[theperfectdrugsk]

Hey everybody,

My old university login finally caught up with me and booted me off access to their Microsoft Office license. I damn sure ain't gonna start paying microsoft for the privilege of having my documents and spreadsheets crash randomly (at least not until they bring Clippy back), so I was wondering if y'all had any opinions/experience with the Office alternatives, specifically OpenOffice and LibreOffice. What do you like/dislike, anything weird I should know migrating from microsoft, and probably most importantly...are revisions/comments/tracking changes compatible between Open, Libre, and Microsoft office? Thanks!

[DefCynodont119]

Open Office is good. 

I used it for the entirety of my computer lit class in high school years ago and everything was transferred/graded onto a computer that had MSoffice and I passed.

As for format differences, icons might move a little in presentations, but that's about it. I've never encountered anything else compatibility-wise that was an issue.

Granted, I don't really use Office programs that often- so there could be something incompatible I don't know about.

[perihelion]

I use LibreOffice for everything at home.  I have occasionally run into issues where presentation files I've made in Libre do not look right when opened in Power Point.  I haven't had any issues at all converting between text documents.  Most of the important features in the LibreOffice spreadsheet program map to and from Excel effectively.  If you did some really hard-core spreadsheets using arrays and multi-axis scatter plots, you may find some things are a bit off.  Dynamic drop down menus I made in Excel all still work.

There's a bit of a learning curve no matter which way you jump.  I jumped LibreOffice because I like the idea of a free open source office suite.

[SypheDMar]

Since 2011 there should be no reason to use OpenOffice.

Microsoft Office is the best office suite especially if you're very Excel-based and work in an office using Excel. The obvious con is that it's gonna cost you and you'll be dependent on non-free software and support. I actually like the Ribbon the more I use it. I'm mostly around Excel but occasionally use Access, Doc, and Power Point. Doc I think is the most replaceable since many applications do word docs very well including Google Doc, LibreOffice, and even Abiword.

LibreOffice is a good free alternative. Some of the way Calc operates isn't quite as intuitive to switch to and makes habit-breaking very difficult, but it's not impossible if you need a free alternative.

Writer and Impress are fine. I found Impress to be somewhat buggy when I had it, but it might have gotten better. I never used Draw, Math, or Base.

[Colonol Dekker]

Since 2011 there should be no reason to use OpenOffice.

Why?  #Genuinelywithnoanimosity

[Ghostavo]

If you can tolerate using web applications, MS Office is available using an Outlook account for free, e.g. excel here.

[Thaeris]

I believe there's some sort of licensing thing that lets LibreOffice do what OpenOffice cannot. LibreOffice reportedly has more features these days versus OpenOffice. Your easiest bet for determining the difference is going to be swinging over to YouTube and watching a demonstration to help you decide.

Note that today, LibreOffice tends to be the current standard on most Linux distributions. I just got done installing the LibreOffice suite on my new Linux machine, in fact. I cannot tell you what is and what is not compatible between LO and MO documents at the moment, but a friend of mine on another forum switched to LibreOffice and is very happy with it for producing media. I did use the LO equivalent of Excel the other day for running some numbers, and did not note any difference in procedure as compared to Excel.

...In general, you are getting an office suite. Think back to earlier days, when you may have had a computer that came with Microsoft Works. Was Works that bad in comparison to Word for the average user? Probably not. It even came with a kick-ass dictionary that I really wish I could rip out of that old Vista machine and port to my other computers! I would not expect a seamless transition between MS and GPL 2 or 3 software, but I don't anticipate it will slow you down as a whole. Again, it's an office suite, and whatever you choose is probably going to be fine.

[theperfectdrugsk]

Fair enough. And yeah...I actually have LibreOffice on my ancient laptop running Linux Lite, but I've never used it (plus I wasn't sure how different Libre would be between Linux and Windows). Honestly, the main thing I'm worried about right now is compatibility for tracking edits, comments etc. Still trying to get a few papers published, and I kinda need my comments to be visible and in the right place for my coauthors, and vice versa.

Holy crap...I had completely forgotten about Works. Thanks for the trip down memory lane, hahaha. HLP: A Safe Space for the Olds. 

[Grizzly]

LibreOffice is created by the former OpenOffice developers, and continues to be updated. The devs split from Openoffice after it was acquired by Oracle, fearing that Oracle would shut down OpenOffice. Faced with the loss of most developers, Oracle shut down OpenOffice.

[Mongoose]

I've used LibreOffice for several years now, and while I used to notice some compatibility issues when moving documents back and forth from Word (especially with things like image embeds), I think they've made some big strides in that area, and I can't think of the last time I encountered a noticeable problem.  Obviously if you're not used to the program there's a bit of a learning curve, especially if you're enamored with Office's Ribbon, but it works just fine for all the basic tasks I need.  Plus you can't beat free.

[karajorma]

I've also been using OpenOffice at home and LibreOffice at work. And I'll sometimes get issues constantly switching between the two (funnily enough almost always with MSO rather than LO). If you're only LibreOffice it works just fine.

[BlueFlames]

I've found that LibreOffice's support for older MS Office formats (.doc, .xls, and .ppt) is noticably better than for the newer MS Office formats (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx).  Not sure why that is, since I thought the latter were the same as the former with some form of data compression applied, but documents saved in LibreOffice using the older formats more reliably render correctly in MS Office than if they're saved in the newer formats.

(I definately pulled out a lot of hair in grad school, when trying to figure out why my colleagues were getting garbage instead of legible charts, when I sent them .xlsx files.)

[The E]

The docx, xlsx and pptx formats are fundamentally different from the older formats. There's an entire sordid history behind it (The TL;DR being that the "x" formats are supposed to be an xml-based open format, but since MS was jealously protective of its monopoly, the standards were written in part with "do what the MS product does" as documentation, which understandably is kinda hard to do if you're not MS); the bottom line is that (and be aware that I am not 100% certain of this!) your best option for Open/LibreOffice <> MS Office interchange is to use the OpenDocument formats, which are a supposedly universal standard for docs and spreadsheets.

[BlueFlames]

My experience has been that Microsoft hasn't been particularly motivated to fully support open document formats.

Maybe they've gotten better in recent years, but using old MS formats in LibreOffice has been the most reliable option for me.

[karajorma]

Same here.

[jr2]

MS Office is free on mobile devices, so you *could* use BlueStacks or similar to get it free on desktop, but probably not worth the hassle.

I use LibreOffice, here's the difference between them: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/whats-the-difference-between-libreoffice-and-openoffice/   (2014)

https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-libreoffice-and-vs-openoffice/  (2017)

One of the main differences is LibreOffice releases fixes and feature updates faster.