Formatted CommentsĬomments are marginal notes for revision or collaboration.
The approach is not complete - that wouldn’t be desirable, especially for troubleshooting - but remains much closer than what OpenOffice offers. This minimal approach is enough for you to see where the frames are while getting a much stronger idea of how the printed page will look. LibreOffice, however, has reduced these basic frames to their corners. The main text frame and headers and footers in OpenOffice remain unchangeable rectangles unless you open File -> Page Preview. This extra support takes much of the pain out of filesharing. doc format, but, since it is becoming rarer, it is the current format that matters. docx text file), but only LibreOffice can save to it. Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice can open MSO’s current format (such as a. If you need to deal with another file format, chances are that it’s Microsoft Office, which - unfortunately - remains the computing standard. But open a file or save one, and the slimmed down LibreOffice is a beat or two ahead. You may not notice the difference when starting either office suite without a file. The result? Open Hub (was Ohloh) reports that LibreOffice has 7.2 million lines of code compared to OpenOffice’s 11.2 million. LibreOffice has devoted much of its efforts over the last few years to cleaning its code. OpenOffice, LibreOffice is better for the following eleven reasons: 11. None of these changes are revolutionary, but most of them are welcome all the same, and their effective just might be cumulative, depending on your priorities and workflow. However, many of OpenOffice’s unique features are ones that LibreOffice deliberately dropped - the horizontal rule, for instance, is only useful for designing a retro-1990s website.īy contrast, LibreOffice is steadily improving the interface and adding new features. OpenOffice does have some features that LibreOffice lacks: a horizontal rule for web pages, a media player, and a macro recorder that is available by default rather than choice. However, after five years’ separation, the two office suites are starting to drift apart - and most of the increasing difference between the two is due to innovations in LibreOffice. Both are supported by libraries of templates and extensions, and, if one acquires a new feature, the other frequently adds the feature in the next release. They have identical system requirements and feature sets. All the same, the differences are growing, and LibreOffice has at least eleven advantages over OpenOffice – see the list below.īoth of these free office suites are descendants of (just don’t ask in a crowd of Linux users which is true descendant of unless you’re fond of flame wars). Even people who know them well have trouble distinguishing one from the other, and, when you find a difference, it is often trivial. LibreOfficeĬomparing LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice is like comparing identical twins.