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LibreOffice Turns Five

Posted by timothy on from the forking-eh dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Italo Vignoli, founding member of The Document Foundation, reflects on the project's five-year mark in an article on Opensource.com: "LibreOffice was launched as a fork of OpenOffice.org on September 28, 2010, by a tiny group of people representing the community in their capacity as community project leaders. At the time, forking the office suite was a brave -- and necessary -- decision, because the open source community did not expect OpenOffice.org to survive for long under Oracle stewardship." The project that was OpenOffice.org does still exist, in the form of Apache Open Office, but along with most Linux distros, I've switched completely to LibreOffice, after some initial misgivings.

3 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Neato by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Microsoft Office is 24. That's 4.8x better!

  2. LO vs OO by sjbe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1) Are there any genuinely significant differences between them that make one preferable to the other?

    Mostly that LibreOffice seems to have the more vibrant development effort behind it. OpenOffice seems to stagnate by comparison. I'd recommend trying both (they're free after all) but LibreOffice will fit most people's needs better I think. I think LO is a bit more feature rich today.

    2) Do either of them properly open those f*cking .DOCX files?

    Usually but no guarantees. The more complex the document the worse the chances of it working well. That said, I've standardized our company on LibreOffice and it's been quite a while since I've had to drag out a copy of Word to view a document.

    3) Do either of them save as .DOCX or .DOC, since that seems to be what most employers and recruiters insist on sending/receiving?

    Yes they can do it and it does DOC fairly well in most cases. Just don't get too fancy with the formatting. I usually send PDFs to employers however.

  3. Re: Switching by gQuigs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >3) I don't trust LibreOffice to output documents that won't embarrass me in front of my boss. People will say "PDF", but bosses always want to edit things.

    Then you better use the same exact version of MS Office with the same fonts installed on your machine....