On its first birthday, LibreOffice has reason to celebrate

Works for me!

Until last year I really thought that nothing could replace MS Office for me - LibreOffice has done it. Somehow it seems to be just what OpenOffice never quite managed to be.

Admittedly I'm not doing anything overly complex, but for my Word processing and Spreadsheet uses Libreoffice works great - and thus far has imported all of my MS Office docs with no problems - something that Open office could never do.

I still miss the elegance of Wordperfect 5.1, but am very, very happy with LibreOffice.

In -not so much- unrelated news:

Wow, the fork is already one year old?

LibreOffice is to XOrg as OpenOffice is to XFree86

Look at what happened with gcc v2, OpenOffice, XFree86. In each case the developers were getting frustrated by the direction of development, a backlog of patches which were being rejected or ignored for no rational reason, and an aloof / uncaring maintainer.

The best thing that happened in each case was a fork. In the case of gcc, the egcs fork became so popular it ended up being the "official" product again under new leadership. For XFree86 and OpenOffice, the fork was renamed and the original was totally abandoned. In all cases it kickstarted a dead project back into life.

So I'm happy to see LibreOffice doing so well. I just wish they picked a better name. LibreOffice is a stupid name. I wonder how Apache feels to have taken ownership of OpenOffice and what their objections or legal restrictions would be to prevent them from trying to reunify everything back under the old moniker.

One year on, LibreOffice is still a crappy name.

Works for me too!

Been using it for over six months. Dont use it hard, just basic Word and Excel docs, but then why pay M$ for their package if that is all I'm doing. It also imports and updates my CV from Word without messing with the formatting, something that OOo couldnt handle. My favourite functionality is the direct PDF export. Stops anyone messing with my docs once they are published.

Can someone enlighten me?

I do like LO and it has replaced OO wherever I had it. However, ever since work upgraded to Office 2010 and that dreaded .docx format nothing opens properly and the formatting as seen in LO is all over the place.

The guys at LO even admitted as much on their homepage when I last looked at it.

So, how are they going to lure win users and enterprises when the (unfortunately ubiquitous) Office is incompatible with LO?

And what about inetgration and seamless working with Sharepoint (where you can edit/save things directly on the sharepoint without "checking out" the relevant files)?

My thinking is that unless the presentation and layout is identical and seamless between LO and MSO adoption will lag.

Which is a great shame as I cant see why the world should rely on payware for such fundamental tools purely because of inertia.

Excellent

I switched to LibreOffice straight away as it was clear OpenOffice was going nowhere. There are still a couple of issues (in-app templates still link to a site that doesn't exist) but it is well on the way. I was a bit surprised last week to find, when I opened a relatively simple Excel spreadsheet in LO that some of the formulae had errors in them. The fact that I was surprised is a good sign that they are nearly there but companies are not going to switch to a product if they cannot rely on fairly basic format conversions.

"We all know how conservative Windows users can be"

We all know that most Windows users use the excellent MS Office and are perfectly fine with that. Otherwise they'd all have been using alternatives for years.

Err...

“We all know how conservative Windows users can be, thus we have more Linux users,”

While I do use Libre Office and MS office on my machines at home and work, I can't let this comment go... Every install of desktop Linux that I've done in the last year has had Libre Office installed by default, so one has to imagine that there are a lot of Linux users out there who don't even know that they've got Libre Office installed - The first time that I used a Linux with Libre office on, I was looking for Open office and spent ages trying to work out why it wasn't available on the repos, only to find out that Libre Office had already been installed.

Oh and from what I've seen Linux and Windows "IT guys" are just as conservative as each other, in their own ways.

OpenOffice.org Web Site Down

Last night, I tried to download OpenOffice from their website. No cigar. So I guess the biggest difference between the two is that you can actually download and install LibreOffice.

LibreOffice

As Alfie said, I don't use it for much, but why should I pay Microsoft if I'm not going to be using all the nifty features?

That said, I'd love to see a suite like LibreOffice stand up a variant of Draw or Impress that actually competes well with Visio as a network diagramming and documentation tool.

File compatibility

Hello All

Been using oOo since version 1 and now LibreOffice. Perhaps a key consideration is any differences in the way comparable major versions of oOo and LO render the documents saved in .od* format. I've not had any issues yet.