Open Office

[jimtherev]

Stepdaughter's desktop is now past it, (1 GB memory; XP, MS Office '03 etc) so I'm buying a good refurb for her... prob cheaper than upgrading the existing, and can always add the existing hard drive to the "new" m/c.
Being too tight to pay £200+ for any recent MS Office, I'm looking at Open Office / Libre Office what have you.


Does anyone have any recommendation on what's best / what to avoid in that particular galaxy, or are they all much of a muchness?


Many thanks.

[Avtrician]

Open office is Libre, and is good.

It can be configured to write files in MS office format and is about 90% compatible. It has problems with MS Office macros.

It opens most MS document perfectly.

One handy function, is the ability to export a document as a PDF file
Its free.

[andytug]

Certainly if you don't like the modern "ribbon" interfaces of Ms Office you'll love LibreOffice /OpenOffice, it doesn't have all that. Basically unless you need the very advanced features like Visual Basic etc it's better in a lot of ways. Trt it, if you don't like get rid, costs nothing!
Main thing stopping it being widely adopted is lack of a full featured email client like Outlook with group calendars, integration with Lync etc, but for home use that's not an issue.

[Tinstaafl]

LibreOffice isn't quite the same as OpenOffice, although it was originally derived from it. Most development seems to be going into LibreOffice now.

Both use Open Document Format as their native file type but can also save in MS Office file types too. An advantage of .odf is that the file is just a .zip file so if something goes awry you can often access your data using standard .zip compression tools. Formatting is kept separate from the data so if you burrow through the .zip's file structure you can access the text. You might lose the formatting, but at least you have the possibility to copy & paste the data.

Some things I prefer about MS Office, others LibreOffice. I can't stand the MS ribbon so MS Office 2003 is the latest I use.

[Mac the Knife]

LibreOffice is/was a "fork" of OpenOffice (which started off as Sun's StarOffice).

OpenOffice is moribund/no longer being developed. Forget it.

LibreOffice is free (please donate a few bucks when you download it), cross-platform, excellent, and there are now very few incompatibilities with MSOffice.

You can save your docs in MSOffice format if you like, though the OpenDocument Format (ODF), is an ISO/IEC standard that is overtaking the MSOffice formats worldwide.

Use it and love it.

Mac

[gemma10]

I`m using OfficeNow 3.5. Served me well for years.

[OzBob]

I have been using the free version of Kingsoft WPS Office for several years, with equivalent alternatives; Writer (= MS Word), Spreadsheets (=MS Excel) and Presentation (= MS Powerpoint) and it works well.
WPS Office Suite: WPS Office 10 Free and WPS Office 10 Business (http://www.kingsoftstore.com/)

[jimtherev]

LibreOffice is/was a "fork" of OpenOffice (which started off as Sun's StarOffice).

OpenOffice is moribund/no longer being developed. Forget it.

LibreOffice is free (please donate a few bucks when you download it), cross-platform, excellent, and there are now very few incompatibilities with MSOffice.

You can save your docs in MSOffice format if you like, though the OpenDocument Format (ODF), is an ISO/IEC standard that is overtaking the MSOffice formats worldwide.

Use it and love it.

Mac
Yes, thanks, Mac. That was what I was enquiring; wondered if there were other 'flavours' of OO, as with Linux, where I'm using Mint... advised by some, despised by others!
Thanks all; gave me what I wanted.
Jim.

[Midland 331]

I've used Open Office for my business for many years. A very occasional glitch regarding profiles, but easily fixed as much knowledge online.