

OpenOffice, the traditional alternative to Microsoft Office If you’re looking for an open source alternatvie to Microsfot Office, you’re sure to find something interseting in these 4 options. Today, these solutions are no longer seen as free, more or less successful, clones of Office, but as real, innovative solutions that work well and do credit to free software as a way to get things done that’s at least as effective as Microsoft’s proprietary software. However, alternative solutions have been around since the 1990s, including free software suites like KOffice and Siag Office. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint are now taught in schools, installed by default on our PCs, an essential skill on our résumés, and is today an indispensable professional tool. If you're going to be sharing documents with people using Microsoft Office, LibreOffice might therefore be the better choice.For computer users of all ages, the idea of an “Office Suite” is intimately linked with Microsoft. Although both LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice can open and edit native Microsoft formats DOCX and XLSX, only LibreOffice is able to save to these formats. This is likely to be the biggest deciding factor for many people. LibreOffice does look a little more modern thanks to its larger icons and leaning towards subtle pastel hues, but it's nothing that'll affect your everyday work. The functional differences are very minor for example, the sidebar in OpenOffice Writer is open by default, whereas in LibreOffice it's closed. LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice are almost identical.


Both software suites offer plenty of user-made designs to download, but LibreOffice's selection of pre-installed options is far superior to OpenOffice's. If you often need to make presentations, LibreOffice has the edge in terms of the number (and quality) of slide templates available. If you choose LibreOffice, you'll need to pick one language at the start and stick with it. If you're multilingual, it's worth noting that Apache OpenOffice offers more in terms of flexibility when it comes to languages, letting you download additional language patches as plugins. As its name implies, this is a small application specifically for creating charts and graphs, ready to be imported into other documents. Toolsīoth LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice offer essentially the same set of apps (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base and Math), but LibreOffice also includes a tool called Charts. The frequency of updates means there's also more potential for bugs in LibreOffice, but any that do appear are likely to be resolved quickly.
