What is the difference between OpenOffice and LibreOffice? I understand that LibreOffice is another fork that is going to be developed. I have used OpenOffice since v1 and am wondering if there is a definite advantage to uninstalling and trying LibreOffice.
OpenOffice vs LibreOffice – Key Differences Explained
libreofficeopenoffice.org
Related Solutions
It is almost impossible to have 100% compatibility, however, if you are not using wordart/libreoffice draw features, etc, you can get high levels of compatibility by using a few simple things:
- Save your documents in a format that all the listed office suites can use (MS Office 2003 documents are best for this purpose, and more so with Word Processing documents).
- Only use features that are shared between the applications, so for example, use simple formatting in tables (by simple, I mean, just create a standard table, XY dimensions, without adding excel features etc, which can become complicated*).
- Use fonts that are available in all the suites. Missing fonts can produce problems.
- Use the program options to your advantage :)! I do not have office installed, but I do have LibreOffice. So for example, you can set up the Load/Save options as such:
You can access this dialog by clicking tools>optionsin the menu.
Best Answer
As of now there is hardly any changes between LibreOffice and OpenOffice. The former is a fork to free OpenOffice.org from the clutches of Oracle.
Till date Sun has asked for copyright assignment to Sun if you wanted your patch to be merged. This has been a great deterrent and has limited community involvement.
LibreOffice says "Everyone is invited". It is not an office suit which will be controlled by one organization, but many organizations will take part to develop it. The supporters include Google, RedHat, Canonical, Novell and a few more (not sure about the list).
LibreOffice has also brought up a wikipage named "Easy Hacks" to get the community involved in the development. This is a great step as probably people would be excited to look at the code.
From that page I can see that the codebase is a bit messy. There are non-English comments, bogus comments, dead code and what not.
Another good reason for breaking apart was that Oracle does not look interested in taking the development of Open Source ahead. OpenSolaris is nearly gone and if this fork didn't happen, probably OO.o would also have become stagnant.