo has not been flawless, but it's treated me a lot better over the years than MS Word, and has never lost me data which is a lot more than can be said for MS Word. And yes, I have documents that are several hundred, and some even close to a thousand pages long. Well, YMMV.

As to the article, well, it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. Bleah.

Re:so who won?

[ubrgeek]

I'm _far_ from a power user with Office, but I can get around with it. Having used Office 2008 for the Mac for years (and not wanting/able to spend the money on the upgrade) I got tired of how slow and unresponsive it got. I started looking around for a replacement. I didn't want to pick up iWork as I kept hearing mixed things about it. I started playing around with Abiword but realized I might as well find something more comprehensive so I could ditch Office entirely. Based on a number of reviews/articles I decided to get LibreOffice (I didn't know about the Oracle angle, but I don't think it would have mattered to me) because the native OS X version looked the most polished (and I kept seeing things about porting OpenOffice to OS X - note: I don't know if those were links to binaries already compiled or instructions on how to do so. I really didn't want to mess around with anything other than, "Hey look. I double-clicked and it works.) Like I said, I'm not a power user but to date LibreOffice has done what I need. I've exported and imported Doc files via Word and Google Docs, haven't seemed to lose formatting (although I haven't tried track changes).

Re:so who won?

[DrgnDancer]

More than one word, but the article pretty much, I think, nails it: If you *have* to have support becasue of IT rules or something, OO.o is the only choice. Feature-wise they're all but I identical; but since most of the developers went to Libre, the smart money is on it improving more and faster as time goes on.

Isn't LibreOffice, for now, Go-oo?

[blind biker]

As far as I know, Libre Office is based mostly (entirely?) on Novell's Go-oo. So this review compares OpenOffice with the much extended and improved Go-oo, which has better multilanguage support, a larger clip-art collection and better MS Office filters. Yes, this kind of article should have been written a long time ago, way before Libre Office appeared, because Go-oo deserved more exposure.

Better late than never.

Re:so who won?

[GameboyRMH]

LibreOffice

--tl;dr friendly section ends here--

LibreOffice has everything that OO.org has, plus the Go-OO patches, minus an evil megacorporation at the reigns.

Good and bad

[dskoll]

I recently switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice on Debian. LibreOffice is mostly better, and the SVG import is a killer feature for me.

However, the one really bad thing about LibreOffice is that "Help" is essentially non-functional. It opens up a LibreOffice help web site that is incomplete and difficult to search. OO's built-in "Help" feature was much better. I don't know why LibreOffice took it out (licensing restrictions, perhaps?)

Re:If it needs Java

[micheas]

Java is not needed. Java is used for some of the extensions, such as the save to a website running mediawiki page extension, and the mail merge extension.

The last I check the bug tracker libre office is planning on replacing the database connector with one that does not require java, so mail merge will not require java.

Re:What fees!

[udoschuermann]

the reasoning to fork it was phenomenally stupid

No, forking LO from OO.o was primarily a matter of getting development to move forward again at a better than glacial pace: The OO.o license requires submitted code to become Sun's (and now Oracle's) property. This kept many from donating their code, depositing it at Go-OO, instead. These changes are now moving into LO, which is starting to show faster improvement than OO.o.

If you think that is stupid, then ... well, ... you're entitled to your opinion. :)

with Windows as only a secondary platform

[hduff]

FTA "It seems most of the new development for LibreOffice is being done on Linux, with Windows as only a secondary platform."

And how's that feel?

LaTeX

[SwedishPenguin]

I've never really seen much of a need for an "office suite". LaTeX is much better at producing documents, spreadsheets may be of use for some minor calculations occasionally but for the things many companies use it for, a database would be better suited for the job. For presentations I recently discovered the powerdot package for LaTeX, it really works great and it's very easy to produce presentations that actually look good unlike the ones I've tried making in OO Impress...

Re:Poor .docx support?

[udoschuermann]

If its true that OpenOffice and LibreOffice have poor support for Office 2007 and 2010 formats, that is going to be a MAJOR stumbling block against many people migrating. No company in their right mind is going to migrate if they are going to loose document-compatability with their clients.

For relatively simple documents conversion support is quite decent, for complex ones, it's can be a real crap shoot from what I've seen and heard. But this is much more a data conversion than a capabilities issue. In fact, I'd be surprised if there is any document created in MS Word that cannot be created in LO or OO.o, and vice versa.

With something as complex as a document, there will always be conversion issues, but until more people start using software that does not force them into a continual upgrade cycle, the pain for the rest of us will not lessen by much.

As for me, I have created all my documents in OO.o (and now in LO) for many years. I export them to .doc when necessary; the .doc/.docx files I receive, I import into OO.o / LO, and export them again as .doc if I modify them and double check them with MS Office: They've always been fine, and I have yet to hear any screaming around the office. I've seen worse conversion jobs (even crashes) between different versions of MS Office.

Re:What fees!

[FlyingGuy]

Well I disagree, but reasonable people can.

As far as submitted code becoming the property of Oracle (nee Sun ) that is something I have not read in their license yet. I kind of doubt they could actually do that since it had been open source ( I think it was GPL ) and at any rate if you made a contribution you could easily mark your code as (c) yourself and licensed under GPL to Oracle, which would force them to either use it or lose it and if the contribution was that important I think they would use , but I digress.

Sun first published Star Office to make money, when they couldn't they gave it away. If it was forkable then it had to have been under some flavor of GPL Sun simply had to put the source out there with some sort of license other then proprietary

But I really think this is on par with the whole MySql drama. Perhaps they will shove "features" into it faster, but I am also betting the bug count will go up as well. Even now other users have posted that the damn thing is unstable, especially on shut down. If they forked the build code then it should be as solid as the Oracle version, but its not and that means they have broken it already. Way to go fella's!