Libre Office or Open Office?

[OwlHoot]

Which of http://www.libreoffice.org/ or http://www.openoffice.org/ is the soundest these days?

Or am I being thick, and they're both actually different names for the same thing?

I vaguely recall one was a fork of the other, and that the latter (or perhaps the former?!) had "lost its way" to some extent and gone over to the dark side etc.

[SueEllen]

LibreOffice was forked off OpenOffice.

When Oracle brought Sun they p*ssed of a load of open source contributors with a change in their terms.

Linux distributions now come with LibreOffice as standard. I've not used OpenOffice for years so can't tell you the differences.

[Platypus]

I don't know the difference, but I do know that at ClientCo most people are losing their MSO licences and using OpenOffice instead. I hear very good things regarding compatibility with MSO.

[BigRed]

I thought Libre Office was the more popular (non Oracle) version. Oracle could become the new CA, I had a manager who's primary objective was to remove all CA products from the data centre, such was the rate of acquisitions each triumph was shortlived.

I recently used Libre Office with Windows 8.1, it did a lot of moaning about JRE and still does occasionally even though I've installed it A spreadsheet with a pivot table was saved in excel format and the pivot table lost it's dynamic options when opened in office 2010.

[petergriffin]

I'm not a fan of either suites but, assuming you use Windows, in my experience Apache Openoffice is slightly more MS-Office compatible than LibreOffice. The latter is the only reliable option on Linux/Bsd.

[Sysman]

I thought Libre Office was the more popular (non Oracle) version. Oracle could become the new CA, I had a manager who's primary objective was to remove all CA products from the data centre, such was the rate of acquisitions each triumph was shortlived.

A former manager fell out with CA so badly that they refused to sell him further licences and he was totally happy about that. That must have been during a period when their acquisitions fell off though.

I recently used Libre Office with Windows 8.1, it did a lot of moaning about JRE and still does occasionally even though I've installed it A spreadsheet with a pivot table was saved in excel format and the pivot table lost it's dynamic options when opened in office 2010.

I've been running LO without JRE for several years now. I have just needed to answer the 6 or 7 prompts complaining about the lack of JRE the first time it's run. That seems to be enough to persuade it not to ask again. It did warn me that I don't get the Accessibility option or the database without JRE but I can live without those. Last time I looked, the developers were gradually changing the JRE dependent bits to use Python instead, with the aim of removing the JRE dependency.

[Sysman]

LibreOffice was forked off OpenOffice.

When Oracle brought Sun they p*ssed of a load of open source contributors with a change in their terms.

Linux distributions now come with LibreOffice as standard. I've not used OpenOffice for years so can't tell you the differences.

WSES.

Because it's there on Linux distros, I run LibreOffice on OS X and Windows so that I've got the same thing everywhere.

The LibreOffice spreadsheet can manage more than 64K rows and when that feature first arrived, neither OO nor MSO could. Not something you need every day but handy to have.

[Incognito]

WSES.

Because it's there on Linux distros, I run LibreOffice on OS X and Windows so that I've got the same thing everywhere.

The LibreOffice spreadsheet can manage more than 64K rows and when that feature first arrived, neither OO nor MSO could. Not something you need every day but handy to have.

LibreOffice forked in 2010, Excel 2007 supported a million rows per worksheet. 64k row limit was Excel 2003.

[Sysman]

LibreOffice forked in 2010, Excel 2007 supported a million rows per worksheet. 64k row limit was Excel 2003.

Was there some sort of backwards compatibility mode in Excel 2007 that would have retained the old limit?

Never mind, the whole PC setup at that place still makes me shudder and it wouldn't surprise me if the guy had put in some frig to make Office 2003 look like something more modern

It was so incompetently managed that I smuggled my own system in for the duration of my stint there.

[Incognito]

Was there some sort of backwards compatibility mode in Excel 2007 that would have retained the old limit?

Never mind, the whole PC setup at that place still makes me shudder and it wouldn't surprise me if the guy had put in some frig to make Office 2003 look like something more modern

It was so incompetently managed that I smuggled my own system in for the duration of my stint there.

Yes, you had to specifically work in the OOXML file format (.xlsx or .xlsm), if working with the legacy .xls file format then the limit was still 64k. Wasn't something obvious and most people would still save in Office 2003 compatible file formats, hence being hamstrung with the legacy limits.

Office Excel 2007 features that are not supported in earlier versions of Excel - Excel - Office.com