OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice?

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Tough choice, and MS Office compatibility continues to be problematic, especially with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. See Neil McAllister’s InfoWorld Appl
[See the full post at: OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice?]

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just wondering, woody, will OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice recognize those DOCX, XLSX & PPTX file formats?

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@EP –

Yes, but the fidelity isn’t great.

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I have been using OpenOffice on two laptops (one Windows XP and one Windows7) for a few years now, and I have found only a few Microsoft Office documents (mostly Excel and Access files) which had any problems at all.

Based on the article, I am going to try LibreOffice on my Windows 7 laptop, and if all goes well, I may convert the Windows XP laptop as well. No big rush, but I’d really rather be using a truly free and Open Source product than an orphaned version of Oracle’s Sun Star Office.

I faced the same choice when Eudora forked and Eudora OSE came out. I opted for Eudora OSE, and have never looked back. The free and Open Source version does everything I need it to do, and it doesn’t cost me a dime to maintain. Granted, it isn’t 100-percent Eudora through and through, but the differences are so minor that I can neglect them safely.

One nice thing about Eudora OSE is that its mailboxes are stored in the fashion of Thunderbird, and so are its Profiles. Just copying the current Profile or 64-bit “Roaming” data is all the backup I need. The entire Eudora configuration can be restored just by overwriting a corrupted Profile with the backed up Profile.

With LibreOffice, I hope updates and Registration may not be the ongoing exercise in frustration that I have experienced for the past two years with OpenOffice.org. It seems their servers never work up to speed, if they even work at all, and the updater module in the OOo program is anywhere from slow to downright unusable. Registration of OOo almost always fails, even though I had an active SunServe Account. Maybe LibreOffice will fix these atrocities.

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LibreOffice is probably one of the greatest office suites there is. Much better than Microsoft Office anyway!

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