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Dave Lehnert
10-26-2015, 10:29 PM
I am such a lite home user that subscribing to MS office is not practical.

What is better in your opinion, Open Office or LiberOffice

Wade Lippman
10-26-2015, 10:54 PM
A year ago I compared them and liked LibreOffice. After 15 years my Office97 disk failed and I had to upgrade. LibreOffice is almost exactly like Office97, just a bit newer. You might not consider that an advantage, but it sold me.

Rich Engelhardt
10-27-2015, 12:36 AM
LibreOffice is my choice.
It installed easily on my *Android OS tablet as well as my Win 7 (now Win 10) laptop.

*My wife bought me a cheap ($49) RCA tablet that came with a keyboard/case for free.
It run Android 4.3.
Open Office might work just as well, I don't know. I'm running LibreOffice on my laptop and installed the same on the tablet so I could use a couple of spreadsheets I had.

Curt Harms
10-27-2015, 8:31 AM
I think LibreOffice is getting most of the development effort these days. There is another lesser known office suite, Kingsoft Office (http://www.kingsoftstore.com/software) that is supposed to be better than Libre Office if you are required to open and save MS Office formatted files. I have no experience with it. Libre Office has done what I need to do.

Dan Hintz
10-27-2015, 8:56 AM
This article might help with your decision... or it may not.
http://www.howtogeek.com/187663/openoffice-vs.-libreoffice-whats-the-difference-and-which-should-you-use/

lowell holmes
10-27-2015, 9:54 AM
I did not know about LibreOffice. I have the Open Office installed and it does everything the Microsoft Office did before it became corrupted.

Microsoft would not let me download a fresh copy even though I had a download key (which I had purchased).

I blew them off and use the Open Office Suite. I can't tell the difference.

Tom Stenzel
10-27-2015, 10:53 AM
On my ancient Win XP box (Athlon XP processor) I tried both. Openoffice seemed a touch faster to start up but bogged down more in use. Libreoffice had more features but nothing I used.

Shortly after Libreoffice started the 4.xx series it stopped working on my computer entirely, would error on startup. No more experiments, I had to go with Openoffice.

When Win XP stopped being supported I switched to Linux (Debian Wheezy, works on my old computer) Libreoffice was supported through the repositories, Openoffice wasn't. So I switched. No differences AFAICT.

I used Microsoft Office at work, the problem I had with the Libre/Open offices was the anchoring of graphics. Things would seem to move about no matter the setting. Looking at the settings left me befuddled at times.

The other is some things aren't automatic. If you have a table of contents to a document and add an entry by selecting text and applying the appropriate style, Word will add it to the table of contents automatically. With Libreoffice/Openoffice you have to tell it to update. Moving from Word you'll wonder what went wrong. It took more than a few AHA! moments to figure things out.

All in all both work.

-Tom

paul cottingham
10-27-2015, 1:53 PM
For the most part, the changes to open or libre office is not much worse than transitioning between versions of office.

and you don't have to pay for the privilege.

Oh, and Libre is being worked on more consistently, so i would probably go that way.

Lee Schierer
10-27-2015, 2:10 PM
I use open office and it does everything that I need and it works interchangeably with MS Office files with no problem.

Dan Hintz
10-27-2015, 2:23 PM
My biggest problem with those free/open-source packages has always been graphics. They never stay where I put them, they never transfer properly from one package to another (try opening a "quality" Word layout in one of those packages... screw-up city!), etc. Stick with paid or free and you're fine, but don't try to mix the two.

paul cottingham
10-27-2015, 3:22 PM
My biggest problem with those free/open-source packages has always been graphics. They never stay where I put them, they never transfer properly from one package to another (try opening a "quality" Word layout in one of those packages... screw-up city!), etc. Stick with paid or free and you're fine, but don't try to mix the two.

Interesting. My experience has been that upgrading Word often causes graphics problems, period. And upgrading from paid to open causes some issues, but not as many.

YMMV of course.

Curt Harms
10-28-2015, 8:56 AM
My biggest problem with those free/open-source packages has always been graphics. They never stay where I put them, they never transfer properly from one package to another (try opening a "quality" Word layout in one of those packages... screw-up city!), etc. Stick with paid or free and you're fine, but don't try to mix the two.


Using the word "quality" with a touch of sarcasm? :p It makes sense that if you want 100% fidelity with a proprietary file format, you need to use the software that produces that proprietary file format. I've not had a problem open .doc or .docx but then any MSO files I need to open are pretty simple, no "all singing all dancing" stuff. What I've heard works is to open the Word document, save it as a native file (odt) edit that, save it then save as a .doc file. I kinda wonder if Word is the best tool for complex graphics stuff but I guess if the only tool you have/know is Word then.......

I've also read that if Word is used as it's intended, making use of styles rather than spaces, tabs, returns etc. for formatting the files 'travel' much better. But who does that, or even knows how?