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Comment by jgilias | Hacker News Reader

Why are you using it instead of LibreOffice? Genuinely curious.

Not the gp (and not IT/Tech based) but I have OpenOffice available because...

1) editing documents I wrote some time ago. There was a time some months ago when LO would warn you when opening an older oOo doc about changes in the format. I saw this with drawings and Impress files. (I need to see if this still happens with latest LO).

2) one of my employers has oOo on their standard desktop image alongside MS Word and all. So I want the same as them for their documents

3) I know the menus and the little UI glitches well in oOo having used it since StarOffice days. LO is (entirely reasonably) refactoring stuff and therefore changing the ways some features work (drawing tools I recollect)

4) gives the impression of running snappier on an ancient laptop that I use. LO does seem to need a full DE (e.g. Gnome/KDE/xfce)

...if oOo life support was switched off, I'd shrug, move all the documents over to LO, and move on I suppose.

It is already switched off, long since. Except downloading.

I'll nag employer1 again over the summer.

Can anyone point to an actual security breach that is traceable to OpenOffice? That would focus minds perhaps.

> LO does seem to need a full DE (e.g. Gnome/KDE/xfce)

LibreOffice seems to do just fine for me here without a DE. I wonder if there's something I'm missing that I don't realize?

Not OP, but I know sometimes I forget I want LibreOffice. Many years ago I worked for a computer store where I used to refurbish computers everyday with OpenOffice so open OpenOffice is still the brand that first comes to mind for me. I never get very far though because as soon as I see "Apache OpenOffice" I realise my mistake and search for LibreOffice.

But I'd assume lot of OpenOffice users today are just legacy users who use it just because they're familiar with the brand and that's what they've always used.

If you type "apt install openoffice", don't most distros install libreoffice instead?

(not the poster) one of my problems with LibreOffice is that it sucks when you are not using English as your main language - little support for spell checkers, etc. At some stage open office used to be better in that respect!

He may not know why he should be using it instead of OpenOffice.

I’m also curious. Also compared to OnlyOffice?

OnlyOffice is far from being as comprehensive as LibreOffice. At least when I tried the spreadsheets, I ran into limitations even though I use spreadsheets very rarely.

Good to know, thanks.

They (he, she, undetermined) might not even be aware of the other office suites. The sibling commenter lists OnlyOffice, first time I hear about that.

1) No Windows release afaik. But please correct me if I am wrong -- I don't see a Win download on their page from a quick look on my phone.

2) I did use it on Ubuntu sometime in college (around 2016 for class) and I just didn't like the feel of Libre. OpenOffice still had a lot of feature parity with Excel without buying Excel, so I got that instead.

They've had Windows builds for as long I can remember. https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/dl/win-x86_64/7.3.4/en-US...

There should be a windows release, its on the downloads page.

>1) No Windows release afaik. But please correct me if I am wrong -- I don't see a Win download on their page from a quick look on my phone.

It's been available for Windows for years. The first option on the drop-down menus says "Windows (64-bit)"[0]. 90% of their 10 million worldwide users in 2011 were on Windows machines[1].

[0]https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Users_and_deployme...

> I don't see a Win download on their page

On the download page, just above the "Download" button, there is a dropdown to select the installer. There should be "Windows (32-bit)" and "Windows (64-bit)" there along with the Linux and MacOS installers.

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/

Others have already noted that the windows release is easily findable, so instead I will ask: what features are missing from LibreOffice that OpenOffice has? The former is a fork of the latter, and LibreOffice has undergone extensive further development where OpenOffice has stagnated.

After checking this thread, I downloaded Libre on Windows and played around with it a little, to refresh my memory. My main use case is just working with some personal spreadsheets in Calc, no complicated work stuff.

I wouldn't say features are missing, if anything it sounds like Libre is way more fleshed out than OpenOffice. That said, I still prefer the (relatively) legacy UI in Open Calc than the slightly more modern UI in Libre Calc, just a personal preference. It doesn't seem that much more advanced, and after all these years an ODS spreadsheet still looks like a spreadsheet. Other people noted the security posture of Libre though, which is a great point.

Just wanted to chime in that your reasoning here is 100% valid.

I'd also be curious about something: suppose you used LibreOffice for a week or so for working on your personal spreadsheets. What percentage of your work time would you waste either searching for the new location for the old command, or learning the new command that maps to the old one?

I'd love to read a case study where someone has documented this with a UI change in FOSS.

For me personally? 0%. I just do simple copy/paste, scatter plot, sort asc/desc... not a heavy user of hotkeys. I had some trouble finding the Chart button at first since the icon's different, but that was the only issue.

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